#17 Energy Storage News & Views

Welcome to the latest edition of Energy Storage News & Views.

Q1 of 2025 has flown by so far, with plenty of exciting news, investments landing, and career moves. At Hyperion, we've observed a buoyant Energy Storage market and talent demand not only in the UK but across Europe with a lot of interest both on the developer/IPP side and the tech manufacturer / integrator side.

As many of you will have seen, we launched our new Cleantech Market & Talent Review beginning with a look back at Q4 2024 and some of our 2025 predictions.

This will be a regular feature from Hyperion moving forward, where we provide an overview of the key market and people trends in Energy Storage and wider cleantech sectors (check out pages 8-9 for the Energy Storage feature). We focus on the talent trends as this is at the heart of what we do!

Check it out here - Q424 - Cleantech Market & Talent Review

It's been a busy period of travel and its now event season. In February, I was out in Amsterdam again (becoming arguably my favourite European city) to meet a major European IPP who are looking at expanding their BESS division and a Trading & Optimization SW client of ours who are increasingly looking at offering an optimization solution for trading teams looking at BESS asset rollout. Very exciting!

In February, some of our team were at E-World in Essen, which by all accounts was bigger than ever this year. My colleague Stephen R. was telling me about the vast number of companies across Software now, whether it be energy management, trading and optimization, of flexibility for distributed energy. These are areas we've seen big demand for talent amongst our client base.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Energy Storage Summit in London - one of the biggest and best European events in the calendar for our sector. It was brilliant to meet with a lot of familiar faces but also many new ones. The attention seems to be on maturing markets in Germany, Italy, Netherlands and eastern European states like Poland, Romania etc.

One of the evenings I was able to attend the Battery Pub event hosted by terralayr which was a great couple of hours of networking with Energy Storage leaders complete with mini fish and chips, sausage rolls and beers (even those with a peculiar green colour, courtesy of the terralayr team!) Also great to meet a candidate I placed last year Erinç Elçin !

Next week I'll be heading to the Energy Technology Live show at the NEC Birmingham, with this year's event now having it's own sub-event - Energy Storage Show

If you're attending and want to discuss your next career move or building your own teams, then drop me a message and we can plan to meet!

Market News

Blackhillock BESS goes live... Europe's Largest BESS site

Zenobē has launched the first phase (200MW) of its massive Blackhillock BESS site in Scotland, hailed as Europe's largest. This is a huge project, set to expand to 300MW/600MWh by 2026, and will significantly enhance the UK's renewable energy grid with this project now boosting the UK's live grid-scale BESS capacity to 8.9GWh.

The project utilises Wärtsilä's Quantum BESS solution, SMA inverters, EDF's Powershift trading-as-a-service platform, supported by Kraken Technologies' control and dispatch platform, and is supported by significant debt financing.

New Li-ion battery factory planned for Portugal

Another day, another announcement for Chinese investment in a European battery site. This time it is in Portugal with CALB investing €2Bn to build a new 15GWh Gigafactory, in conjunction with the Portuguese Government. They will also aim to take advantage of Portugal's local lithium deposits, with lithium mining company, Savannah Resources, to start commercial production of lithium (Barroso project) in 2027.

In the week Europe has announced plans to protect domestic supply (see below), this highlights the challenges being faced from aggressive overseas competition.

A new UK battery company emerges from stealth

There's a new UK battery player in town, Volklec. Having been in stealth for a while, the company has now emerged with some grand plans ahead. Firstly, they've assembled a great team including Phil Popham (ex Lotus CEO), they've signed an exclusive technology and knowledge transfer partnership with Far East Battery, a manufacturing partnership with UKBIC, and initial financing from Frontive Group. Longer term the group plan to raise £1Bn to build a 10GWh factory by 2030.

We had the pleasure to talk with the Founder Imran K. and the plans are truly exciting, with the company's strategy designed to avoid past mistakes made by failed UK battery players!

Watch this space!

The EU shares their plan to boost European EV battery demand

Yesterday, the European commission published it's Automotive Plan, which is designed to help EU OEMs to electrify their fleets and counteract the growing influx of Chinese and US rivals in the sector. This includes an investment of €1.8 billion to create a secure and competitive supply chain for battery raw materials and policies to follow on supporting local cost-competitive cell production in the EU

Ultimately, the investment is rather small when you compare it to the aggressive plans of China and USA, so will it keep the wolf from the door? Well, it's a start and hopefully can inject some much needed life into what was a sector in "mortal danger" as put by Stéphane Séjourné (VP, Prosperity & Industrial Strategy)

T-1 Capacity Auction Results released in the UK

NESO has published the results of the latest publishes T-1 Capacity Market results with 726MW of BESS capacity awarded, making up 9.15% of total awarded capacity. A more detailed analysis on the results by Daniel Sheldon of Aurora can be found below

The market are eagerly anticipating next week's T-4 Capacity auction!

Deal signed to build the world's largest BESS projects in Saudi

BYD and Saudi Electric Company (SEC) have signed a deal to build the biggest BESS projects in the world to date - a whopping 12.GWh across 5 sites!🔋🔋🔋🔋🔋

The sheer scale of this is staggering and it is yet another sign of the country's ambition and commitment to clean electricity as part of Vision 2030 and another huge step towards them becoming the major BESS powerhouse globally, having already reached the top 10 markets.

Netherlands Sees Record-Breaking Battery Project Reach Financial Close

Lion Storage's "Project Mufasa," a monumental 1,400MWh battery energy storage system, has secured over €350 million in funding, making it the largest project of its kind in the Netherlands. Located in Vlissingen, this Tesla-powered facility, operated by Eneco, will balance energy supply and demand, supporting the country's renewable energy goals. Set to be operational in 2027, Mufasa represents a significant leap forward for grid stability and demonstrates the growing confidence in large-scale energy storage investments.

Largest BESS in Construction in NL

Staying on the Dutch theme... Alfen, a Dutch system integrator of Battery Storage, will supply a 31.6MW/126.4MWh BESS project currently under construction, for FlevoBESS in the Netherlands, which is the largest in the country to reach that stage. The BESS units will provide 4MWh of energy storage per 20-foot container.

Alfen is a Hyperion's historical clients and its' great to see their continued progress in BESS after their fantastic success in EV charging.

Further success in real-time grid flexibility for UK DSO (ENW)

UK distribution system operator Electricity North West has successfully dispatched flexibility for DER, partnering with flexibility service provider Axle Energy via the ElectronConnect platform from Electron . This was a real milestone for ENW, as they demonstrated the ability to adjust electricity supply to manage network constraints, within just 15 minutes. The benefits of flexibility dispatching are clear - greater adoption of flexible energy assets (EV chargers, batteries, heat pumps etc); better flexibility value for asset owners (customers); improved grid stability; better, most cost-effective constraint management; and encouragement for more flexibility service providers in the market.

Shout out to Jo-Jo Hubbard FEI and the Electron team, who featured on a previous Leaders In Cleantech podcast hosted by Hyperion MD David Hunt

Recruitment News

As mentioned above, it's been a rather buoyant start to the year for the Energy Storage practice at Hyperion. There has been surge of demand for senior commercial, project delivery, and operations talent in the ESS space, both utility-scale and C&I.

Placements:

• UK Country Director - European C&I ESS + EMS provider
• BESS Project Manager - Grid-Scale BESS developer, builder, and operator

Some of our live searches include:

BESS Procurement Manager with BSTOR - A first-mover BESS developer in Belgium with a strong 1.5GW pipeline of projects in development, including some at RtB phase. They need a talented, experienced, and enthusiastic Procurement Manager to manage and improve their BESS supplier relationships, contract management activities, and future diversification.

Review and Apply here

Chief Commercial Officer - A fast-growth C&I BESS + EMS player that has already entering multiple new country markets and with ambition for further expansion. We need an experienced business scaler with an international pedigree - someone who can help elevate a company sales from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of Euros.

Senior Sales Manager Europe - A exciting battery analytics start-up, now part of a global engineering and electronics company. They are scaling the team and we need an experienced sales professional with direct experience in battery technology (ideally SaaS or Analytics) and market knowledge in ESS or EV / E-Mobility.

Review and Apply here

Additionally, Our team here at Hyperion Search Ltd is growing, as we look to hire 2 new Associate Consultants for the Liverpool office. If you know any great junior recruiters who could be excited to begin a career in cleantech search, then they can find out more and apply here

I wanted to end this section with an anecdote from my recent travels. It's a really valuable example of the flexible, brave approach to addressing the "green skills shortage" we keep hearing about

Deals

Here is a selection of latest deals in the sector!

Lion Storage - €350 million (Debt / Govt' Loan) - Financial close reached for their Mufasa Project (1.4GWh BESS) in the Netherlands (featured above). This has been fully funded through 100% non-recourse project financing. It will also be one of the largest in Europe.

Scatec - €107 million (Senior unsecured green bond) - Used to extend Scatec’s corporate maturity profile and enhance its financial flexibility.

Moonwatt - €8 million (Series A) - To accelerate its breakthrough sodium-ion battery technology - more specifically accelerating the development and deployment of their hardware and software and expanding the team.

Echandia - €20 million (Early VC) - To support the scale up of production capabilities in Sweden and USA (including the recently unveiled production site in Washington state).

Skeleton Technologies - €18.3 million (Grant) - Just Transition Fund (JTF) grant for the European Commission to be used to further scale their Curved Graphene pilot production plant.

Greenalia - €97 million (Post-IPO) - To support the Spanish IPP's portfolio of operational assets and the development pipeline in Spain and also the US (across renewables, BESS, hydrogen, and biomass).

I wanted to end this edition with some of my personal Must Watch / Must Listen Recommendations

1.🎙Redefining Energy - State of play in the battery universe with Aaron Wade

2. Modo Energy Transmission Podcast with Quentin 'Q' Scrimshire

(i) Securing debt for BESS with Brandon Faber of NORD/LB

(ii) Sodium-ion batteries with Neil Kidner of Adena Power

If you enjoyed this edition of the Energy Storage News and Views, please share with your network and don't forget to Subscribe if you haven't already. There will be a new edition coming soon!

See you next time!

David