236. The Bankability of Energy Storage (Solar Power Summit) - Jul26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

**Gerard Reid** (0:11)
Today on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about the bankability of battery storage investments. And the podcast is based on a panel discussion that Laurent was involved in at SolarPower Europe's event in Brussels in May, 2026
Yeah, actually, Laurent, if I remember, you were with Fredrik Sandberg and Hanna Kunzmann. Fredrik is from RWE and Hanna is from EQT. And a really interesting discussion in and around, as I said, batteries, stationery storage, and what's going on there.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:42)
Yeah, and also a lot of conversation around revenue models, around regulation, around technology. So we thank SolarPower Europe for organizing all this. Well, Borger, a wonderful team.
And it's probably time to listen to the conversation.

**Gerard Reid** (1:00)
Bring it on.

**Laurent Segalen** (1:01)
Welcome to this panel. So we're in Brussels. It's SolarPower Europe. And I have the privilege to chair a great conversation around bankability of storage project. My name is Laurent Segalen. You might know my voice because I'm the co-host of the Redefining Energy podcast. I have the privilege to introduce my guest, two heavyweights of the storage industry, Fredrik Andrén Sandberg from RWE and Hanna Kunzmann from EQT. RWE is investing $10 billion for storage and flexible assets over the next five years and to expand to 6 gigawatts, and that is 25% of their overall capex.
As for EQT, a Swedish investment fund, they have a $20 billion infrastructure, a 6-fund to scale massive development, and they have a pipeline of 16 gigawatt of storage. So please welcome our guests.
We have decided to slice the conversation around four main topics of bankability. The first one is gonna be about the technology. The second one about revenue models monetization. The third one about regulation, and the fourth, if we have time, around the digital layer. So the first question I'm gonna ask, technology. What do you like as technology to invest in? What is bankable?

**Fredrik Andrén Sandberg** (2:39)
Thank you so much for bringing us to this panel. I also find it interesting how integrated we are in Europe. We have a German person working for a Swedish company, and then a Swedish person working for a German company. It also shows how well Europe is working in that moment.
When I look at the technology, we do actually see storage to be quite mature. So I mean, we do have foreseeable how they degrade and so on. So I think the main problem is not the technology at the moment, as long as it can be insured, and we have the revenue certainty, then I think it's definitely bankable. And I mean, as we also see how the energy landscapes is developing in Europe, storage is simply needed. We see that with the large scale, the lot of renewables, which is not needed for energy security and other reasons, we simply need storage to back this up. We need storage of flexblaster to make sure that we can actually integrate the renewables that we so desperately need to build.

**Hanna Kunzmann** (3:29)
I agree. For us, we understand the technology to be broadly proven and to be modelable and what an investor at the end of the day wants and needs is that certainty of long-term revenue contribution and also the certainty of operation, insurability, bankability.
What we see, and this is all going a bit outside of the topic of lithium iron or not lithium iron, is we see an immense shift towards longer duration where we still see the supply chain and the economics developing over time. I mean, we think that the very markets becoming more and more crowded by markets. We saw the same in the UK, we see the same happening in Germany. We see a shift in our portfolios from a one to a two, to a two to a four and ultimately an eight hour battery, where we just need to also have more commercialization options come intact with the need that we see from the market. Also quite frankly, if we are all seeking to transition to a green future, that is what we require. In order to get to base load, we will require longer duration storage and that needs to be economic and make sense on an off-terrace strategy and a technology perspective as well.

**Laurent Segalen** (4:35)
Yeah, because one of the issues that the battery has is a lot of the professional come from the wind and solar universe with a type of mindset, like, OK, you put the asset, OK, maybe you're going to change your gearbox once every never or blade or you're going to clean your solar panel once in a while. But the battery is a different animal. It's every day you need to every hour, every minute you need to check what's going on. So there is this evolution that we're seeing in the management of batteries. The bankability is not just at FID. It's the bankability along the life of the battery. And unfortunately, we see that those equipment, which are 10 years old, I've got a 10 years old solar farm, so OK, fine.