Bstor to build third and largest battery park in Aubange

After Bstor launched a new battery park in La Louvière at the beginning of this year, the battery project developer has started constructing its third and largest battery park, ‘Estor-Lux II,’ in Aubange, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg. Bstor is 40 percent owned by the listed Antwerp holding company Ackermans & van Haaren.

In December 2021, the Estor-Lux consortium – Ackermans & van Haaren, BEWATT, CFE, IDELUX, SOCOFE, SOFILUX, SRIW – launched the full commercial activity of the first battery storage park connected to the Belgian high-voltage grid.

With an installed power of 10 MW and a storage capacity of 20 MWh, the 480-module lithium-ion battery park in Bastogne was the most significant active battery site in Benelux regarding storage capacity.

Crucial for balancing demand and supply

The project in Aubange, which represents an investment of 124 million euros, will have a 100-megawatt connection to the high-voltage grid. The battery containers will store 270 megawatt hours of electricity.

In just a few years, such large-scale batteries have become crucial for balancing supply and demand on the electricity grid. With the advent of increasing peaks and troughs in renewable energy, the need for flexible storage is rising.

Large battery parks can help energy companies absorb these peaks. Bstor is one of the pioneers in that domain. Aubange aims to be operational by the autumn of next year, after which energy supplier Eneco will rent the battery capacity to supply its customers.

Over-demanded high-voltage network

Bstor finds it increasingly difficult to find suitable locations on Elia’s over-demanded high-voltage network. This means they sometimes have to wait months or years for a connection, while other companies reserve connections but do nothing with them, which results in high costs and unused infrastructure.

Therefore, Bstor advocates revising the ‘first come, first served’ principle to use unused reserved network capacity more efficiently.