BESS has won big in Poland’s capacity market (CM) auction for 2029 delivery, with potentially 2.5GW of projects winning contracts including from Axpo, OX2, R.Power, FRV and PGE.
A total of 12GW of CM obligations, starting in 2029, were awarded in the auction which concluded last week, transmission system operator (TSO) Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne (PSE) said yesterday (17 December).
The CM has been a big driver of the grid-scale energy storage market in Poland and, as discussed in-depth at Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit Central Eastern Europe (CEE) 2024 in September, is the bedrock of the business case.
The closing price was PLN 264.90/kW/year (US$65.3), similar to the PLN 244.90/kW seen in last year’s, both of which are a big drop on 2022’s auction price of PLN 406.35/kW/year.
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According to Energy-Storage.news’ analysis, of that 12GW, some 2.5GW of obligations were given to energy storage projects, most likely to be battery energy storage systems (BESS).
That is the sum total of contracts given to projects with the technology type ‘new generation capacity market unit’ (nowa jednostka rynku mocy wytwórcza – see the full list of projects, in Polish, on PSE’s site here). That was the name exclusively used for energy storage projects in the past auctions.
New-build gas, coal or nuclear plants that will be built between now and 2029 could theoretically be amongst ‘new generation capacity market unit’ projects, but the average size of project wins for the category is in the low tens of megawatts, very small for legacy power plants.
The figure is higher than the 1.7GW of BESS that won last year (mostly belonging to IPP Greenvolt) and the 165MW that won in 2022.
Notable developers and IPPs with winning energy storage projects this year include Axpo, OX2, R.Power, FRV, European Energy and power producer PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna), the latter owned by the government of Poland.
There may well be other big names with winning projects too, but the other listed companies in PSE’s list are less familiar to Energy-Storage.news or are listed under specific holding company names, like ‘BESS10sp z.o.o’, which won 122MW.
OX2 and R.Power have both announced their contract wins. OX2 said it had two winning projects totalling 200MW/400MWh, though according to PSE’s results its two projects only won obligations of just over 28MW each (56MW total). R.Power said it had four winning projects totalling 655MW/2.3GWh, though its name is not in the PSE’s list so the projects must be under holding companies with different names.
R.Power said the CM revenues for the projects will be around 1.6 billion PLN (US$394 million).
European Energy meanwhile won four energy storage projects totalling 114 MW of power.
Some 1.5GW of projects based abroad also won contracts, including 556MW from Sweden and 1GW from elsewhere.
This piece was updated after publication to include a reference to European Energy’s projects.
