Castleton Commodities International LLC (CCI) subsidiary S4 Energy has acquired Netherlands battery energy storage system (BESS) development platform LC Energy, and its 6GW pipeline of projects, from developer Low Carbon.
CCI is a commodities trader and acquired Dutch energy storage developer and operator S4 Energy last year, while LC Energy was, prior to this deal, a joint venture entity between UK-headquartered Low Carbon and Dutch firm QING.
LC Energy’s pipeline includes four, 4-hour medium voltage BESS projects in the Netherlands, all of which are set to come online next year. Energy-Storage.news spoke with the firm’s management team in September about a 500MW/2,000MWh permitted project, the largest to reach that stage in the country, though that is not coming online until 2026.
Low Carbon initially announced the deal this morning (29 October) via a Reuters report that said LC Energy’s pipeline of projects in the Netherlands totalled 6GW, while CCI’s announcement a few hours later said it was 7.5GW, potentially including projects outside the country.
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The Netherlands is targeting 39% renewable electricity by 2030 and the large-scale BESS market has progressed in the past year or two, evidenced by a flurry of gigawatt-hour-scale projects moving forward, including LC Energy’s and others from Dispatch, Lion Storage, Giga Storage, SemperPower, Corre Energy, PowerField and RWE.
All those announcements came after transmission system operator (TSO) TenneT introduced a ‘flexilisation’ of grid fees, which provided a solution to one of the Dutch market’s main challenges for BESS deployment.
S4 Energy was one of the early movers in the Dutch BESS market with a c.10MW project combining lithium-ion systems and a flywheel coming online in 2020, and this deal brings it into the large-scale space which companies like Lion, Giga and SemperPower have led to-date.
