Oil and gas major TotalEnergies has acquired Kyon Energy, one of the most active battery energy storage system (BESS) project developers in Germany.
Paris-headquartered TotalEnergies has agreed to pay an upfront €90 million (US$98 million) to acquire Kyon from its three founders, plus further payments linked to the achievement of development targets.
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Those development targets will be for the company’s forward pipeline of projects alongside 120MW of operational BESS projects it developed and sold to long-term owners. It has brought a further 350MW to the construction stage while 300MW is ready-to-build, and its ‘advanced stage’ pipeline is 2GW.
A notable partnership that Energy-Storage.news has reported on is with investor Obton, to which Kyon sold nearly 200MW of projects last year. Kyon is also developing a 137.5MW/275MWh BESS in Lower Saxony, for which it was granted approval in November, a month after getting the go-ahead for a 58MW/116MWh system in Saxony-Anhalt.
TotalEnergies said the acquisition fits into an integrated energy strategy, after offshore wind wins in Germany and the acquisition of aggregator Quadra Energy.
TotalEnergies also owns France-headquartered BESS technology provider Saft, which serves the transport, industry and defence sectors and is particularly known for deploying projects in remote or extreme weather locations.
Saft regularly deploys projects for its parent company – including in the US, France and Belgium – so this acquisition could provide opportunities to make inroads in the German market too.
After a quiet few years prior, the grid-scale energy storage market in Germany has picked up since 2021 as high prices in ancillary service markets, energy trading opportunities and falls in the cost of lithium-ion BESS products combined to create a strong business case.
Progress has also been made in the country’s regulatory environment for energy storage, with regulators extending a grid free exemption for large-scale BESS to 2029 and then lawmakers last week publishing its first Electricity Storage Strategy.
Kyon Energy’s managing director Florian Antwerpen shared his views for a recent Year in Review article along with fellow European developer/operators Aquila Clean Energy EMEA and Baywa r.e.
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