The LevelTen Asset Marketplace platform connects clean energy project developers and buyers/financiers, with the associated software, analytics and M&A transaction expertise for transactions.
Giovanni Di Pascale, CEO of Altea Green Power, said: “We are delighted to have signed this agreement, which allows us to expand our business opportunities, following a model that may not yet be common in Italy, but is widely recognized and embraced overseas.”
“The process of selling our 2GW storage projects starts in these very days on LevelTen Energy’s platform. Over the next month, we will be accepting all the offers from interested parties and aim to conclude the sale by 2023.”
The early-stage projects being sold were designed with the help of Milan-based consultancy Elemens.
The market in Italy is currently gearing up to launch construction on projects, with some players waiting for the rules around large-scale storage auctions by TSO Terna to be finalised, expected late this year. Energy-Storage.news did a deep dive into the Italian market for the most recent edition of PV Tech Power (Vol.35).
Enel Green Power, part of the large utility Enel, is the only player which has started construction on a significant pipeline, having won the bulk of contracts in Capacity Market auctions in February 2022 and fast reserve ancillary service auctions in late 2020.
‘Battery storage cannot be developed like solar’
While buying a large early-stage pipeline of projects is a route to market used by many, developer Innovo Group, which is moving towards an independent power producer (IPP) model, sounded a note of caution when being interviewed for the PV Tech Power feature.
Speaking to Energy-Storage.news back in April this year – and speaking about the market in broad terms, it should be said – the firm’s founder and CEO Rodolfo Bigolin described a problem of “too many solar developers” entering the Italian market and hastily building up big pipelines to sell.
“And the problem with that is that people are throwing around grid connection requests and they’ve secured land without the strategy, without any studies over the specific project. We believe that battery storage cannot be developed like solar. It needs much more work and analysis on every specific project,” he said.
“We’ve had half-a-gigawatt pipelines come across our desk with a point of connection of 10 or 12km, from the same people who were a year ago advising others that you can’t go beyond 2km. But they found a piece of land and are now throwing grid connections around.”
Altea Green Power has in the past signed separate development partnerships with Aer Soleir for energy storage and solar PV in Italy, covered here and by sister site PV Tech respectively.
The LevelTen platform has been used numerous times in high-profile energy storage deals, including acquisitions by Cypress Creek Renewables and Canadian Solar‘s development arm Recurrent Energy in Texas and California, respectively, in mid-2022.