Aquila Clean Energy EMEA has started construction on a 50MW BESS in Finland, while MW Storage has launched two new projects in the country.
Aquila, a developer and independent power producer (IPP), has started building the 50MW/50MWh standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in Kotka, southern Finland, it announced on LinkedIn last week.
The greenfield project, developed by its in-house development team, is its first in Finland with more standalone and co-located ones in the pipeline – Aquila has wind assets in the country.
BESS are being deployed in Finland to capitalise on the country’s large and lucrative ancillary services market, with a very large onshore and offshore wind pipeline.
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The announcement comes a few months after Aquila started building its first large-scale BESS in Germany, a 100MWh system in Schleswig-Holstein. The firm was one of the first movers in the Belgium market too, with a 25MW/100MWh project commissioned in early 2023.
In concurrent news also posted on LinkedIn, Swiss investor MW Storage has added two new BESS projects to its Finland near-term pipeline. The projects, 20MW each, will come online in 2026 and will also be in southern Finland.
It isn’t clear if one of the two projects is the same one that was announced by BESS technology provider Fluence in July, covered by Energy-Storage.news. That one is also in southern Finland, in Uusimaa. Southern Finland is where the country’s main population and energy consumption hubs are, and so is where many of its BESS are being built.
If they are both new, it will be MW Storage’s fourth and fifth projects in the country. Energy-Storage.news has asked the company for further detail and will update this article if a response is received.
MW Storage and Fluence are together building a 100MW/200MWh BESS in Germany, claimed as the country’s largest, while MW Storage commissioned Switzerland’s largest BESS back in 2020, expanding its 20MW of power capacity this year to 28MW.
Other projects in Finland covered by Energy-Storage.news recently include a 50MW/110MWh project acquired by L&G NTR Clean Power (Europe) Fund, BESS contract wins for system integrator Merus and optimiser Capalo AI, and a BESS-hydro-PV hybrid project from developers SENS and Callio.
