Deutsche Bahn secures battery storage from Iqony
From 2026, the “Steady Green Energy” battery storage system will make Deutsche Bahn’s power supply even more flexible and greener (Figure 1). To this end, the group subsidiary DB Energie and the energy company Iqony GmbH, Essen/Germany, have concluded a Power Storage Agreement (PSA). Both companies agreed on a contract under which DB Energie will use 35 MW of the approximately 50 MW battery storage system for five years. The plant will be built at the Duisburg-Walsum power plant site of the Steag Iqony Group and is expected to go into operation in May 2026. In the future, it will help to enable the further integration of renewables such as wind and solar energy, thus addressing one of the biggest challenges of the energy transition.
“It is a four-hour storage system that can store a total of around 200 MWh of green electricity and provide it as needed,” explains Christian Karalis, co-head of Business Development and responsible for the battery storage project at Iqony. With this facility, Iqony is a pioneer in Germany and also one of the first movers in Europe: “Iqony offers partners with customised Power Storage Agreements (PSA) the opportunity for the first time to contract storage capacity for their portfolio without having to own the assets themselves. We are also responding to the emerging demand for longer storage periods, which are particularly aimed at optimising green portfolios. Typically, storage in the German market currently only has two hours of capacity,” says Karalis. In the future, Iqony also has battery storage projects in preparation at other power plant sites of the Steag Iqony Group.
“Deutsche Bahn will be carbon neutral by 2040. A key lever in achieving this is to increase the share of renewable energies in rail power. This is currently 68 %. But trains also have to run when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Iqony’s battery storage system can store surplus electricity from renewables and feed it into the grid when needed. With our share of 140 MWh, electricity for around 3 M km travelled by the ICE can be stored each year. This flexibly usable storage system helps DB to make the power supply for the railways even more sustainable and is another important step on the road to a climate-neutral DB, thus contributing to the implementation of the energy transition throughout Germany,” says Florian Reuter, CEO of DB Energie.
The project is not only innovative in technical terms, but the agreement concluded between the partners as a whole is also forward-looking. Until now, companies had to construct and operate battery storage systems themselves and also bear the financial risks. The PSA as a new contractual construct allows the competencies and needs of the participating companies to be utilised to the mutual advantage of both sides. The market for battery storage is currently in the ramp-up phase but will play an important role in DB’s energy supply in the coming years. “As with our previous green power purchase agreements, I am pleased that DB Energie is now also helping to advance the urgently needed expansion of battery storage in Germany with its commitment,” says Reuter.
“As the leading provider of large-scale battery storage in Germany, we are very pleased about the cooperation with Iqony and about the forward-looking use of the storage facility by DB Energie,” says Markus Meyer, managing director of Fluence Energy GmbH. (Iqony/Si.)
