Italy approved 3.7 GW of batteries in October

In the week to 3 November, Italy closed out a month in which its energy ministry authorised 3.7 GW of battery projects, a British forecaster cut the fleet it expects on the grid by 2029, and two modest projects in Spain and Germany found the counterparties they needed to get built. Permission is no longer the scarce input in a European storage project. A connection date is, and so is someone prepared to carry the market risk once the asset is live.

Italy authorised 3.7 GW of batteries in a single month

Italy's Ministry of Environment and Energy Security issued five single authorisations on 30 October covering 722.5 MW of battery capacity, taking October to 24 projects and 3.7 GW, ahead of the 3.2 GW cleared in September, according to ESS News. The largest of the five is Castra Energiae Umbriae at Castel Giorgio in Umbria, a 434.5 MW system of 340 containers at 4.472 MWh each, around 1.5 GWh in total, with roughly 17 months of construction ahead of it. The other four are all in Puglia.

The geography is lopsided. Puglia took 12 of the 24 authorisations and about 2,237 MW, which is 60.6% of the month, with six projects and some 752 MW in the province of Foggia alone, while northern Italy accounted for around 11%, or 420 MW across five projects in Piedmont, Lombardy, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Emilia-Romagna, pv magazine Italia reports. Average project size rose to about 154 MW from 125 MW in September, although the median stayed at 100 MW and half the projects are 100 MW or smaller. Where the decrees state storage capacity, durations run from about 3.5 hours at Castel Giorgio to more than 4.5 hours at Brindisi and Santa Maria La Longa. Construction schedules range from six months to 31.

A permit is not a project. The more useful detail in the Italian list is the spread of build times, and the fact that two of the northern projects, at Casei Gerola and Castelnuovo Scrivia, will connect to the same Terna substation, which makes the substation rather than the decree the thing that sets their start date. If you are holding authorisations in a cluster like that, the work now is to pin down what the connecting works require and when they land, and to decide which products your duration can actually reach on day one.

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A British forecaster cut its 2029 battery fleet by 2.9 GW

Modo Energy refreshed its British battery pipeline and on 29 October published a lower short-term build-out forecast: 17.7 GW of batteries by the end of 2029, within a range of 16.2 to 19.1 GW, and 2.9 GW below its own October release. Modo puts the change down to timing rather than to any lack of projects: connections reform pushed many projects' connection dates further out, and the firm says the projects are there while the pace of build-out is far from where it needs to be for the Clean Power 2030 storage goals. Reaching 23 GW by 2030 would take 3.4 GW a year, about 70% above the best year the market has delivered so far.

The queue is also being priced. Ofgem said on 17 September that it was minded to approve an oversubscribed technologies commitment fee for batteries, starting at £3,000 per MW and rising to a maximum of £25,000 per MW while the queue stays heavily oversubscribed, with around 90 GW of battery capacity either operational or in the reformed connections queue against a projected need of roughly 29 GW by 2035. Modo expects that fee to do little to the next few years, although it could push individual projects due after 2029 out of the queue as the securities they must post go up.

For an owner, the connection date has quietly become the most movable number in the business case, and it moves in one direction. A project that slips past 2029 in Britain carries a later revenue start and a higher cost of holding its place in the meantime. Reading your own connection offer for what it assumes, and pricing what it would cost to keep it through another slip, is a cheaper exercise now than at financial close. If you would rather start by comparing what a portfolio can earn across markets, our knowledge bot Fusie will take that question.

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Two small batteries found two very different counterparties

Three standalone batteries in Spain's Basque Country reached financial close on €50 million, a combined 55 MW and 220 MWh at Güeñes, Barakaldo and Lezama, developed by Return Energy and reported on 2 November. Technical adviser DNV, which covered design, technology selection, contracts and the main technical risks in its due diligence, calls it the largest standalone battery portfolio in Spain to reach financial close to date. None of the three sits behind renewable generation, so the lenders took their view on a four-hour portfolio earning from flexibility alone, at a size that would be a rounding error in Germany or Britain.

In Germany the same week, Uniper signed a seven-year tolling agreement with Stadtwerke Lippstadt for a planned 20 MW and 42 MWh battery at Roßfeld. Lippstädter Ladesäulen, a wholly owned subsidiary of the municipal utility, will own the battery and receive a fixed fee for granting Uniper use of it, while Uniper takes the marketing and commercial optimisation into its own trading portfolio. VENSYS Elektrotechnik supplies and maintains the modular lithium iron phosphate system, and commissioning is planned for summer 2027. The two companies already buy and sell standard energy products together, and a feasibility study on sites and economics is what led them to the tolling structure.

The two deals answer the same question in opposite ways. Spain's lenders accepted market exposure on 220 MWh; Lippstadt sold its exposure to a utility years before the battery exists. Neither route is automatic at 20 or 55 MW, because both depend on finding a counterparty willing to trade or underwrite a volume that the larger desks often skip. If you own a handful of assets, or one site behind an industrial meter, the decision to settle before the build is who bids and dispatches them, and under which balance responsibility.

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What we are watching next

• Ofgem's final decision on CMP470, the commitment fee for the battery connections queue, is still outstanding and was promised for later in 2026 (Ofgem).
• The British arithmetic to 2030: 3.4 GW of new batteries a year against a 16.2 to 19.1 GW range for the end of 2029 (Modo Energy).
• Brindisi, the 1,000 MW system authorised in October in four independent 250 MW sections and about 4.6 GWh, connects at 380 kV to a future extension of Terna's Brindisi Pignicelle substation, with around 12 months of works planned (pv magazine Italia).
• Return Energy's Basque pipeline runs well past the three financed projects, to more than 1,400 MWh and 352.6 MW (ESS News).
• Stadtwerke Lippstadt calls the Roßfeld battery a new business area for the utility, and commissioning is planned for summer 2027 (ESS News).