Battery storage played a crucial role in the Baltic region’s switch from Russia over to the Continental European grid over the weekend, coinciding with Lithuania launching a €100 million storage support scheme.

ESN Premium hears from independent power producer (IPP) Econergy about its expansion from solar into BESS across Europe.

The government of Estonia will financially back a 500MW pumped hydro energy storage project to meet the country’s need for long-duration energy storage, as the Baltics prepare to disconnect from Russia’s grid this weekend.

The government of Poland looks set to run further capacity market (CM) auctions with the specific aim of enabling gas plants to win, after BESS wiped the floor with the technology at the last auction.

State-owned power producer PGE Group has selected LG Energy Solution to provide the BESS for a 263MW/900MWh project it will build in Poland, for a total of PLN 1.555 billion (US$385 million).

Portugal has selected 43 winning BESS projects for a share of €100 million (US$105 million) in EU grants while, on the other side of Europe, Moldova has launched a 75MW BESS procurement with funding from USAID.

System integrator Fluence will provide 200MW/400MWh of BESS for dependent power producer (IPP) DTEK’s projects in Ukraine.

Developer and IPP R.Power has received €15 million (US$15.6 million) in non-reimbursable state financing to build a 2-hour BESS project in Romania.

BESS has won big in Poland’s capacity market (CM) auction for 2029 delivery, with potentially 2.5GW of projects winning contracts including from Axpo, OX2, R.Power, FRV and PGE.

A flurry of grid-scale energy storage news from Europe, with large-scale projects progressed in Kosovo, Switzerland and Croatia involving Millenium Challenge Corporation, Intilion and NGEN respectively.