It comes a week after the Energy Storage Summit at the Battery Show Europe, hosted by Energy-Storage.news publisher Solar Media and co-located with parent company Informa’s The Battery Show Europe in Stuttgart, Germany. See all our content related to that event here.
Energy-Storage.news: Talk us through Second Foundation’s energy into deploying own-operate BESS projects?
Second foundation is at its core a trading business and, like others, it is starting to build an asset base around the trading, for multiple reasons. We didn’t buy these assets outright, but we have marketing contracts with them. We became interested in batteries and wanted to trade them, but at that point there were no batteries to trade in the same way as PV and wind through direct marketing. So we started talking to developers and decided to take a stake in one developer, work with another, and invest in their projects. But ultimately it’s about trading those assets. The best way to do that is to bring those projects to market and sell part of the assets to co-investors.
In all cases now, we still have skin in the game—we own a stake in the asset, do the trading, and handle O&M and other admin, but we have a co-investor who typically owns 50% or 80%. The ownership structure varies. We’re doing this at the moment in Germany, Czech Republic, Finland, Poland, Romania and Benelux.
