Between 26 August and 2 September, one thread ran through the European flexibility news: value is moving from building megawatts to routing and controlling them. A Finnish optimiser took over trading for two Baltic solar-and-battery parks, an 800MWh Dutch battery reached financial close on a congestion-shaped grid connection, and BloombergNEF’s half-year figures showed capital pulling away from standalone solar toward storage and co-location. Every number below links to its source.
1. Baltic hybrids are being wired to trading platforms, not just the grid
Finnish optimiser Capalo AI has taken on route-to-market and trading for two of Danish developer European Energy’s Baltic solar-plus-storage parks, according to pv magazine: the 78.5MW solar, 25MW/65MWh Anykššiai park in Lithuania (online since June and market-prequalified in August) and the 65.7MW solar, 46MW/105MWh Saldus park in Latvia, still under construction. Capalo will trade the assets across day-ahead, intraday and balancing markets, run coordinated dispatch of the solar and battery as a single flexible unit, and act as balance responsible party. The company says it now manages 1.6GW of batteries and 460MWp of solar on its Zeus platform, with 600MW and 300MWp of that already live.
The deal did not land in isolation. Energy-Storage.news’s Central and Eastern European roundup the next day captured the wider flurry: Greenvolt secured a €218 million UniCredit package for two 200MW/800MWh batteries in Poland (Entrix optimising), developer Elesela reached financial close on a 20MWh project in Klaipėda, Lithuania, and GEN-I lined up an EPC for a 55MW/220MWh battery in Romania. Since synchronising with continental Europe, the Baltic states run a common regional balancing market, and Lithuania has become one of the region’s most active storage markets, with government support approved for up to around 1.7GW/4GWh of new capacity.
What this means if you own or manage Baltic or Nordic assets: the megawatts are the easy part now. The revenue lives in how you route them. Three things worth doing.
First, sort your route to market before commercial operation, not after. Prequalification, balancing-group setup and a balance responsible party all take lead time, and an asset that is built but not prequalified earns nothing.
Second, treat co-located solar and storage as one dispatchable unit, not two line items. Shared dispatch across generation and storage is where the extra value sits.
Third, design for several markets at once. Single-market revenue, especially in ancillary services, is the first to compress as more batteries prequalify.
This is our day job at Fusebox. We integrate and dispatch BESS, PV, EV chargers, HVAC systems and C&I loads on one platform, across 15 European markets and 9 TSOs. If you are bringing a Baltic or Nordic hybrid online, let’s talk about the route to market before the ribbon-cutting.
Talk to Fusebox about your route to market →
2. The grid is the bottleneck, so batteries are taking congestion-shaped connections
Return reached financial close on its 200MW/800MWh Sirius battery in Winschoten, Groningen, on the back of a long-term fixed-price toll with Vattenfall that helped anchor a €400 million debt package from ING, NatWest, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO and Rabobank, Energy-Storage.news reported. The detail that matters for asset owners is the connection. Sirius will link to TenneT’s grid under a time-dependent transport rights (TDTR) agreement, a flexible connection similar to Germany’s flexible connection agreements. It adjusts when it charges and discharges based on how much grid capacity is free at the time, accepting some operational limits in exchange for connecting inside existing constraints and helping relieve congestion. Commercial operation is due in the fourth quarter of 2027.
The backdrop, set out in a survey of the Dutch market by The Global Economics, is a grid that has run out of room. Regional operator Enexis alone reported more than 10,000 business requests waiting for a new or upgraded connection. The Dutch coalition agreement for 2026 to 2030 now proposes a Grid Congestion Crisis Act and leans on flexible contracts, tariff incentives and shared energy hubs, turning the ability to shift load into something with a price. In Germany, developers are pushing back on the trade-offs, arguing that restricted, non-firm access should come with a matching cut to the BKZ connection-cost fee, as developer Kyon Energy put it.
For BESS developers and C&I sites stuck in a connection queue, the takeaway is practical. A firm connection can be years away. A curtailable or time-limited one can put an asset to work much sooner, if your control stack can live inside the limits and still capture the good hours. That is a dispatch problem, and it is solvable. If you want to sanity-check whether a flexible connection pencils out for a site, our knowledge bot at fusie.fusebox.energy is a quick first stop, and then let’s get specific.
Talk to Fusebox about connecting under congestion →
Regulatory and market watch
- Germany’s first capacity market auction under the StromVKG closes for bids on 8 September, covering 4.5GW of 15-year contracts, though the 10-hour duration rule leaves batteries largely shut out of this first round (Energy-Storage.news, Enerdata).
- Italy’s second MACSE storage auction: qualification data is due to Terna by 10 September, the pre-auction guarantee by 20 October, and the 16GWh auction runs on 24 November (Timera Energy, DLA Piper).
- Baltic balancing review: Elering, AST and Litgrid are due to submit their annual analysis of balancing-services provision, including demand-reduction reserves, to the Baltic regulators during the third quarter of 2026 (Elering).
- Nordic aFRR energy activation market: the TSOs have published the market-participant implementation guide ahead of go-live in Sweden and Norway (Nordic Balancing Model).
- EU network code on demand response: still with the European Commission after ACER’s March 2025 submission, while national non-fossil flexibility targets from the flexibility needs assessments are due by January 2027 (ACER).
