Europe's largest battery, a 48-MW unit in Northern Germany, is now ready to supply reserve capacity to the European electricity grid, Dutch utility Eneco said Thursday.
German utility-scale batteries set to double this year
Batteries mainly provide balancing control for TSOs
The battery is in Jardelund near the Danish border in a region with a very high saturation of wind turbines battling with grid congestion issues.
Initially, the battery will be used for the primary reserve market and as of this week will participate in the weekly auction of primary reserve capacity, joint owners Eneco and Mitsubishi said.
The battery, constructed in just eight months, has a capacity of 48 MW and contains around 10,000 lithium-ion batteries, sufficient to store power for over 5,000 German households for 24 hours.
Eneco and Mitsubishi are also investigating the possibility of connecting local wind farms to the battery, allowing for temporary storage in the event of overproduction to prevent a curtailment of wind production to keep the grid stable.
Germany's rapidly growing utility-scale battery market is forecast to almost double this year to over 300 MW, with another 100 MW of projects expected to come online early next year, according to German storage lobby group BVES.
