TotalEnergies Building 75MWh Battery at Antwerp Refinery

French energy giant TotalEnergies has launched a battery farm project for energy storage at its Antwerp refinery in Belgium.

The battery farm project will have a power rating of 25 MW and a capacity of 75 MWh, equivalent to the daily consumption of close to 10,000 households, TotalEnergies highlighted. After commissioning four battery parks in France offering a total energy storage capacity of 130 MWh, this project will be TotalEnergies’ largest battery installation in Europe.

According to TotalEnergies, the batteries – 40 Intensium Max High Energy lithium-ion containers – will be supplied by Saft, the French company’s battery subsidiary. TotalEnergies said that the installation will help meet the needs of the European and Belgian high-voltage transmission network and that the project would be operational by the end of 2024.

This battery farm project, TotalEnergies believes, will smooth power fluctuations in the national grid daily, particularly during peak winter periods, as well as guarantee grid security by participating actively in the national grid’s reserve services. It should also allow more renewable electricity to be integrated into the grid, TotalEnergies pointed out.

The company added that this storage project would compensate for any intermittency introduced by renewable energies and thus enable their development. Batteries are an effective response to the growing need for grid balancing, TotalEnergies said, adding that they can be deployed quickly, have a limited footprint, and have high reactivity. As a result, they can help meet the new challenges facing power grids today, the company noted.

This project, located on the Antwerp refinery site, will benefit from the available land and the site’s grid connection, TotalEnergies said. It is a new step in TotalEnergies’ development of battery energy storage systems (BESS), strengthening the company’s presence across the entire electricity value chain in Belgium (production, storage, supply), it added.

“This first storage project in Belgium – our largest in Europe – will help ensure the stability of the Belgian and European grids to allow for greater development of renewable energies. It fits in perfectly with the multi-energy strategy of TotalEnergies. Backed by Saft’s battery energy storage system expertise, TotalEnergies intends to deploy storage solutions – notably in countries where we are actively developing renewable energies. With its energy storage solutions, TotalEnergies supports the growth of renewable energy production in the European energy mix,” said Olivier Jouny, SVP of Integrated Power at TotalEnergies.

The Antwerp refinery is situated in the city’s port area, in the Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam hub serving Europe’s oil markets. The site comprises Europe’s third-largest refinery, which processes 338,000 barrels of oil per day, a petrochemical plant, and a facility that produces polymers, with a capacity of 1.1 million tons per year of ethylene, according to TotalEnergies.

In 2013, TotalEnergies invested more than EUR 1 billion to upgrade the Antwerp complex, and work on the upgrades was completed in 2017.

As an electricity supplier in Belgium, TotalEnergies has a portfolio of 450,000 BtC sites and around 100,000 BtB sites. To supply them with energy, TotalEnergies relies mostly on the 430 MW Marchienne- au-Pont CCGT power plant, the 140 MW Plate-Taille hydroelectric dam, and a 300 MW wind farm located in the Belgian waters of the North Sea. TotalEnergies is also developing solar and onshore wind projects, with a portfolio of 300 MW.

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