Utility and power generation firm RWE will trade 50MW/100MWh of BESS capacity in Germany from the virtual aggregation platform of startup Terralayr under a five-year agreement.
The two companies have entered into a five-year tolling deal starting from 2026 for the battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity spread across several projects in the control area of transmission system operator (TSO) 50Hertz.
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The projects are aggregated into a virtual battery via Terralayr’s flexibility platform, which offers storage capacity virtually rather than tied to a specific single project. RWE will pay Terralayr a fixed annual fee for the capacity in return for taking control of the BESS capacity’s activity in the energy market.
The approach is designed to open up the security of fixed revenues to smaller projects that may struggle to secure single-site tolls, as well as offer a wider array of options to those seeking to procure flexibility. Spreading the toll across projects also reduces operational risk.
Terralayr CEO Philipp Man and VP strategy and commercial Mikko Preuss discussed the platform in an interview with ESN Premium in January this year. It is the second big-name company to procure capacity from the firm, after Swedish state-owned power generation and trading company Vattenfall.
Commenting on the RWE deal, Preuss said: “We offer customers storage capacity, providing all the advantages of a physical battery storage system without them having to manage the physical systems themselves.”
Preuss will be speaking on a panel on Day One of next week’s inaugural Energy Storage Summit Germany in Stuttgart (3-5 June), as will his colleague Valerie Mahar, VP asset development, on Day Three.
Bart Beljaars, head of commercial asset optimisation for Continental Europe at RWE, commented: “Batteries are becoming increasingly important for a stable energy supply, and Terralayr’s virtual battery is a perfect complement to our rapidly growing portfolio of batteries and generation assets. By working with Terralayr, we can utilise the flexibility of both RWE and customer batteries more effectively.”
RWE is a major deployer of renewables and storage alongside its legacy coal and gas portfolio, with 1.2GW of BESS operational worldwide. It recently commissioned large-scale BESS projects in Germany and the Netherlands, while in the US the past six months has seen it break ground on 900MWh of Texas BESS, propose a 200MW system in Colorado and pilot a novel nickel-hydrogen battery technology.
