264 battery containers, 1.4GWh, constructed and maintained by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) (300750). The German Albatross energy storage project has completed financing of EUR 260 million (approximately CNY 1.936 billion).
CATL: Secures 1.4GWh Energy Storage EPC Agreement
It is understood that this is GIGA Storage's first utility-scale energy storage station in Germany. GIGA Storage currently has a total of 1.4 GW/5.6GWh in energy storage projects under construction. The project is located in Lower Saxony, Germany. It was announced in early October that the project was ready for groundbreaking; however, the start date has been postponed to early 2027, and the commissioning time has been extended from the originally planned 2028 to early 2029. The grid connection agreement with Amprion has also been signed.
The institutions participating in this round of financing include seven banks: ABN AMRO, Hamburg Commercial Bank, ING, Rabobank, Siemens Financial Services via Siemens Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), and Société Générale.
The project scale is 350MW/1400MWh, equivalent to the daily electricity consumption of approximately 193,000 German households. Key equipment includes 264 battery containers, 96 medium-voltage transformers, and 2 high-voltage transformers. According to GIGA Storage, CATL will be responsible for the engineering design, construction, and maintenance of this energy storage station, collaborating with multiple European subcontractors.
This marks a rare instance where CATL directly enters a European energy storage project as an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contractor (covering engineering design, construction, and operation & maintenance). This signifies that CATL possesses not only product capabilities in batteries and systems but also comprehensive abilities in engineering delivery, O&M services, and localization.
How to Achieve Top-Tier Bankability?
Given CATL's recent consecutive AAA rating for energy storage bankability from PV Tech, it is easy to understand why CATL secured this 1.4GWh energy storage EPC agreement.
Currently, bankability has gradually become a key indicator for evaluating suppliers of large-scale global energy storage projects. Energy storage bankability is not determined by a single product metric but depends on the assessment of the supplier's overall strength. CATL has reached the highest industry standards across multiple indicators, including project performance, financial health, energy storage shipments, manufacturing scale, and overseas capacity layout. Specifically:
System Operational Capability: CATL has implemented over 3,000 energy storage projects globally, with actual operational system reliability exceeding 99%. Cross-regional project experience has validated its system application and execution capabilities. Ren Feng, CEO of HGLASER Energy, stated that although their equipment investment is 3%–4% higher, if eight metrics strongly correlated with IRR are each 5 percentage points higher than competitors, the cumulative effect exceeds 47%, impacting returns exponentially.
Manufacturing and Delivery Capabilities: Reports assign CATL a maximum score of 10 for manufacturing capability and 8.9 for financial status. Its capacity utilization rate exceeded 90% in both 2025 and the first half of 2026. The Debrecen factory in Hungary started cell production on September 22, 2026, with the first two production lines in trial operation, planning for a capacity of100GWh; a 15GWh joint venture factory in Indonesia is under construction.
Systematic Empirical Validation: In May 2026, the Xiamen Empirical Energy Storage Research Institute was launched. It has conducted systematic empirical validation on 32 global projects, involving a station capacity of over 16GWh.
LTSA (Long-Term Service Agreement): CATL uses LTSAs to guarantee operational metrics such as station capacity and stability, transferring developer risks into contractual obligations for the supplier. A typical case is the Australian Supernode project exceeding 3GWh, where CATL signed a full-cycle LTSA as the exclusive system supplier. The three-phase project successfully closed financing of AUD 469 million, with cumulative financing reaching approximately AUD 1.2 billion.
For energy storage project owners, adopting products from highly rated energy storage system suppliers provides stronger grounds for financing their projects. This may also be one of the important reasons why the aforementioned GIGA Storage German energy storage project secured financing.
In the view of financial institutions, recognition of the supplier's operational and fulfillment capabilities facilitates risk communication between project parties and financial institutions; stable manufacturing and delivery capabilities relate to whether the project can be built according to plan; and the long-term reliability of system operations affects revenue calculations over the entire project lifecycle.
Currently, the large-scale energy storage industry is transitioning from "supply chain competition" to "system capability competition." Going global with large-scale energy storage is not just about shipping a set of systems overseas, but ensuring they operate stably for the long term within local grids, engineering, finance, insurance, and O&M systems. Transforming equipment capabilities into true financing credibility and asset certainty will be the key to the next round of competition in energy storage globalization.
Note: The content of this article is merely a compilation of public information, industrial research, and objective analysis of the energy storage industry. Listed companies mentioned herein serve only as reference cases within the industrial chain and do not constitute any basis for investment. There are risks in the market; invest with caution.