In the past week, developer RES Group has just got a front-of-meter battery project underway for a utility company in northern Germany, while storage system provider Tesvolt has just signed a deal with another utility in the European country to distribute energy storage behind-the-meter for commercial customers.

The award of RES Deutschland’s 10MW project was announced following a competitive solicitation process from energy supplier Versorgungsbetriebe Bordesholm (VBB) in January. The project in the Schleswig-Holstein municipality of Bordesholm is funded by the EU and supported by the local state. One of the main aims of the system’s deployment is to provide backup to the local grid in the event of power outages.

At the time of the project’s award, RES Group said it will be “demanding” from a technical perspective to provide a closed network infrastructure, as well as the need to add features including synchronous coupling switches and a fibre-optic comms network. The system also joins Germany’s primary control power market. Traditionally and most commonly provided by gas turbines, the grid’s frequency is stabilised by matching generation and consumption on a network within seconds of a signal being received from the grid.

RES announced that a ground-breaking ceremony was held for the Bordesholm battery last Monday, attended by RES Deutschland and VBB executives. Funded as a pilot project by the European Union in supporting continental aims for decarbonisation, VBB hopes the system will help it reach 100% renewables by 2020 - its share is currently already at 75%.

At the beginning of this year, a report from Germany Trade and Invest (GTAI), effectively one of the country’s business development agencies, said around 1,250MW of primary control power was being traded in the coupled markets of Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland out of around 3,000MW in total in Europe. About 144MW of that was being provided in Germany by batteries - mostly lithium-ion - by the end of 2017. Since then, Energy-Storage.news has reported on numerous primary control projects going online in Germany including Enel’s first project in the country and one from Bosch at the site of a coal plant, created in a JV with German utility company EnBW.

Julian Jansen, analyst at IHS Markit, told Energy-Storage.news today that it is increasingly common that utility players both large and small are starting to “accelerate the development of solution based, smart energy offerings over the past 5 years,” including energy storage, with the traditional utility business model of generation and supply “clearly understood” to not be “fit for the future”.