A building permit has been issued in Limburg for the currently largest battery park in Europe. The Green Turtle battery park, which the Dutch company Giga Storage is building in Rotem (Dilsen-Stokkem), will look like a long series of containers on an industrial estate of twelve hectares, in which 720 batteries will be linked together. It will have a capacity of 600 megawatts.
Charging for surpluses
600 megawatts corresponds approximately to the capacity of an average gas power plant. The difference with a gas power plant is that batteries can only supply electricity for four hours at a time and then need to be recharged.
The idea is to charge them when electricity is cheap, for example at night or when there is surplus wind or solar energy available, and put them back on the high-voltage grid during peak times in the morning and evening. when prices are higher. This also includes the business model.
In addition, Giga Storage, which also wants to build a 300 megawatt battery park in Kinrooi, will also request support under the CRM mechanism, intended to ensure electricity supply. And it can be reimbursed by grid operator Elia for efforts to keep the electricity grid in balance. The project in Dilsen-Stokkem will cost approximately 600 million euros and should be ready for use in 2027 or 2028.
More and more needs
For the time being, there are only 150 megawatts of battery parks in Belgium, but that will change quickly. There is already 5,000 megawatts of power in the pipeline, equal to the capacity of five nuclear power stations. Next year there will even be a specific CRM auction to support batteries.
The size of the parks that are announced is also increasing. “These batteries are needed to enable an electricity grid with increasingly renewable energy, to keep electricity affordable and to become independent from abroad,” says Joeri Siborgs, general manager of Giga Storage Belgium. “More than a gigawatt of solar energy is added every year. The needs for storage are therefore increasing.”
The flexibility that battery parks provide, among other things, to absorb the fluctuations of wind and sun and to bridge windless periods, will be the biggest challenge for the energy transition in the coming years.
Today, wholesale electricity prices can vary greatly depending on the amount of renewable energy available. With low demand and a lot of sun and wind, electricity prices themselves can become negative. This means that users are reimbursed for purchasing electricity.
Battery parks can help to absorb those large fluctuations. Batteries are gradually taking the place that gas-fired power stations previously occupied in keeping the electricity grid in balance. Ironic: Europe’s largest park will be located precisely on the site where a new gas power plant was previously planned.
