Greenvolt begins building 600 MW/2.4 GWh BESS in Poland
ess-news.com59 points by msalsas 5 hours ago
59 points by msalsas 5 hours ago
Poland is an interesting market for BESS right now because it's still early days. The aFRR capacity market is mostly served by coal units, and only a few hundred MW of newly operational batteries are bidding against them. PSE buys roughly 400-500 MW of aFRR in each direction, so with several GW of batteries contracted in the capacity market for 2027-2030, reserve prices are likely to fall hard within a year or two. After that it becomes a market channel optimisation problem like in GB or Germany, which is a super interesting area to work in, IMO.
2.4 gwhr is a monster of a battery.
For reference the UK has about 7gw output of battery (assuming all on at the same time. I don;t have the capacity though.) The UK is one of the more mature grid battery places in europe.
The UK has some mammooth projects in the pipeline as part of the Long Duration Energy Storage Cap-and-Floor scheme [1].
There's a 200MW/3,600MWh project which has planning permission and also a 400MW/7,200MWh proposal [2].
1. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-03/Long%20...
2. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/field-s-2...
Greenvolt Group has started construction of a 600 MW/2.4 GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Poland, with commercial operations targeted for the end of 2027.
Huge, this helps wean Poland off of coal.
and industry
Industry can electrify or sunset. “Work is hard.” The energy potential is well above the demand curve, just have to build the orchestration infrastructure (low carbon generation, batteries, transmission, district heating, flexible load demand response, etc). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in thirty minutes to power humanity for a year, the inability to harness this potential energy is the problem being solved for. It's easy to go faster: simply direct fossil fuel capital and subsidies to the technologies I enumerate above. To not go faster is a choice. We could make different choices.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/08/30/poland-coal-capacity-tr...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/
https://pyrtkoanalytics.com/poland-in-the-energy-transition-...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/12/29/poland-projected-to-r...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/fifteen_minutes
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, >3TW of solar PV has been installed globally as of this year)
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
(Poland is expected to add 3-4GW of solar per year, and has hundreds of GWs of combined wind [onshore and offshore] and solar PV potential)
> Industry can electrify or sunset
The much more realistic third option is just moving somewhere else
Tariffs to equalize if needed until electrification is complete. China is electrifying the fastest with low carbon generation. Other countries should try to keep up. Renewables and batteries are the cheapest form of firm generation in 90%+ of the world. That’s a competitive advantage. Why would you move industry to where power was not low carbon and therefore more expensive?
https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/exports-by-country (most Polish exports go to other EU countries or the US)
https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/imports-by-country
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
> Tariffs to equalize if needed until electrification is complete.
Brain dead. Corporations will simply drop the market or consumers will pay higher prices.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ economics speak for themselves. Quote the subthread in five years when most of Poland’s coal and gas generation has been phased out.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/eu-national-targets...
https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/07/how-europes-drought-expo...
Explain what it speaks?
Clearly you have no real knowledge how economy works.
How the tariffs will make ordinary business build a steel plant that closed because it was not viable?
Meanwhile the US is doubling down on fossil fuels because… reasons.
I don't know about other states, but Texas has about 18GW of BESS, already (https://www.cleanview.co/power-projects/operating/battery-st...). We're planning another ~177GW (https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2026/04/16/ERCOT-Monthly-Op...).
The BESS market is doing OK in the US. Politicians will come and go but the fundamentals of BESS are solid, so I don't see why the installed base won't keep increasing in the US.
Battery storage capacity averaged 70% growth over the last three years - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67925
> During the first six months of 2026, operators added another 8.3 GW of battery storage capacity, reaching nearly 52 GW of nameplate battery storage capacity
What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"? Do they mean gigawatt-hour? (sidenote: how scary that the DoE is the one making this error?)
> What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"?
This is the maximum amount of power it can dispatch. I think they use it intentionally so they can compare it to other generation sources.
For example this spreadsheet [1], with data for 2023, contains figures for "power capacity megawatts" and "energy capacity megawatthours".
1. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor...
This source has some useful stats on duration: https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou...
> In Q2 2026, battery energy stationary storage (BESS) installations reached 20.2 GWh
> total module manufacturing capacity to over 100 GWh.
> Storage Deployed in 2025: 57.6 GWh
Depends on who you are talking to. Battery engineers tend to talk about capacity as storage potential (energy). The rest of the energy industry (resource planners, developers, manufacturers, etc.) talk about capacity in power terms (instantaneous discharge.)
When you see people talking about Lithium-based chemistries, you'll often only see power terms because they are almost always for 2-hr projects. Nowadays you'll see more differentiation between 2-hr/4-hr/6-hr storage (and a few interesting companies doing 100-hr+).
Unpacking the headline - A 600MW project of 4-hr lithium is 2.4GWh of storage capacity. The capacity rating of this project is 600MW, the storage capacity (2.4GWh) is an ESS specific attribute.
Another important dimension to capacity is how much accredited capacity your project has. Usually projects are only given credit based on some set of historic averages of how much system load the asset actually serves (e.g. if you for some reason had a battery could only discharge at high noon every day, 200GW of this resource would in a sane world have an accredited capacity of near 0 because it's completely coincident with existing solar.)
How much faster would it go if the feds were helping things along instead of actively hindering?
The government likes to get in front of a parade and pretend they are leading it.
YMMV depending on where in the US you are. California has like 10x'd it's battery storage in a couple years, to the point where it's the main source of electricity during some time slots where we used to be dependent on natty gas.
Edit: although it looks like in recent days, fossil fuels reign supreme once the sun goes down. I guess we don't have enough batteries for the current heat wave
We have one of the world's largest BESS installations in California. Calm down.
Not really. The market is still moving quickly towards renewables. It's only some conservative politicians in the US that are making noise about fossil fuels, not the market.
The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development.
The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals. That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
> The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals.
I was unaware car makers were part of the energy supply industry.
> That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
Most car makers are creating more and more electric cars, some makers are committing to 100% electric soon. Increasingly energy efficient ICE cars take engineering time and money to make, money they'd rather not spend. By not making them spend it, they won't. They'd do the same for safety features if we let them.
And none of that results my core statement which is the energy supply market (and you knew that's what I was talking about because that's literally the topic) is still moving to renewables. More renewables come online every month.
Paying a wind company billions of dollars in damages is basically a wash, they spend that on another installation.
Show me where any politician on either side has made a real impact on any of these charts: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...
The US is switching to cleaner (coal -> gas) energy, renewables (solar and wind), and BESS almost entirely because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative.
Which battery technology and where are the sourcing it?
These ones are from BYD, however Poland is constructing another, smaller BESS in parallel where the batteries will be supplied by LG Energy Solution and manufactured near Wrocław, Poland.
The article says the batteries are sourced from BYD, and it's likely lithium iron phosphate batteries.
Article doesn't mention but says the company is BYD Energy Storage which apparenly uses Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery technology (specifically, Lithium Iron Phosphate / LiFePO₄
> BYD Energy Storage will supply the battery technology.
third sentence...