At the French port of Dunkirk, a mothballed oil refinery represents both the legacy and the future of the energy giant TotalEnergies.
The French company shut down the refinery in 2010. Rather than abandon the site, the company is finding new uses for it.
Earlier in the decade, it installed more than two dozen industrial-scale batteries on a strip alongside the rusting tanks and pipes. Some longstanding refinery employees now make the rounds at the battery farm, making sure the devices are functioning properly.
The batteries, housed in white, rectangular containers, are connected to the power grid. They kick in with almost instant bursts of electricity when needed, such as when a nearby aluminum plant, a huge consumer of power, fires up.
Every time a large industrial company starts a machine, “the grid goes down, so you need more power on it,” Damien Grosseau, the head of development and projects at the site, said in an interview at its 1970s-style Dunkirk offices.
Although it is still mainly an oil and gas producer, TotalEnergies views batteries as an attractive investment that can profit from the tectonic changes that are occurring in the electricity field.
TotalEnergies is an outlier among big oil and gas producers, which have shied away or pulled back from investing in renewable electricity, wary of tight regulation and lackluster profits. But TotalEnergies is aiming to invest up to $4 billion a year in electric power, calculating that it can be lucrative with the right approach. The goal is to double the share of electricity in the company’s energy output to around 20 percent by the end of the decade.
The French giant figures that it can profit by helping clients and grid operators adapt to changes hitting the power markets.
“We try to target the markets that have strong potential,” said Maxence Le Grelle, who manages a portfolio of batteries and natural gas-fired power plants in Europe. “It means that they have growth and volatility.”
Mr. Le Grelle’s unit is concentrating on Britain, Germany and Texas, along with France.
Demand for power is expected to surge in the coming years because of increased consumption by electric vehicles, data centers and other sources.
The growing number of wind and solar farms, whose output fluctuates with the breeze and sunlight, is helping to create large swings in the availability of power. “The more renewables you have, the more volatility you have,” Mr. Le Grelle said.
For example, in March, German electricity prices went from zero euros per megawatt-hour at noon, when solar energy peaked, to 165 euros per megawatt-hour at 6 p.m. when renewable energy dropped off, according to TotalEnergies.
At the same time, coal and some gas-fired generating plants are closing down, reducing pollution, but also removing what has been a stabilizing influence on the power grid. The turbines at the core of these plants also provide a rotating force known as inertia that helps regulate the grid at times of fluctuation. Batteries can perform this function only when paired with special equipment.
The rapid growth of renewable energy, especially solar power, also formed the backdrop of a major blackout that paralyzed Spain and Portugal in April. “The grid has become increasingly complex to manage,” said Javier Pamos, the manager for Iberia at Aurora Energy Research, a consulting firm.
Mr. Pamos said that the incident was likely to lead to greater demand and higher revenue for grid management services from batteries.
Batteries can earn money in several ways. Grid operators pay battery owners to respond to short-term system imbalances.
The devices can also be used in arbitrage, taking power from the grid to charge when electricity prices are low and pumping it out when they are higher.
By sucking up surplus output from, for example, solar farms during the day, and then discharging that power later, batteries help to balance the presence of renewables on the grid. Otherwise, the solar power would need to be disconnected.
“What we see in Europe is quite a boom in battery projects,” said Emma Zimmermann, a senior associate at Aurora Energy. She estimated that energy providers spent €7.3 billion on batteries in 2024 and forecast that battery capacity in Europe would increase around fivefold by the end of the decade.
Unlike other alternative energy technologies that are often encouraged by subsidies, batteries “just get built because the expected revenue that they can make is so high,” said Ms. Zimmermann, who estimated that batteries could earn hefty profits in “the mid-double digits.”
Batteries are useful for quick responses, said Margaux Corsini, the head of asset management for energy storage systems at TotalEnergies. “Every second, we can be called to regulate the grid,” she said, adding that the batteries shift from charging to discharging frequently during the day.
But the batteries at Dunkirk can fire into the grid for only an hour, Ms. Corsini said.
So TotalEnergies uses gas-fired power plants when more electricity is needed over longer periods such as frigid spells that stoke demand for heat.
Mr. Le Grelle spoke at a gas-fired plant in the countryside of eastern France in Toul near Nancy, a city with a medieval gate and Art Nouveau stained glass.
The power station can start up in a half-hour in some circumstances, and there are few limits on how long it can operate. It can also generate far more electricity than the batteries at Dunkirk.
The plant’s crew of around 30 employees keep it on constant standby, waiting for a request to fire up from RTE, the national transmission operator. Failure to come through can result in fines.
The Toul unit ran frequently in 2022 when there were unusual outages at the nuclear plants that dominate French power generation.
More recently, the facility has seen low use as the aftershocks from Europe’s energy crisis have reduced industrial activity.
“It’s a more depressed market that we have currently,” Mr. Le Grelle said. “But past years have shown it can change quite rapidly.”
Stanley Reed reports on energy, the environment and the Middle East for The Times from London. He has been a journalist for more than four decades.
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