Econergy will soon start construction on a 50MW BESS project in Poland, the first of that scale to reach this stage in the market, the Israel-based IPP claimed.
The independent power producer (IPP) is already active in the solar PV markets in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region, with 250MW operational in Romania and 52MW in Poland by the end of the year, and is adding energy storage to both.
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Speaking to Energy-Storage.news at last week’s Energy Storage Summit CEE 2024, its Poland country manager Przemek Zielinski said it could be the first to make it to the market with a grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) there.
“In Poland we will have 52MW of PV by the end of the year, and we are closing a deal and will initiate construction on around 50MW of storage in central Poland too, which is probably the first one of that size in the country. A lot of people are talking about grid-scale BESS in Poland, but I think we’ll be the first to start building a project of that size,” Zielinski said.
“The project has a building permit, and now we are preparing all the construction and process to select the vendor for it.”
The project is a standalone BESS with its own grid connection, and it won a capacity market (CM) contract in 2023. The CM looks set to be the bedrock of the business case for large-scale BESS in Poland.
Econegy expects to start construction on the BESS in Q4 of 2024, with a commercial operation date (COD) anticipated in 2025 while ‘full-year operations’ are projected to begin in 2026.
While the transmission system operator (TSO) PSE’s list of 2023 CM winning projects doesn’t include one listed under Econergy’s name, it does have a 45.6MW project entered into the auction by a company called Encos. Econergy Poland and Encos, via its ‘Encos Research and Development Unit’ subsidiary, announced plans in January 2024 to build an energy cluster in the Karlino commune.
Tuval Eldar, business development manager, added that the firm is considering adding energy storage to its 3GW pipeline of PV projects in Romania. There, the business case is more around arbitrage and co-locating solar and storage to shift generation to the later hours of the day.
