Developer Lion Storage has successfully reached financial close on a 1.4GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) set to be developed in the Netherlands.
Global law firm Dentons advised a consortium of six banks, including ABN AMRO, Rabobank, ING Bank, Triodos Bank, Santander CIB and ASR, on the €350 million (US$365 million) loan to Lion Storage for the project. Macquarie Capital is also supporting Lion Storage as the lead equity investor alongside listed infrastructure investor TINC.
The Mufasa project, a 350MW system, marks Lion Storage’s first BESS. It is to be developed in the port area of Vlissingen in the northern Netherlands and is expected to be operational in the first half of 2027, slightly later than the previously forecast 2026 target.
Once operational, the developer claims the asset will be the largest utility-scale BESS in the country, fully funded through 100% non-recourse project financing. It will also be one of the largest in Europe.
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Project Mufasa will employ Tesla’s Megapack 2 XL energy storage solution. It will consist of 372 of these units, and Tesla has also agreed to provide a comprehensive engineering, procurement and construction agreement (EPC) and a long-term service agreement.
“It’s the biggest in Europe with Tesla batteries. We considered other suppliers but in the end it was quite obvious they were the ones to go with,” Lion Storage co-founder and CTO Jeroen Althoff told Energy-Storage.news from Day One of the Energy Storage Summit EU 2025 in London yesterday (18 February).
“For project finance it needs to be bankable, and they do all the EPC and civil works, it all sits beneath them. If you have one party responsible for batteries and one for installation and one for ground works, you can run into problems.”
Eneco will trade the battery in the market with a commercial agreement somewhere between merchant and a toll, which Althoff claimed is the first of its kind.
“Eneco is pioneering flexibility in the Netherlands and we have contracted with them on a market revenue index model. They have completely free utilisation of the asset but pay us based on market prices. So we take on market risk, but no operational risk, as we get paid based on the market price. It’s in between merchant and tolling, and is a completely new model. The asset it so large we needed to reinvent the commercial model.”
Lion Storage said the BESS will be a critical component in replacing a former coal-fired power plant. It will use the area’s existing grid connection to allow direct access to the high-voltage network operated by the country’s transmission system operator TenneT.
Arno Hendriks, co-founder of Lion Storage, believes the project will be a game-changer for energy storage in the Netherlands and highlights that the technology is investable.
“As the first of its kind to secure full project financing, it proves that energy storage is not just viable—it’s investable,” Hendricks said.
Energy-Storage.news interviewed Althoff at the Energy Storage Summit EU 2024, at which he discussed the company’s plans and the major challenges in the Netherlands’ energy storage market.
First 4-hour BESS goes online in the Netherlands
As reported earlier this month, developer-operator S4 Energy put a 4-hour duration project online in the Netherlands, the first in the country to become operational.
The firm has operationalised a 10MW/40MWh BESS in the Rilland municipality of the Zeeland province. S4 Energy said the project’s ability to store energy for longer periods, combined with its rapid-response capabilities, will enable it to provide essential services to the grid and, eventually, end-consumers.
Other large-scale projects expected to come online in the Netherlands this year include a 31.6MW/126.4MWh project from development vehicle FlevoBESS and a 45MW/90MWh project from developer Dispatch. Much larger projects, including those from S4 Energy/LC Energy, are coming down the line further ahead.
S4 Energy was one of the early movers in the Dutch BESS market with a 10MW project combining lithium-ion BESS and a flywheel coming online in 2020 but, until its acquisition of LC Energy, was notably absent among large-scale project announcements.
