Fluence’s Q1 revenues up 50% from last year

Fluence said some extra costs were associated with the roll out of its sixth generation battery storage solution, the Fluence Cube, launched in 2020. Image: Fluence.

Fluence has reaffirmed its guidance of US$1.1 billion to US$1.3 billion revenues for the 2022 financial year, with the company’s CEO claiming expectations were exceeded in the first quarter “despite short-term headwinds”.

The energy storage technology and services provider said ongoing product shipping delays and temporary closures of customer sites are expected to be resolved sooner rather than later when issuing its Q1 2022 financial results this week.

It also highlighted that historically, a large portion of its customers’ projects come online in the peak summer months, subjecting its business to a seasonality which sees about 60% of its annual revenue recorded in the third and fourth quarters of the year. 

In the company’s fiscal Q1 2022, which ended 31 December 2021, it recorded US$175 million revenues, which was a 50% increase on the same period of 2021.

It signed contracts for 600MW of energy storage products, a 525% increase from Q1 2021, which CEO Manuel Perez Dubuc said in a conference call to discuss results was in excess of expectations for what has historically been one of the quieter periods of the year as the company said revenues are on track for the full-year guidance offered back in December. 

Fluence has also diversified into optimisation services for renewable energy as well as energy storage assets and added 250MW of contracts in the first quarter for its Fluence IQ automated bidding platform.

The 1.1GW Fluence IQ deal with AES Corporation reported this week and booked after the end of the quarter, meant targeted 2022 revenues for Fluence IQ contracts have already been achieved, the CEO pointed out. 

The company floated its IPO in October last year, which raised just under a billion dollars and valued Fluence at US$4.7 billion, but meant it immediately paid back outstanding debts of about US$100 million and paid other associated costs of the transaction. 

A net loss of US$111 million was recorded for the quarter, nearly 10 times Q1 2021’s US$12 million net loss and adjusted EBITDA US$-43 million, nearly four times the US$-11 million recorded in the same quarter of 2021.

Raw materials indices-based pricing to be introduced

Shipping delays and customer site closures resulting from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic took their toll.

Chief financial officer Dennis Fehr said that US$41 million of non-recurring expenses were incurred during the quarter, which included US$31.3 million from project charges and other costs attributable to the pandemic’s effects, as well as US$5.6 million excess shipping and other non-recurring costs. 

Some of the other losses were due to the cost of rolling out Fluence’s sixth generation energy storage products, accounting for US$13 million costs, which Fehr said meant gross profits were negative. 

The company also paid US$60 million in advance for battery equipment to secure supplies amid ongoing supply chain disruptions. 

CEO Perez Dubuc noted that inflationary pressures and raw material price increases are a “concern for many in our industry,” although Fluence’s current backlog — US$1.9 billion as of 31 December 2021 including US$1.6 billion in energy storage orders and US$0.3 billion in recurring revenues from Fluence IQ and energy storage services — has been hedged by fixed price contracts signed with suppliers and customers, he said. 

Future contracts will include pricing based on raw material indices (RMI), which could minimise exposure to fluctuations in future commodity prices. 

The company also expects new production facilities to come online through contract manufacturers in North America in the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal year, and in Europe in Q1 2023.

It held cash and cash equivalents of US$632 million as of 31 December 2021 and expects to realise US$125 million of delayed revenue from Q4 fiscal 2020 within the first half of this fiscal year, but expects the total forecast for shipping and pandemic-related non-recurring expenses to be in the range of US$50 million to US$55 million.

In Energy-Storage.news’ recent Year in Review 2021 interview blog series, Manuel Perez Dubuc said that energy storage, like nearly every other industry, had been dealt severe challenges by COVID related to shipping costs.

“Global shipping delays are impacting anyone who wants to bring goods from Asia to the Americas or Europe. While we cannot predict the shipping markets, we’re seeing the situation start to stabilise in terms of price and reliability, and we expect it to normalise by Q4 of the 2022 calendar year,” he said, with Fluence considering it likely to be a “brief speed bump in the clean energy transition”.

Project sizes grow, along with available markets and applications

Fluence is seeing its orders from repeat customers grow in scale as well as number, Perez Dubuc said in the conference call, and the whole energy storage industry grows as sites are “becoming bigger and bigger because the technology has been understood and they (customers) really see the benefit”.

The CEO highlighted the example of a 200MW/200MWh order for four systems in Lithuania, which will help strengthen the transmission network and followed a successful 1MW pilot. In this way energy storage could be a vital tool to ease transmission network congestion and save money on infrastructure build out, with Perez Dubuc name checking Chile, Germany and Vietnam as perfect examples.

Chief product officer Rebecca Boll agreed that the transmission space is one the company sees opportunities begin to open up, as well as newer use cases like data centres. 

Megawatt-hour durations of sales are also increasing independent power producers (IPPs) and utilities are increasingly replacing fossil fuel generation with energy storage and combining energy storage with renewables, Perez Dubuc said. 

Growth is being seen in new geographic regions, Rebecca Boll added, citing the example of India, where Fluence recently announced a forthcoming joint venture (JV) with renewables company ReNew Power. 

Not only do these new regions present new contract opportunities, but as with more established markets like California and Australia, they are expected to move over time from shorter to longer duration energy storage solutions, Boll said, helping to grow the total available market.

Conference call transcript by Seeking Alpha.

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NREL Researchers Delve into Use of Heat Transfer Mediums for Concentrating Solar Power

An employee runs diagnoses on heliostats at a solar thermal facility in Nevada. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

Concentrating solar power (CSP) has long-held promise as a renewable energy technology. To spur CSP industry advancement and achieve an energy cost goal of 5 cents per kWh, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Gen3 CSP program funds research to explore the potential of several heat transfer mediums. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers are contributing to this effort, tackling several challenges related to the use of one potential medium – liquid-hot molten salt – for energy transfer and storage.

CSP uses mirrors, or heliostats, to harness the power of the sun by heating and storing an inexpensive medium such as sand, rocks, or molten salt for on-demand energy dispatch.

Three years ago, the Gen3 program established three pathways to potentially reach the CSP energy cost goal: a liquid pathway (exploring use of molten salt as a heat transfer material, led by NREL), a particle pathway (using sand-like particles as a heat transfer material, led by Sandia National Laboratories), and a third pathway exploring the use of gas as heat transfer material (led by Brayton Energy).

In March of 2021, DOE down-selected among the three pathways to fund further research into particle-based storage, but also created an opportunity for NREL to further develop the liquid pathway over the next two years.

Craig Turchi leads thermal energy science and technologies research at NREL. He says that molten salts are a desirable option for a heat transfer and storage material – liquids are easy to work with as they can be pumped through pipes and heat exchangers to move around a CSP system. Unfortunately, some practical challenges also remain, which are the focus of current NREL research.

“Everyone initially thought that salt corrosivity would torpedo this effort,” according to Turchi. While easy to move around, salts are also corrosive to the tanks and pipes that hold them. “We actually solved that problem by and large. NREL and partners did a lot of great science on the salt chemistry – how to purify it, how to make it relatively noncorrosive if you control the chemistry, and we demonstrated that in the lab.”

So, corrosivity is not the biggest problem with using molten salts. Instead, the challenge lies in achieving very high temperatures needed for a high-efficiency power plant. The salt’s energy density requires relatively large – and therefore, expensive – storage tanks and one must keep the salts from freezing in the pipes (while thermally stable as a liquid to very high temperature, these salts freeze at a not-so-chilly 400°C).

“We had performed testing to show which materials could work but hadn’t actually built a tank to demonstrate that it did work,” adds Turchi. “Our design is a steel tank, but whereas the current tanks are insulated on the outside, our proposed tank was insulated on the inside to protect the steel.”

DOE awarded NREL $2 million to build a prototype tank to evaluate its integrity when filled with molten salt. The tank is currently being built and will be operated on the mesa above NREL’s Golden, Colo. campus.

There is more than one kind of salt, so NREL’s work developing the Gen3 CSP liquid path also involved selecting and experimenting with new salts. Commercial molten salt systems use nitrate salts; however, these start to degrade once the system reaches a certain temperature. The NREL team wanted to reach higher temperatures to achieve more efficient energy conversion for higher efficiency power plants, so they explored an alternative – chloride salts.

Youyang Zhao is an NREL researcher who has been studying salt chemistry for the Gen3 liquid pathway project for the last three years. Zhao says he started out by finding ways to reduce the impurity levels of industrial salt. Additionally, Zhao says, “We were optimizing the salt composition to lower the melting point of the salt. The lower the melting point, the more time we have to work with the material.”

Zhao’s work led to the decision to design the new prototype tank for chloride salt.

This new opportunity is an important continuation of their efforts. “At a high level,” Zhao explains, “we are connecting fundamental science to future engineering. I’m not creating the component design, but trying to find out the basics, such as chemistry and material knowledge, to provide information so people can design systems better.”

Kerry Rippy is an NREL expert in inorganic chemistry and has supported the Gen3 CSP liquid pathway in several capacities. In the lab, her team explored and demonstrated electrochemical methods to remove corrosive impurities in molten chloride salt. Now, they are continuing this work with the University of Wisconsin to demonstrate the reliability of the purified molten chloride salt as it flows through a scaled-up prototype that mimics an industrial system.

Rippy is also supporting the mesa top tank testing project. The cost of the containment vessels is high, so the team is investigating new materials to store the salt, at varying temperatures and in large volumes for up to 10 hours at a time. Rippy is helping to develop an electrochemical sensor inside the tank to monitor the purity of the salt during experimentation.

Rippy says a molten salt chloride pathway merits further exploration for the benefit of CSP and beyond. “There are multiple potential avenues for this research to be valuable. It can be beneficial for solar fuel synthesis; it could enable high-temperature fuel cells, and the nuclear industry is also really interested in this research.”

“The nuclear industry is developing a number of ‘Gen4’ reactors of its own, some of which use molten chloride salts,” agrees Turchi. Results from the upcoming tank testing could drive down tank costs for a number of energy industries.

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Swell Energy Debuts New Distributed Energy Resource Management System

Swell Energy Inc., an energy and smart grid solutions provider, has rolled out GridAmp, its proprietary Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS). The enhanced DERMS platform aggregates Distributed Energy Resources (DER), including solar and battery storage devices, into virtual power plants (VPP) to provide advanced grid capabilities to utilities.

GridAmp will control multiple grid service operations with behind-the-meter solar-powered batteries within Swell’s Home Battery Rewards program, an 80 MW distributed VPP being developed on O‘ahu, Maui and Hawai‘i islands – as contracted with Hawaiian Electric and approved by the Hawai‘i Public Utilities Commission.

“Working with Power Partner grid service aggregators like Swell is an essential part of reaching Hawaiian Electric’s goal to cut carbon emissions from power generation 70% by 2030 and achieving net zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2045 or sooner,” says Yoh Kawanami, Hawaiian Electric’s co-director of customer energy resources.

Swell’s GridAmp software is designed to maximize revenue across multiple utility and customer value streams using optimization algorithms and machine learning models that inform and automate DER and VPP operations. GridAmp provides a differentiated ability to co-optimize or “stack” multiple grid services to support a variety of energy objectives at the customer, utility and wholesale market levels.

The software supports interoperability and customization for various utility markets and DER integrations. GridAmp is designed to be inclusive across various technologies and manufacturers, expanding the breadth of Swell’s VPP partnerships and geographies. The DERMS platform is integrated with Swell’s operations and customer facing platforms to further enable rapid turnkey deployment of DERs and enhance participation in VPPs.

“GridAmp co-optimizes the VPP experience for end-users and the utility, fundamentally enhancing value and customer participation in generating, consuming, and transacting renewable electricity,” states Suleman Khan, CEO of Swell. “Through our various technology partnerships and a comprehensive ‘VPP in a Box’ solution, Swell unites homeowners, businesses, industry partners, and utilities behind the shared goal of utilizing VPPs to yield reliable, cost-effective, flexible energy in an equitable manner.”

Swell’s first GridAmp enabled VPP in Hawai‘i will simultaneously balance three separate grid services, namely Capacity Build, Capacity Reduction and Fast Frequency Response, to help manage Hawaiian Electric’s energy supply by absorbing excess renewable energy from the grid as production spikes and dispatching energy when needed, thus reducing peak demand and providing 24/7 fast frequency response to balance the three island grids.

Solar-powered energy storage systems located at homes and businesses of Hawaiian Electric customers will collectively and autonomously meet the customer’s demands and respond to the grid’s dynamic needs. In return, Swell’s VPP customers receive GridRevenue and gain additional GridSavings by shifting their energy use throughout the day. These capabilities and services are available to utilities across the country.

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Daiwa, Solariant Collaborating to Develop Renewable Energy Projects in the U.S.

Solariant’s 41.3 MW solar plant in Kagoshima, Japan

Solariant Capital LLC, a renewable energy investment and development company, has entered into a strategic co-development and co-investment partnership with Daiwa Energy & Infrastructure Co. Ltd. (DEI), a subsidiary of Daiwa Securities Group Inc.

The partnership will initially focus on developing Solariant’s portfolio of U.S. renewable energy projects and acquiring other development stage projects. The initial portfolio of projects is located across the Southeast and Southwest U.S. with over 1 GW AC of solar and 2.5 GWh of BESS projects under development.

“With the current favorable environment for renewable energy in the U.S. driven by the recent administration’s aggressive climate goals and support from state and local governments, we believe this partnership is a great opportunity for DEI to expand our footprint into the U.S. market,” comments Morimasa Matsuda, CEO of DEI. “Solariant Capital is a great partner and well-positioned to take advantage of the expanding renewable energy market in the U.S.”

“We are excited to be working with Daiwa (DEI), a globally respected energy and infrastructure investment firm,” says Daniel Kim, Solariant Capital’s managing director. “This partnership will strengthen our position in the market and help us accelerate our goals to expand our operations across new markets.”

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Battery trade body calls for caution as EU votes on sustainability measures

Hundreds of gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing capacity have been committed to in Europe. Pictured is Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden, which recently started up its production lines. Image: Northvolt.

European lithium battery industry trade body RECHARGE has warned that some parts of the EU’s Draft Report on Batteries and Waste Batteries may stifle the industry and not deliver on objectives, ahead of today’s vote. 

The European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) will today (Thursday 10 February) vote on the report which provides clearer definitions about which batteries can be admitted to market and introduces minimum requirements for the content of recycled material in batteries.

Some Energy-storage.news sources fear the measures will make Europe’s comparatively nascent battery industry less competitive than established Asian industry producers, who are larger but also have experience of local battery recycling regulations.

RECHARGE, which overall welcomes the proposals in principle, reiterated these fears yesterday in a statement: “European battery manufacturers will introduce many innovations over the coming years and therefore caution needs to be applied in a fast-paced environment not to overregulate product design and to not over-narrowly define product performance.” 

“Such measures could hamper the ability of the industry to innovate and to meet new and future more complex customer demands.” 

Claude Chanson, RECHARGE General Manager, added that the measures needed to be properly implemented and controlled at the member state level by avoiding being too broad in scope. 

“This would not only jeopardise the competitiveness of the still nascent European batteries industry, but would also open the door for green-washing and for non-compliant products to enter into the EU,” he added. 

The industry could create about 800,000 jobs by 2023 at the current pace, according to RECHARGE. RECHARGE has even suggested that some recent proposals may put safety controls at risk.

The main worry for industry participants is a diminishment of the EU market’s attractiveness leading to supply constraints at a time of rising demand for lithium-ion batteries, especially from EVs, and the ensuing higher prices.

Lithium-ion battery costs have increased in the last six months for the first time in a decade due to supply chain constraints for the underlying materials. 

Following adoption in the Committee, the draft report will be submitted for vote in Plenary during the February Session.

See more information about the ENVI Committee vote and the legislation including proposed amendments here.

See RECHARGE’s full statement here.

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UK’s Zenobe Energy gets US$326m financing for EV fleet solutions including battery storage 

In addition to electric buses and associated infrastructure, the company develops large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects. Image: Zenobe Energy.

UK clean energy and transport solutions developer Zenobē Energy has established a multi-source debt structure of £241 million (US$326 million) to fund capital investment into e-buses and charging infrastructure.

The funding platform – which Zenobē said is the first of its kind – was advised and structured by UK retail bank NatWest, which has previously provided funding to Zenobē to help grow its electric vehicle (EV) activities.

The funding package is to support Zenobē’s turnkey fleet electrification offering, which it launched in May 2019.

The offering includes financing for charging infrastructure, stationary battery storage located in bus depots for overcoming grid constraints, batteries on the vehicles and the vehicles themselves.

Currently, Zenobē has 175MW of operational and contracted storage assets and 394 electric vehicle (EV) buses, equivalent to an estimated 25% market share of the UK operational EV bus sector.

To read the full version of this story visit Current±.

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Developer ILI Group proposes 1.5GW/45GWh pumped hydro project in Scotland

Cruachan Dam, Scotland, site of an existing 440MW pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) facility. Image: Drax.

Clean energy developer ILI Group has begun the initial planning phase for a new pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) project in Scotland.

The Balliemeanoch project at Loch Awe, Dalmally in Argyll and Bute will be able to supply 1.5GW of power for up to 30 hours. It is the third and largest of ILI’s pumped storage hydro projects, with the other two being Red John at Loch Ness and Corrievarkie at Loch Ericht.

The Balliemeanoch project will create a new ‘head pond’ in the hills above Loch Awe capable of holding 58 million cubic metres of water when full.

Mark Wilson, CEO of ILI Group, said that long-duration energy storage, particularly storage over four hours, is “crucial” to reaching net zero, with announcements such as the new seabed leases for offshore wind making energy storage projects such as Balliemeanoch becoming “increasingly important”. 

To read the full version of this story visit Solar Power Portal.

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TotalEnergies Purchases SunPower’s Commercial-Industrial Solar Business for $250 Million

SunPower Commercial; Overall view of the UC Davis West Village on Hutchison Drive in Davis, Calif.

TotalEnergies has signed a definitive agreement with SunPower Corp. to acquire its Commercial & Industrial Solutions (CIS) business for $250 million, including $60 million of earn-out subject to regulatory evolution. TotalEnergies is the majority shareholder of SunPower, a solar technology and energy services provider.

“With this acquisition, TotalEnergies is further investing to grow its distributed generation activity in the U.S. and support its B2B customers in meeting their sustainable development goals,” says Vincent Stoquart, senior vice president of renewables for TotalEnergies. “It is a new milestone in our renewable development in the country, where we are targeting 4 GW of solar capacity by 2025. This will also give SunPower additional resources to focus on the growing residential market. We look forward to welcoming the Commercial & Industrial teams and ensuring the continuity of TotalEnergies’ commitment in this business as we integrate this high-quality portfolio of products and customers.”

TotalEnergies’ distributed generation business currently accounts to close to 500 MW in operation worldwide. The purchase will allow TotalEnergies to extend its distributed generation business footprint to the U.S. and to develop over 100 MW of additional capacity per year.

“TotalEnergies is the ideal partner for our CIS business to take advantage of the growing commercial market and opportunities like community solar and front-of-meter storage,” states Peter Faricy, CEO of SunPower. “The sale enables SunPower to focus on creating a superior residential experience, increase our investment in product and digital innovation, and reach more homeowners. The enhanced strategic clarity created by this transaction will help SunPower lead the industry and deliver maximum value to our investors, partners and customers.”

Following a thorough process involving discussions with a number of parties, and upon the unanimous recommendation of a special committee of SunPower’s independent directors, the acquisition has been approved by both companies. The transaction is expected to close early Q2 subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. This operation is not expected to reduce TotalEnergies’ majority ownership stake (50.83%) in SunPower.

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Form Energy in talks with Georgia Power for 100-hour iron-air battery storage project

Form Energy’s scalable battery storage tech involves rusting and then de-rusting iron as it discharges and charges. Image: Form Energy.

Multi-day battery storage tech startup Form Energy is working with Georgia Power on a potential 15MW/1,500MWh project in the US utility company’s service area. 

Form Energy went public last year with the iron-air chemistry of the battery it had been developing for a number of years in stealth mode. The technology essentially causes iron to rust as it discharges energy then converts the rust back to metallic iron as it charges.  

The startup has claimed this will offer long-duration energy storage at low-cost, storing and continuously discharging energy for up to 100 hours. If those claims are true, it can be cost competitive with thermal power plants and cheaper than other batteries.

In an interview with this site last year, CEO Mateo Jaramillo, a former director of Tesla Energy, said the rechargeable battery could go after markets that high capacity factor resources, like open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) and coal, currently dominate. 

In other words, iron-air could position renewable energy as baseload power for the grid, Jaramillo said. Indeed, before rebranding as Form Energy, the company, spun out of work by noted MIT professor Yet Ming-Chiang, was known as Baseload Renewables. 

Yesterday, the company announced its tie-up with Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the US’ biggest energy utility holding companies. 

Georgia Power and Form Energy are working together to find an optimal application for the 1,500MWh of iron-air battery energy storage systems (BESS) that the technology provider has proposed. 

“At Georgia Power, we know that we must make smart investments and embrace new technologies now to continue to prepare for our state’s future energy landscape. As we continue to grow our renewable portfolio, we believe that energy storage solutions will play an important role in ensuring our customers continue to have a reliable and resilient electric grid for decades to come,” Georgia Power’s chairman, president and CEO Chris Womack said.

“We’re very pleased to work with Georgia Power on this important project and to provide a technology solution that will accelerate the transition to a reliable, renewable and affordable electric grid,” Jaramillo said.

“This collaboration is a testament to Georgia Power’s commitment to innovation and economic solutions that are in the best interest of their customers.”

Coal coming offline leaves baseload opportunity for long-duration storage

This is Form Energy’s second announced collaboration with a US utility company. In May 2020, more than a year before the iron-air chemistry had been made public, Energy-Storage.news reported that Minnesota utility Great River Energy had signed up for a pilot deployment of the technology. 

The pilot with Great River will be a 1MW/150MWh system. It was announced shortly after the utility said it would replace coal in its energy mix with renewables and energy purchased from the market. That included retiring a 1,151MW coal plant by 2023, the year the pilot with Form is scheduled to get underway. 

Georgia Power meanwhile wants to retire over 3,500MW of existing coal-fired generating units by 2028 before closing a remaining two units by 2035. The company is planning to replace that capacity with a mix of natural gas and renewable energy. Its Vogtle Unit 3 and Unit 4 nuclear generation units are scheduled to finally come online after several challenging years of development.

The utility has also begun a build-out of 80MW of battery storage which it will own and operate, and in a recent Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) filed with Georgia’s regulatory Public Service Commission (PSC) requested permission to put a further 1,000MW of BESS into its own and operate portfolio by 2030. 

Form Energy’s decision so far to team up with utilities in two regions historically dependent on coal appears to echo its CEO’s assertion in interviews that the iron-air battery’s opportunity is for delivering applications requiring several hours or days of energy, leaving the power intensive, shorter duration applications in the hands of lithium-ion and other technologies. 

“While solar, wind, and lithium-ion batteries will meet a good part of future electricity demand, clean, firm resources provide significant cost savings and reliability benefits over a renewables and lithium-ion only approach,” Jaramillo said in his contribution to our Year in Review 2021 blog series last month.

“How to go about providing that clean, firm power and procuring it is starting to come into focus, and we expect this will continue to be the case. We believe that there will need to be cost effective solutions to complement lithium-ion and provide storage over a period of multiple days.”

The company is one of the members of the Long-Duration Energy Storage Council, to which Google and Microsoft recently added their names, and Form Energy was one of the single biggest VC investment dealmakers in the energy storage industry last year, raising US$240 million in a Series D funding round which closed in August. Investors included major steel company ArcelorMittal. 

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ACCIONA’s Largest PV Installation to Follow Texas Project Investment

ACCIONA’s Sishen Solar Park in Dibeng, Northern Cape (South Africa)

ACCIONA Energía has acquired Red-Tailed Hawk, a 350 MW AC/458 MW DC photovoltaic (PV) project near Houston in Wharton County, Texas, from Avondale Solar LLC and Solar Plus Development Inc. AP Solar Holdings LLC, a full service, utility-scale solar power project developer and affiliate of Avondale and Solar Plus, developed the project.

The plant will be the largest photovoltaic installation of ACCIONA Energía and will have an estimated investment of $460 million. The construction phase is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2022, and the plant is expected to be fully operational in 2024. RedTailed Hawk will be connected to the Houston grid, which has a high demand and injection capacity, just like ACCIONA Energía’s nearby photovoltaic plant of Fort Bend, already under construction.

Red-Tailed Hawk will have a capacity of 350 MW AC of photovoltaic solar energy, enough to meet the energy needs of 66,500 Texas households. The project falls under ACCIONA’s Social Impact Management program, which re-invests a portion of the project’s annual revenue to support education, wellness and environmental stewardship programs in the community where it operates.

“We are excited to continue our growth in Texas, where we already have two solar projects under construction and three wind farms,” says Joaquin Castillo, CEO of ACCIONA Energía North America. “Red-Tailed Hawk is a clear demonstration of our commitment to the United States, and it brings us one step closer to our goal to double our installed capacity in the country by 2023.”

Red-Tailed Hawk is the company’s third photovoltaic plant in the United States, where ACCIONA Energía has already begun the construction of two other solar farms: Fort Bend (315 MW DC) in Texas and High Point (125 MW DC) in Illinois. In addition, the company also owns and operates 10 wind farms in the U.S., totaling more than 1 GW of wind capacity, and the 64 MW Nevada Solar One concentrated solar power facility.

Upon completion of the Red-Tailed Hawk, Fort Bend and High Point parks, ACCIONA Energía will have over 2 GW capacity of solar and wind energy in the United States. In total, the company has a portfolio of 4GW of projects under development.

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