Utility and power generation firm EnBW has presented a 400MW/800MW BESS project proposal to a municipal council in Germany, for deployment at its Philippsburg nuclear power plant which is in the process of being decommissioned.
Work has been underway since 2017 and 2020 to dismantle two nuclear power plant blocks at the site, and EnBW has now proposed the 2-hour battery energy storage system (BESS) to turn the site into a central hub and storage location for the German grid.
TransnetBW, one of the four transmission system operators (TSOs) in Germany, has built a large substation nearby, part of the Ultranet transmission line for taking wind power from northern Germany into demand centres in the South.
Peter Heydecker, board member for sustainable generation infrastructure at EnBW, said: “In the energy system of the future, the task of large-scale battery storage systems will be to reconcile two factors in the short term: The weather-dependent generation capacity of renewable energy sources on the one hand, and the actual electricity demand of households, businesses and industry on the other. Together with the hydrogen-ready gas power plants, which are also designed for longer periods of use, they provide the flexibility we need in the system.”
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The building permit is still pending and EnBW’s final investment decision is still to be made, but the firm said it could be operational by mid-2027 if everything goes smoothly. The land for the BESS is entirely independent of the decommissioning process for the nuclear plant infrastructure, it added.
EnBW is already building a large-scale BESS project, 100MW/100MWh, in Marbach, Southern Germany, as well as a pumped hydro energy storage project launched in 2023.
The energy storage market in Germany is currently amongst the most active in Europe, with huge financial opportunities in what is the continent’s largest wholesale energy market, plus ancillary services, meaning a strong business case. Major large-scale projects and pipelines have been progressed by Giga Storage, Trianel and Luxcara, Dais and Electric Land and Econergy in the past month alone – see all recent coverage here.
However, challenges around grid access and regulatory costs remain the biggest hurdles. For example, recently a high court upheld a grid access construction fee for BESS, in a case brought by a developer.
