A €600,000 (US$595 million) grant from state agencies Enterprise Estonia and KredEx has been given to a pumped hydro energy storage project planned for 2025/26 in the Baltic state.
The money will go to state-owned energy firm Eesti Energia to prepare the construction of a 225MW pumped hydro plant it announced in August, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.
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The facility is planned for the industrial area of Estonia Mine in Ida-Virumaa for 2025/26 and will help provide stability to the Estonian grid as it aims to disconnect entirely from Russia’s and connect to mainland Europe’s.
Veljo Aleksandrov, project director, said the the analysis of the technical solution together with an environmental impact study will be completed at the beginning of next year, followed by the preliminary design with the necessary studies. Preliminary design should be completed by the end of 2023 and the investment decision made in the first half of 2024.
“Ensuring Estonia’s energy security and energy independence with our own assets is more important than ever before. In view of the connection to the continental European electricity system planned for 2026 at the latest, it is extremely important that the necessary energy markets and production or storage assets be created in the Baltic States to ensure the security of supply as greenly and cheaply as possible,” Aleksandrov added.
The firm has not revealed the capacity or discharge duration of the planned site, which may need to wait for further studies. Pumped hydro energy storage technology has a typical duration of between 6-20 hours, which in this case could mean somewhere between 1.35GWh and 4.5GWh of energy storage.