EDF Power Solutions has put a 150MW/600MWh BESS in Belgium into commercial operation while Engie has started building a 74MW/296MWh project.
France-headquartered EDF has inaugurated the 4-hour battery energy storage system (BESS) in Lixhe, Belgium, it said last week (1 September). It has been deployed via subsidiary Luminus, one of Belgium’s largest utilities, and is the largest in the Wallonia region.
The project is the result of €160 million (US$185 million) in investment. Luminus and I4B – The Belgian Infrastructure Fund are its main shareholders, and they reached financial close on it in June last year.
The facility connects directly to the high-voltage grid of TSO Elia. Luminus subsidiary Newelec handled the medium-voltage distribution network (33 kV) on-site and supervised the electrical installations.
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The project is near the Lixhe hydroelectric power plant and will contribute to the daily balancing of the grid and to strengthening Belgium’s supply security, EDF said.
Mathieu Bihet, Federal Minister for Energy of Belgium, commented: “With 150 MW of power and 600 MWh of storage capacity, this battery storage facility brings new flexibility capacity to our electricity system. This is essential to strengthen the integration of renewable energies, better balance the grid, and ensure the security of our supply.”
Belgium was one of Continental Europe’s early movers on grid-scale storage thanks to a storage-friendly regulatory regime, particularly on grid fees, and support from TSO Elia including via a capacity market (CM) which has provided long-term revenues. Many large-scale BESS projects in Belgium have CM contracts.
Just in July, owner-operator BStor put a 50MW/140MWh project online while Netherlands-based platform Giga Storage financed a huge, 2.8GWh project, one of the largest in Europe.
EDF is active across renewables and BESS globally, but via Power Solutions specifically it put a 50MW/120MWh project in Poland online in May.
Engie starts building Belgium project
Another France-headquartered power firm, Engie, has launched construction on a 74MW/296MWh BESS at Coo, in the province of Liège, Belgium.
The project is being built on a site which is becoming a major energy hub, with pumped storage, solar and EV charging, Engie said. Commissioning is scheduled for early 2028.
It announced the project as part of a roundup of European activity updates last week (4 September), though it didn’t much in the way of details on the projects. In the announcement, it said that in the past few months it:
- has acquired a 66MW/264MWh project in Spain, operations scheduled for 2029
- is building two wind co-located projects in Portugal, each 10MW/45MWh
- has brought two projects online in the UK totalling 100MW/200MWh
- Inaugurated a 35MW/100MWh project in the Netherlands
The company also completed a 251MW project in Chile, announced last week.
