The Regulatory Authority for Energy (RAE) of Greece has chosen the 12 winning projects of a recently-launched tender, with 411MW of battery storage capacity to receive financial aid over a 10-year period.
The tender, which was launched earlier this year, will provide grants for the initial capital investment needed to build the projects, plus annual amounts over a ten-year period to maintain revenues. It is the first round of a state-led procurement aiming to fund up to a 1GW of battery storage.
A total of 93 projects were submitted into the auction, with 12 winners, 3 runner-ups and 78 projects which were excluded from the final list. Projects bid in with a desired annual aid amount, with a weighted average of the winning projects of €49,748 per MW per year.
This is less than half of the upper limit that projects could bid in at, of €115,000. When it emerged in July that companies were bidding in significantly below that figure, research and consultancy firm Clean Horizon told Energy-Storage.news it showed “players willing to take risks” to get into the Greek market.
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The auction contains a clawback mechanism for if the projects generate significantly higher-than-predicted revenues.
See a table below detailing the 12 winning projects below, bid in by six different companies: Helleniq Renewables, PPC Renewables, Mytilineos, Intra – S Energy (Intrakat), Energy Technical Development SA and Energy Bank I I.K.E. It is not clear who the latter two’s ultimate parent companies (if any) are.
All of the projects appear to be two-hour duration.
| Company submitting project | Project power rating (MW) | Project guaranteed capacity (MWh) | Offer (€k/MW/year) |
| Helleniq Renewables | 50 | 100 | 33,948 |
| Helleniq Renewables | 25 | 50 | 39,956 |
| PPC Renewables | 50 | 100 | 47,291 |
| PPC Renewables | 48 | 96 | 48,756 |
| Intra – S Energy | 50 | 100 | 49,501 |
| Helleniq Renewables | 25 | 50 | 49,885 |
| Mytilineos | 48 | 96 | 49,900 |
| Intra – S Energy | 25 | 50 | 55,332 |
| Energy Technical Development SA | 7.8 | 15.6 | 58,640 |
| Energy Technical Development SA | 8 | 16.54 | 60,000 |
| Energy Bank I I.K.E | 49.99 | 100 | 60,887 |
| Intra – S Energy | 25 | 59 | 64,112 |
The past year has seen gigawatts of projects receive electricity market licenses from the RAE, an integral, early part of the development process. PPC Renewables has the second-most energy storage licenses granted by the RAE according to Clean Horzion data from May, with EDP Renewables top of the list with around 1.5GW.
Mytilineos, an industrial conglomerate, said its winning project will be co-located with solar plants under construction and is expected to start construction in 2024 for a commercial operation date (COD) in 2025. It will be in Halkidiki, in the region of Central Macedonia.
The company plans to participate in future tenders from the RAE, it added, and will use its own aggregator unit to control the winning energy storage project.
Greece is aiming to have 3GW of energy storage online by 2030 to help it hit renewable energy targets, the this round of financial aid to projects is part of getting there.
The auction programme is partially funded by Greece’s portion of the EU-wide Recovery and Resilience Plan, the program to mitigate the negative economic effects of the Covid pandemic, a move which was approved in September last year.
See the RAE’s decision document (in Greek) here.
