NFOŚ grant submitted but not awarded
Development market of RES in Poland has settled into a comfortable chaos. What never stops surprising me is the appetite for poor projects and half-baked strategies. That said, the volume of BESS assets currently on sale is not surprising at all. The NFOŚ BESS grant results help put a number on the market's actual depth.
Investors submitted close to 10 GW and walked away with around 3 GW. The pattern becomes clearer when you look at where the rejections landed.
Pomorskie had 5 entities that submitted 8 projects averaging 221 MW each, serious capital by any measure, and nearly all of it was turned away. Zachodniopomorskie had zero winning investor bids despite being potentially the most under-invested region relative to curtailment exposure. Meanwhile Podlaskie barely attracted any submissions at all, yet the system need is there.
The selection logic prioritized project readiness which is a legitimate criterion. But when the regions with the strongest curtailment case lose nearly everything they submitted and regions with potentially much lower system benefit absorb most of the awarded capacity, it raises a fair question for the next round: should grid alignment carry more weight in the scoring methodology?
And again, this looks like a market of a few large institutional bets. The rest is scattered.
Many good discussions are currently underway around BESS, its revenue streams etc. but generally it all comes back to pipelines and whether they were structured properly to mitigate risks and bulletproof the assumptions. Does your development team plan with your investment team?