Evecon, an Estonian renewable energy company, and Corsica Sole, a French company, will build two battery energy storage systems with a total capacity of 200 megawatts in Harju County by 2025.
The battery parks will be located in Kiisa in Saku Rural Municipality and Arukylä in Raasiku Rural Municipality, correspondingly. Elering’s emergency power plant is located in Kiisa as well.
In 2025, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will decouple from the Russian electricity grid, and the Baltic networks will be linked to the continental European grid. The battery farm is scheduled to reach its completion at that time. This will ensure an adequate emergency reserve and in the future, the battery park can be converted into a storage facility for renewable energy.
The two battery parks have a total capacity of 200 megawatt-hours and 400 megawatt-hours respectively, which means that 90,000 households can be supplied with electricity when necessary.
Elering is building the connections for the future battery farms that are scheduled to go into operation during the second and third quarters of 2025. The first park will be built in Kiisa during the spring of the following year, and the second in Arukyla during the fourth quarter of 2024. Kiisa will get the batteries from Corsica Sole by the end of 2024.
Michael Coudyser, CEO of Corsica Sole, said that fluctuations in the electricity system can be adjusted to in a matter of seconds using a battery bank. To counterbalance the impacts of fluctuations in grid frequency, the batteries quickly store or generate electricity.
A battery park is a controlled environment made up of several containers. Depending on the manufacturer, a single container could hold hundreds or thousands of batteries.
The battery park will be called the Baltic Storage Platform, in which Evecon will have a 20 percent stake and Corsica Sole will have 80 percent stake.
Climate Minister Kristen Michal (Reform) said that the emergence of reserve and storage capacities in Estonia is good news and it is particularly welcome that it is being done by private companies.
Evecon plans on building 20 wind farms with a total capacity of 1,200 megawatts by the end of 2026 and 78 solar plants with a total capacity of 1,465 megawatts by the end of 2024.
Corsica Sole is a French renewable energy company created in 2009 in Corsica. The company set up its first battery farm in 2021.
Continental Europe’s biggest battery system was built by Corsica Sole in Belgium in December 2022. The system helps to ensure the stability of frequency in the European electricity network. The main way battery systems do this is through participating in Frequency Control Reserve (FCR), which will be gradually replaced by a pan-European service called automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR).
Eesti Energia was unable to secure a contract for a large-scale energy storage facility through an international tender. It is expected that it would have a capacity ranging from 25 to 50 megawatt-hours that sufficiently meets the reserve needs of the Baltic countries. Eesti Energia said that despite the unsuccessful tender, it was going ahead with the project.
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