Prior to financial close, Giga finalised all key project conditions, including permits, land contracts and supplier contracts. The world’s largest lithium-ion OEM, CATL, is responsible for the engineering, construction and maintenance of the BESS project and will work with several European subcontractors. Image: Giga Storage

Owner-operator Giga Storage has finalised financing for the construction of its 350MW/1,400MWh Albatross energy storage project near Neuenkirchen in Lower Saxony, Germany.

Announced 26 October, Giga Storage received a €260 million (US$290 million) debt financing package for the battery energy storage system (BESS) project from international banks ABN AMRO, Hamburg Commercial Bank, ING, Rabobank, Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank, SMBC and Société Générale.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news earlier this month, Albatross is strategically sited near the village of Neuenkirchen in Lower Saxony, close to Germany’s North Sea coast, an area that hosts around 9.2GW of offshore wind generation. The BESS will connect to the high-voltage grid via transmission system operator Amprion’s adjacent 380kV Merzen substation.

The Merzen substation has recently been upgraded, and Albatross sits between two existing HVDC power lines that carry electricity to Germany’s southern demand centres. The region is also home to Conneforde–Cloppenburg–Merzen, a two-year transmission upgrade project that will add 60km of line, channelling locally generated renewable energy to urban and industrial consumers.

Prior to financial close, Giga finalised all key project conditions, including permits, land contracts and supplier contracts. The world’s largest lithium-ion OEM, CATL, is responsible for the engineering, construction and maintenance of the BESS project and will work with several European subcontractors.

With Albatross, Netherlands-headquartered Giga Storage makes its debut in the German BESS market, extending a footprint that began closer to home with Giga Rhino, a 7.5MWh project in the Netherlands backed partly by crowdfunding.

Since then, the developer has moved into territory that breaks new ground for scale in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Among its flagship schemes are the 300MW/1,200MWh Giga Leopard project in Groningen, which secured financing last June, and the 2.8GWh Green Turtle project in Belgium, where building work started in September following an order for Tesla’s Megapack 3 batteries.

Giga Storage itself came under the ownership of Paris-based infrastructure investor InfraVia Capital Partners in 2024. According to CEO Kevin Dijkers, that investment was a key enabler of the company’s push beyond its home markets at the point when the project was first acquired.