BESSt of BESS

People:Thomas' LinkedInMax' LinkedInKeywords: BESS, Terra One, Project Finance, Merchant Storage, Day-Ahead Swap, Flexible Connection Agreements, Energy TransitionSummary:Thomas Antonioli is the Co-Founder and CFO of Terra One, a Berlin-based company that develops, builds, finances and trades its own grid-scale batteries. A banker by training, he spent the first five years of his career in London financing ports, airports and motorways, then moved into startups: first at the consumer lender Kreditech in Hamburg, then for six years as CFO of Grover, which he helped scale from a 30-person seed-stage company to around 800 people, raising 1.5 billion in equity and debt and reaching unicorn status. Terra One covers the full value chain, from greenfield development and in-house EPC management to project finance and its own route-to-market platform OneKraftwerk, with balancing groups across all German TSOs, exchange memberships at EPEX and Nord Pool and prequalification for ancillary services. Its first battery has been live since the beginning of 2026, further projects are under construction, a 350 MW / 1.4 GWh high-voltage portfolio is heading into project financing, and in 2025 the company secured €150m of holdco financing from Aviva Investors.In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about how a long email from his co-founder Tony Schumacher, read on a beach in Hawaii, turned a fintech CFO into a battery founder, why Terra One runs project development like a SaaS sales funnel and calls itself a technology company with some assets, and why it built its own trading platform with one of OpenAI's earliest employees instead of hiring an optimiser. Thomas explains where the Aviva holdco loan sits in the capital stack, why the same banks that are cautious on merchant batteries in Germany finance them in the UK, how a day-ahead swap hedges spread compression without giving up dispatch control, and why uptime mattered more than the algorithm in the first year of operations. We also cover flexible connection agreements that cost between 2 and 17 percent of revenue, including one that makes the battery track every wind and solar plant within 20 km, why a restricted connection should come with a lower Baukostenzuschuss, why green co-location on existing solar parks finally works with the latest revenue curves, why Poland is the next market, and which range he puts on the gigawatts of utility-scale storage live in Germany at the end of 2030.

People:Stephan's LinkedInMax' LinkedInKeywords: TWAICE, Battery Analytics, BESS Performance, Warranty Tracking, Battery Safety, Energy TransitionSummary:Dr. Stephan Rohr is co-founder and co-CEO of TWAICE, the Munich based battery analytics company he spun out of the Technical University of Munich in 2018 together with Dr. Michael Baumann. His path into batteries started with mechanical engineering at TUM, a short stint in management consulting on two early battery projects in 2012 and 2013, and then a PhD at the Institute of Automotive Technology from 2014 to 2018, where he built a 200 kWh grid storage system module by module and designed its cooling system himself. Back then a kilowatt hour cost 1,200 to 1,500 euros and the battery hall at Intersolar was empty. Today TWAICE monitors around 130 utility scale BESS projects and more than 20 GWh across Europe, the US, Chile and Australia, including a recently connected 2.7 GWh site in the US.In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about why almost everything the industry believes about battery degradation is pointing at the wrong problem. Stephan walks us through the EPRI incident data his team worked with, where only 10 percent of storage incidents originate in the cell while 45 percent come from controls and another 45 percent from balance of plant, and explains why systems that look perfectly available often deliver just 92 percent of their usable energy, which is hundreds of thousands of euros per year on a merchant asset and an asymmetric penalty risk under a tolling agreement. We cover what independent analytics actually does during commissioning and site acceptance, how continuous warranty tracking holds integrators accountable when every LTSA looks different, why insurers are starting to treat an independent analytics layer as a risk mitigation measure, what the Powin bankruptcy did to owners with stranded assets in the US, and what sodium ion cells and their flat open circuit voltage curve will change for state of charge estimation. At the end Stephan places his bet on how much utility scale storage Germany will actually have online on 31 December 2030, and his number sits well above what the registered project pipeline suggests today.

People:Steffen's LinkedIn⁠Max' LinkedIn⁠Keywords: BESS, Entrix, Optimization, MACSE, Tolling, Grid Fees, Energy TransitionSummary:Steffen Schülzchen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Entrix, an energy trader and market leader for trading flexible energy systems in Europe, and the first guest to ever come back on this show. Beyond AI-powered trading, Entrix provides innovative solutions for long-term revenue security and grid-supportive battery operation, supporting clients throughout every project phase with a full-service package: from technical design and integration, to continuous optimization, all the way to 24/7 operational support. With more than 3 GW and 8.5 GWh as well as 70 battery storage assets under contract, the company is active in Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain and Portugal, with offices in Munich, Warsaw, Milan and Madrid. Entrix has been pioneering battery optimization in Germany by managing one of the country's first large-scale storage projects, and is now the trusted partner of leading infrastructure players such as Encavis, MEAG (Munich Re), as well as a wide range of local utilities.In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about what a year has done to the European storage markets, starting with why Italy's first MACSE auction is de-facto full tolling with Terna rather than a capacity market, and whether developers bid themselves into the ground at €13,000 per MWh and four times oversubscription. Steffen explains why the capacity markets in Poland, Germany and Spain are better understood as a government-backed floor than as a business case, how tolling, floors and day-ahead swaps are increasingly being blended into a single project, and why Deutsche Bahn of all parties ends up on the other side of such a structure. We also cover Entrix's first live assets in Poland and a 1.3 GWh portfolio there, Germany's record buildout and the AgNes grid fee reform with its FID cut-off, why he considers €5 per kilowatt per year survivable but dynamic grid fees the far bigger opportunity, why he is still not worried about cannibalization in a market that cleared at minus 499.99 €/MWh this year, and which exact number he puts on the gigawatts of utility-scale storage live in Germany on 31 December 2030.

People:Marek's LinkedInMax' LinkedInKeywords: BESS, Fluence, Sodium-Ion, Saudi Arabia, Energy TransitionSummary:Marek Kubik was part of the founding team of Fluence, one of the biggest BESS companies in the world, and has been in grid-scale storage since 2009, for practically as long as the industry itself has existed. His journey started at AES, where he delivered one of the world's first commercial battery projects at a coal power station in Northern Ireland, before scaling Fluence from a small Amsterdam office through hypergrowth to its Nasdaq IPO. Today he is building renewable mega-projects in Saudi Arabia.In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about why the first grid-scale batteries had nothing to do with renewables, and how ancillary services, pioneering showroom projects and regulatory groundwork turned BESS into a commercial business. Marek also weighs in on how quickly sodium-ion will really become cost-competitive, why Europe may already have lost the battery manufacturing race to China and the US, and how Saudi Arabia went from zero to 18 GWh of grid-connected BESS in a single year.

Personen:Laura's LinkedInMax' LinkedInKeywords:BESS, GridCog, Colocation, Flexible Netzanschlüsse (FCA), EnergiewendeSummary:Laura Hoffmann-Ostenhof leitet als Central Europe Lead das Industrieteam von GridCog und ist damit die Schnittstelle zwischen Energiebranche und Produkt. GridCog ist eine Simulationssoftware für Energieprojekte, die aus dem Behind-the-Meter-Markt in Australien kommt und heute von London aus auch die komplexen Front-of-Meter- und Colocation-Projekte im deutschen Markt abbildet.In der Folge von „BESSt of BESS" sprechen wir darüber, warum viele der Curves, die heute in Business Cases stecken, die physische Realität eines Projekts gar nicht abbilden – und wie man Colocation, flexible Netzanschlüsse (FCA), Degradation und Availability richtig modelliert. Außerdem ordnet Laura ein, welchen Einfluss der Wechsel vom EEG hin zum doppelseitigen CfD auf den Battery Case hat, wie weit verschiedene Märkte (UK, Australien, Spanien, Deutschland) tatsächlich sind – und wie viele Gigawatt Großspeicher 2030 wirklich am deutschen Netz hängen.