Germany's Largest Operating Battery Opens Near Leuna With About 500 MWh

Münch Energie has inaugurated what it calls Germany's largest operating battery storage system near Leuna in Saxony-Anhalt: 250 MW of power and about 500 MWh of storage, built in around six months without state subsidies.

What was opened

The site is at Leuna/Krumpa in the Saalekreis district, near Merseburg. It was inaugurated on 13 August 2026, according to Cleanthinking. It has five sub-units connected to several substations, with a combined installed capacity of 300 MVA, TaiyangNews reports.

The operator plans to expand it from about 500 MWh to 800 MWh in 2026. Cleanthinking says that would lengthen the full-power discharge time from about two hours to 3.2 hours. The investment was privately financed and the cost was not disclosed.

A claim worth reading carefully

Münch Energie calls it the country's largest operational battery storage facility. The state government's wording is more careful: it calls the site the largest contiguous storage cluster in operation in Germany. We could not verify the claim against a national register, so we repeat it as the operator's and the state's description.

What the battery is for

The system absorbs surplus wind and solar power, including from the public grid, and feeds it back at peak times to support the Leipzig and Halle region. Cleanthinking gives a concrete example from 5 August 2026, when wholesale prices swung from negative at midday to about €204 per MWh at 21:00. A battery charged at noon and discharged in the evening is built to capture exactly that gap.

Saxony-Anhalt's Minister President Sven Schulze attended and said large-scale storage is key to making renewable power available when needed. A researcher from Fraunhofer IEE added that new storage should be planned in as the grid expands.

Link to home storage

German households already buy home batteries in large numbers, as our Germany country guide explains. The same price swings that make a 500 MWh site worthwhile are the ones a household battery on a dynamic tariff tries to use, at a far smaller scale. A big battery does not replace a home battery, and the reverse is also true: they serve different customers.

Sources

• TaiyangNews: Germany's 'Largest' Battery Storage System Starts Operations
• Cleanthinking: Deutschlands größter Batteriespeicher läuft jetzt bei Merseburg

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