Vattenfall and the international energy storage company Return have entered into an agreement under which Vattenfall will operate and optimize a large-scale battery park with a capacity of 50 megawatts for eight years.
The battery park will be located in Waddinxveen in southern Netherlands and is planned to be operational in the first half of 2026.
Return will provide Vattenfall with a large-scale battery with an output of 50 megawatts and a storage capacity of 100 megawatt hours in an eight-year contract from the planned commissioning in the first half of 2026.
The battery storage will be connected to Tennet’s high-voltage grid in the area.
Honey Duan, manager of external battery storage systems at Vattenfall, says: “Flexible storage systems are becoming increasingly indispensable for a stable, fossil-free and efficient energy supply.
“Large-scale battery systems serve the energy transition and play their part in realising our goal of enabling of fossil freedom.”
As an integrated energy supplier, Vattenfall is not only developing its own battery projects. The optimisation and marketing of external large-scale storage systems is also gaining momentum.
Duan says: “In a volatile environment, the large-scale battery from Return will provide us with a valuable, flexible add-on to our increasing portfolio of renewable electricity production.
“We will integrate the battery into our automated trading processes, thereby reducing costs for imbalances and balancing energy in our portfolio and allowing us always to provide flexibility where it brings the greatest benefit to the electricity market.
“Batteries act as flexible storage systems to bridge regional and temporal inefficiencies in the electricity market.”
Vattenfall has the ambition to place up to 1.5 gigawatts of external large-scale battery capacity on the electricity market in Northwest Europe in the coming years.
Duan says: “Vattenfall benefits from decades of experience in the operation and marketing of electricity from pumped storage power plants, as well as optimising batteries in the Netherlands with the wind farms Haringvliet and Princess Alexia.
“In Germany, Vattenfall already operates pumped storage plants and smaller run-of-river power plants with an installed capacity of around 2.7 gigawatts.”
