Belgium Gets a 600 Megawatt-Hour Battery

EDF subsidiary Luminus has brought the Navagne battery energy storage system online at Lixhe in Belgium, in partnership with infrastructure fund I4B. The plant is rated 150 MW and 600 MWh — four hours of dispatch — with a capital cost of €160 million, or about €267 per kilowatt-hour. It comprises 132 storage containers supplied by Sungrow and connects directly to transmission operator Elia's high-voltage network. Financial close was in June 2025 and commissioning completed in September 2026.

Four hours is the detail that positions this asset. Europe's grid batteries were built overwhelmingly for frequency response — one hour or less, earning revenue from fast reserve products where the value is in responsiveness rather than volume. Those markets saturate quickly, because the total requirement for frequency containment on a synchronous area is a fixed and fairly small number, and once enough capacity has bid in, prices collapse. A four-hour asset is designed for a different job: shifting energy between the middle of the day and the evening peak, wholesale arbitrage, and capacity provision. Those markets are much larger and much less saturable.

The siting choices are also worth noting. Direct connection to the transmission network at high voltage avoids the distribution constraints that limit where large batteries can be placed, and the location adjacent to the existing Lixhe hydroelectric plant means the grid connection, the land and the site infrastructure were already there — which is the same economic logic behind co-locating batteries with solar plants, applied to an older generation of asset.

The €267 per kilowatt-hour figure is a useful benchmark for anyone comparing project economics, though it covers the full installed cost including balance of plant, grid connection and civils rather than the cells alone.

Newelec, a Luminus subsidiary, handled the distribution network construction and Re-Power performed commissioning. For a market the size of Belgium's, 600 MWh in a single asset is a substantial addition, and it lands as several European markets are discovering that their earliest storage revenue streams no longer support new build.