Q Energy builds large battery storage facility in France

The project developer Q Energy has started to build a large energy storage facility. The project, called Merbette, is being built on the site of the Emile Huchet power plant in Saint-Avold. The site of the coal-fired power plant in the small northern French town between Metz and Saarbrücken offers enough space for the 24 battery containers that will house batteries with a total capacity of 44 megawatt hours.

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With an output of 35 megawatts, the plant can push this stored electricity back into the grid. This means that the new battery storage system can take over the power supply for 10,000 people in France for one day.

Decarbonising the energy mix

The project is part of a comprehensive plan by the operator Gazel Energie to make the previously purely fossil-fuelled power plants greener. This is because the storage power plant facilitates the integration of renewable energies into the power grid and thus supports the decarbonisation of the energy mix. In the medium term, its importance for stabilising the power grid and reducing electricity price fluctuations will also grow.

One gigawatt of storage projects in the pipeline

Battery storage systems as stand-alone solutions or integrated into hybrid power plants are crucial building blocks of the energy transition and important for grid operators and electricity suppliers as well as for consumers. The integration of storage systems into wind power and solar projects is therefore one of Q Energy's strategic growth areas, the company says.

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"Merbette is the first of numerous energy storage projects that Q Energy is advancing. Our development pipeline currently includes more than One Gigawatt of battery storage system projects across Europe. 400 megawatts of these will be in France alone," says Sang Chull Chung, Managing Director of Q Energy. (su/mfo)