VILVOORDE, Belgium — Hidden behind two giant cooling towers in a mothballed gas power plant, a sea of rectangular boxes holds the key to solving one of the EU’s most vexing challenges: Energy is being squandered.
The containers, each weighing 26 tons and stretching as far as the eye can see, are packed with lithium batteries. Together they will soon make up the largest battery storage park in Europe.
The EU desperately needs the project.
The bloc is building renewable energy at a record pace, but it can’t always use the power that wind and solar plants create. Sometimes the demand isn’t there, so the energy is simply lost as electricity can’t always be stored.
It’s a big problem. In 2023 the EU essentially wasted the equivalent of 0.5 percent of its total power consumption, according to Eurelectric, the bloc’s leading electricity industry association. That’s making it harder to solve another urgent problem: the high energy prices hampering manufacturers.
Energy storage technologies can ease price spikes and help renewables operators avoid curbing production at times of oversupply, an increasingly common problem in Europe.
Sites like Vilvoorde “can really respond to some of today’s [changing] energy demands, which will only increase throughout the energy transition,” said Wim Alen, deputy vice president for battery storage at Engie, the utility that is developing the project. For firms, he added, “it will translate to cheaper bills.”
The stakes are existential for Europe’s energy-hungry companies, which are facing power prices that are double those of their U.S. rivals. Those prices will only rise further this year, according to the EU’s own internal assessment.
On Wednesday the EU will unveil its grand plan to marry economic revival and green policy. That will include promises to promote energy storage developers, a plan that “contributes to lower prices for all consumers,” according to a draft POLITICO obtained. It’s a start, industry figures and experts say, but much more will be needed.
What the EU needs above all, said Jacopo Tosoni, head of policy at the European Association for Storage of Energy lobby, is “a clear strategy.”
Finding a balance
Last year the EU sourced 47 percent of its electricity from green energy; Brussels has pushed hard to build out renewables and hit its climate goals.
But that success also presents a raft of problems.
Unpredictable solar and wind production causes volatility in power markets, creating uncertainty for buyers. At times of oversupply, power prices can even go negative, harming revenues. Last year, EU power prices fell below zero 1,480 times, according to the Eurelectric lobby.
Too much green energy can also prompt grid operators to order renewable plants to curb their production to help balance supply and demand. That’s when power gets wasted.
“Investments are slowing down,” said Walburga Hemetsberger, CEO of the SolarPower Europe lobby, flagging that new solar panel growth across the EU slid by 92 percent last year.
“This is just the start of a trend which we do not want to see because this is putting the energy transition at stake,” she said.
According to Sepehr Soltani, an energy analyst at the Rystad consultancy, that slowdown is “the main reason why energy storage is important,” since it can store up and dispatch electricity efficiently back into the grid at times of low supply.
Europe does have some energy storage sites, Soltani said, two-thirds of which are so-called pumped storage. That works by having hydroelectric turbines push water up to reservoirs at times of oversupply, which is then released and turned back into power when demand is high.
Roughly a third are battery parks like the one in Vilvoorde, which can briefly store electricity until grid operators request it.
But it’s a subpar setup. Pumped storage only works in specific areas, and batteries typically only store power for several hours.
Newer technologies may help sequester energy for longer periods. Dutch-Irish company Corre Energy, for example, is currently building projects in Denmark and the Netherlands that compress air in old salt mines, which it then transforms back into electricity.
The caverns can store energy for up to “three-and-a-half days,” said Corre Energy CEO Patrick McClughan, which gives grid operators more flexibility than the “three to four hours” they get from batteries.
Storage support
But rolling out energy storage at the scale needed will require more EU help, advocates say.
Today, Europe has around 85 gigawatts of energy storage systems in place, said Tosoni, the industry lobbyist. The bloc would need more than twice that just to reach the EU’s legally binding 2030 target for 42.5 percent of total energy production to come from renewables.
As things stand now, “we’re gonna definitely fall short” of that target by up to a quarter, he said, arguing that Brussels needs to step up its support of the fledgling sector.
So far, the European Commission, the EU’s executive, has given capitals until 2027 to set storage goals and other targets to better handle fluctuating supply and demand. It will then compile those into a bloc-wide 2030 target.
The Commission will also propose new rules allowing EU governments to subsidize storage schemes as part of its plans to jumpstart the bloc’s competitiveness, according to early drafts.
“We will help scale up subsidies for non-fossil flexibility technologies, such as storage,” a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO, adding that the EU executive would also “adopt new rules” to “address the remaining barriers that prevent storage from valuing their services in the [EU’s] electricity market.”
But Brussels still needs a broader energy storage vision, Tosoni argued, with an earlier EU-wide target that gives the industry “investment certainty.”
The Commission, Tosoni added, should also scrap tax rules that charge battery operators twice — once for storing energy, and again for sending it back to the grid. Tosoni had a few other requests, including quicker permitting and revised national regulations to better address the emerging energy storage sector.
It’s also about fostering new technologies. Dutch startup Aquabattery, for example, is working on a battery that stores energy by splitting saltwater into an acid and alkaline solution, which can theoretically store energy for an unlimited amount of time.
But for storage technology to gain broad traction, the EU must harmonize storage regulations across different countries, said Janneke Gi-Stuijfzand, the firm’s chief commercial officer. “Some sort of support scheme” to help them scale up “could help” too, she said.
Back in Vilvoorde, Engie’s Alen agrees more needs to be done — fast.
“Governments must take care to put in place the right rules to allow the development of such types of energy storage,” he said, against a backdrop of empty spots where new battery containers will soon be slotted into place with large cranes.
If they don’t, he warns, it will lead to “high costs, not only for … industry but also for consumers down the line.”
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