BESS owner-operator Return has secured an €835 million (US$938 million) portfolio financing underwritten by Deutsche Bank and Rabobank to expand its BESS activities in Germany.
The financing will enable the firm to expand the battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity underpinning its virtual flexibility portfolio in Germany.
The financing covers an initial 117MW of BESS capacity across three projects under construction in Germany, to which additional projects will be added over the rest of 2026 and 2027.
Return said the financing differs from traditional BESS financing because it brings multiple facilities under one financing structure, enabling eligible projects to access capital without restarting the financing process. Traditional BESS financing is typically done project by project, it said.
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Advisory and law firms that worked on the deal were Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, White & Case, Baker McKenzie, Baringa, DNV, EY and EY Parthenon and Marsh (insurance).
The firm aims to deploy at least 1GW in Germany annually from 2027 onwards, which would amount to annual investments of between €750 million and €1.2 billion.
Germany has a huge solar and wind pipeline and forecasts are that it will need several tens and perhaps even hundreds of gigawatts of BESS to integrate it.
The firm is headquartered in the Netherlands where it has some of the largest projects online, and it started expanding into Germany in 2024 and last year acquired a portfolio of projects in Spain too. Just yesterday we reported on it financing 220MWh of projects in Spain.
Return has entered into offtake deals with power groups Engie (400MW) and Centrica Energy (100MW) in Germany and Vattenfall in the Netherlands.
German market
The announcement comes ahead of a 31 December deadline for getting projects to final investment decision (FID) in order to qualify for an exemption from grid fees if they come online by 4 August 2029.
The exemption was confirmed in May after several months of uncertainty had ground the market to a halt, after which BESS activity has picked up again.
Just a few weeks ago projects totalling 3.2GWh of capacity were progressed to construction by Enertrag, Enlight, Vattenfall and Giga Storage.
Aside from the rush to get projects over the line, the other key challenge in the German market right now is around flexible connection agreements (FCAs). FCAs are limited grid connection agreements and, system operators argue, the only way to get BESS online in time.
FCAs are also intimately related to the grid fee debate, as explained by the CEO of owner-operator Eco Stor in an ESN Premium interview at the Energy Storage Summit Germany 2026 in Berlin in September.
