The results of Poland’s recent capacity market auction have been revealed, with a clearing price significantly lower than the previous years and IPP Greenvolt saying it won the lion’s share of around 1.7GW of BESS awarded contracts.
The auction which took place last month (December 2023) cleared at a fixed, consumer price-indexed (CPI) price of PLN 244.90/kW (US$61.73) per year for the contracts which start in 2028, the Polish state bulletin revealed yesterday (9 January). The contract lengths range from 1 to 17-years.
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It awarded contracts to 159 projects totalling over 7GW of power, of which 111 are in Poland and 48 are abroad in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Sweden. The clearing price is significantly lower than the PLN 406.35/kW at which the previous auction cleared, for deliverability in 2027. There are lower clearing prices for the projects in Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The capacity market is set to kickstart the large-scale BESS market in Poland by providing the basic building blocks of the business case, according to numerous delegates interviewed by Energy-Storage.news at Energy Storage Summit Central Eastern Europe (CEE) 2023 in Warsaw in September.
Greenvolt wins 1.2GW of contracts for BESS
Renewable energy developer and independent power producer (IPP) Greenvolt won 1.2GW of 17-year contracts for six battery energy storage system (BESS) projects it bid in, the company revealed on the same day.
It claimed this equated to over 70% of total capacity awarded to BESS technology, implying the total awarded to BESS was around 1.7GW. That would be over 10 times higher than the 165MW that won contracts in last year’s auction.
A breakdown of the winning projects from the state bulletin did not spell out the technology for each but analysis by Energy-Storage.news showed that projects described as ‘new generation capacity market unit’ (nowa jednostka rynku mocy wytwórcza) – as all of Greenvolt’s are – totalled 1,735MW.
Greenvolt’s six projects’ winning obligations range from the smallest at 85MW to the largest at 510MW, totalling exactly 1,200MW.
A total of 16GW of BESS projects got preliminary registration to bid in to the December 2023 auction, though not all will actually have bid. Research firm LCP Delta recently did a deep-dive into the Poland and Eastern Europe grid-scale energy storage markets with a focus on the former and the capacity market auction for Energy-Storage.news.
Greenvolt originates in biomass in Portugal but has expanded to other renewables and is active in the energy storage markets in Portugal and the US.
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