People:
Thomas' LinkedIn
Max' LinkedIn
Keywords: BESS, Terra One, Project Finance, Merchant Storage, Day-Ahead Swap, Flexible Connection Agreements, Energy Transition
Summary:Thomas Antonioli is the Co-Founder and CFO of Terra One, a Berlin-based company that develops, builds, finances and trades its own grid-scale batteries. A banker by training, he spent the first five years of his career in London financing ports, airports and motorways, then moved into startups: first at the consumer lender Kreditech in Hamburg, then for six years as CFO of Grover, which he helped scale from a 30-person seed-stage company to around 800 people, raising 1.5 billion in equity and debt and reaching unicorn status. Terra One covers the full value chain, from greenfield development and in-house EPC management to project finance and its own route-to-market platform OneKraftwerk, with balancing groups across all German TSOs, exchange memberships at EPEX and Nord Pool and prequalification for ancillary services. Its first battery has been live since the beginning of 2026, further projects are under construction, a 350 MW / 1.4 GWh high-voltage portfolio is heading into project financing, and in 2025 the company secured €150m of holdco financing from Aviva Investors.
In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about how a long email from his co-founder Tony Schumacher, read on a beach in Hawaii, turned a fintech CFO into a battery founder, why Terra One runs project development like a SaaS sales funnel and calls itself a technology company with some assets, and why it built its own trading platform with one of OpenAI's earliest employees instead of hiring an optimiser. Thomas explains where the Aviva holdco loan sits in the capital stack, why the same banks that are cautious on merchant batteries in Germany finance them in the UK, how a day-ahead swap hedges spread compression without giving up dispatch control, and why uptime mattered more than the algorithm in the first year of operations. We also cover flexible connection agreements that cost between 2 and 17 percent of revenue, including one that makes the battery track every wind and solar plant within 20 km, why a restricted connection should come with a lower Baukostenzuschuss, why green co-location on existing solar parks finally works with the latest revenue curves, why Poland is the next market, and which range he puts on the gigawatts of utility-scale storage live in Germany at the end of 2030.
