Project development and land acquisition for battery storage and grid
Battery storage project development: we find suitable sites, assess potential and handle land acquisition for storage and grid projects.
Sustainable and successful energy projects result from careful, efficient and cost-effective project development. We identify suitable sites for your battery storage system, assess the potential and take care of land acquisition. In doing so we always look at the whole energy system: generation, storage and grid integration.
Battery storage project development follows different criteria in site selection than generation plants. First and foremost, land zoning is decisive, because a stand-alone storage system needs, depending on the federal province, suitable building land zoning or explicit permissibility, whereas a storage system at a wind or PV plant can use its site. In practice, one distinguishes stand-alone storage, storage together with a generation plant and storage at an existing consumer. A storage system at the grid connection of an existing plant uses the existing infrastructure, while a stand-alone storage system can be located more freely at the grid node. Added to this is the question of the grid level, because with connection capacity a higher grid level will generally be required, which the grid operator determines according to grid structure and capacity, and a site close to a suitable connection point saves cable length and interventions.
In battery storage project development, further siting factors arise from safety and law. Relevant are distances to buildings, neighbouring plots and other facilities, access for emergency services and a regulated fire-water supply; the draft fire protection guideline (TRVB 165) provides, depending on the fire-water supply, for about four to six metres distance to buildings and two to three metres to the property boundary. Flood discharge areas, protected areas and distances to roads restrict the choice; in Upper Austria, in addition to provincial roads, an area of eight metres must be observed in which the road administration must consent, and along motorways a building prohibition zone of 40 metres applies under the Federal Roads Act (Bundesstraßengesetz). Water law can also play a role, because fire-water extraction and fire-water retention are subject to permit or notification obligations depending on the location. Easements are needed for lines to the grid connection; if no agreement is reached with owners, they can be granted by the authority against compensation under certain statutory conditions. The space requirement itself is manageable: typical containers are the size of a shipping container, and the plant consists of several of them together with inverters and a transformer. An early check prevents a seemingly favourable site from proving non-permittable.
For landowners, leasing can bring attractive additional income. Fair and transparent contracts, experience from previous projects and early involvement of the host municipality create the basis for high local acceptance; project presentation and public relations for storage and grid accompany this dialogue. Whether a site is technically and economically suitable is shown by the feasibility study with layout plan for storage and grid. The power demand and consumption of your site are analysed by the load profile analysis for storage and grid. Once a site has emerged, coordination with the grid operator follows, which then leads into planning. For photovoltaic projects, read our project development for photovoltaics.
