SB Energy Global LLC, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp., has placed a multi-year order for 1.5 GW of First Solar’s advanced, ultra-low-carbon, thin-film photovoltaic (PV) solar modules. SB Energy will deploy these modules across its 4 GW solar and storage development pipeline in the U.S. This order follows SB Energy’s original procurement of 1.7 GW of First Solar modules for five utility-scale projects in Texas and California, which began construction in 2020, expanding SB Energy and First Solar’s partnership to a cumulative 3.2 GW of U.S. solar projects.

SB Energy’s team has reached commercial operations on 1.3 GW across projects in Texas and California in the last six months. The remaining 0.4 GW of projects from the original 1.7 GW procurement are expected to reach commercial operations in the first half of 2022.

“Providing flexible, renewable energy at scale is central to SB Energy’s mission to accelerate the clean energy transition,” says Abhijeet Sathe, co-CEO of SB Energy. “First Solar’s partnership and the incredible work of our team enabled us to bring 1.3 GW of new solar projects to commercial operations in 2021, making us the second largest in terms of new solar capacity added to the grid. We’re excited to expand our partnership with First Solar as we enter our next phase of growth and continue to develop cutting-edge climate infrastructure and technology solutions.”

“At First Solar, we value long-term relationships based not simply on our ability to deliver a competitive, high-quality product that is a hedge against pricing and supply volatility but on trust and a shared vision,” states Georges Antoun, chief commercial officer for First Solar. “We thank SB Energy for its trust in our technology and for investing in responsibly-produced American solar as they grow their platform in support of our country’s march towards a sustainable energy future.”

All 1.5 GW of the modules in the order will be produced in First Solar’s Ohio manufacturing plant and support SB Energy’s plans to achieve 10 GW of renewable energy and storage projects in operation or under construction by the end of 2025.

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The investor-developer got contracts in both the T-1 and T-4 Capacity Market auctions. Image: Gresham House.

London Stock Exchange-listed energy storage investor Gresham House Energy Storage Fund expects to earn more than US$144 million (£108 million) revenues from contracts awarded in recent Capacity Market auctions in the UK.

The battery energy storage company was awarded 112.0MW of de-rated capacity in the T-1 auction for 325MW of projects, which is expected to add £8.4 million in revenues over one year between 2022 and 2023.

It was also awarded 180.4MW of de-rated capacity in the T-4 auction for 463MW of projects, which is expected to add approximately £100 million over the 15-year period, assuming CPI at 2%.

“The Capacity Market is a vital tool for National Grid to ensure sufficient dispatchable generation to meet demand requirements as renewable generation expands, intermittency rises and as battery storage installations continue to lag renewable deployment,” Ben Guest, lead fund manager and managing director of Gresham House New Energy said.

Both the T-1 and T-4 auctions closed at record high prices due to capacity constraints. A total of around 1GW of battery storage assets were awarded contracts across the two.

The T-1 auction closed in the first round at £75/kW/y, with 4996.224MW of de-rated capacity across 226 pre-qualified Capacity Market Units (CMUs) securing contracts on 15 February.

The T-4 Capacity Market auction cleared in the ninth round at £30.59 /kW/year, with a total of 42,364MW of capacity securing contracts on 22 February.

Both were impacted by the closure of coal and nuclear power plants in the UK, straining the available capacity.

Additionally, the volatility in the energy market currently driven by high gas prices impacted the T-1 auction in particular.

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

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US Military facility fitted with renewable energy, storage and energy efficiency solutions by Ameresco. Image: Ameresco.

The award of contracts by utility Southern California Edison (SCE) for 537.5MW/2.150MWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS) has enabled a significant rise in revenues for Ameresco’s project business.

The US clean energy solutions company, which is involved in everything from energy efficiency upgrades to microgrids, renewable energy generation with and without energy storage, standalone battery storage and renewable natural gas, reported its latest quarterly financial results this week. 

Covering the fourth quarter of 2021 and full-year results, Ameresco recorded full-year revenues of US$1.2 billion, an 18% increase on 2020 figures, US$152.7 million of adjusted EBITDA, a 30% increase.

Quarterly revenue and EBITDA figures of US$415.9 million and US$48.5 million were reported, up 32% and 36% respectively from Q4 2020. 

President and CEO George Sakellaris described it as a year of outstanding performance for the company, which demonstrated the strength of its diversified business model. He noted however that revenue growth was led by the company’s Projects business, largely due to the SCE project, which is the biggest contract in Ameresco’s history. 

The contract award was announced in October last year. The three separate four-hour duration BESS projects, each connected to a distribution network substation pocket, will help address electricity network reliability issues for the California investor-owned utility (IOU).

Q4 2021 project revenues were US$333 million, versus US$244.8 million for Q4 2020, a 36% increase. 

With revenues starting to be recognised for the SCE contract, which will see BESS installed at three sites in SCE’s service area, Sakellaris said that “despite the well-publicised global supply chain challenges, we are pleased to report that the design/build project is proceeding as expected”.

“Importantly this contract is representative of the types of the projects that are emerging as the power industry addresses grid stability and reliability. Our track record of execution on projects of increasing size and complexity puts Ameresco in a distinct competitive advantage to capture similar opportunities in the periods ahead,” the CEO said, calling it an excellent example of the “ever expanding addressable market”.

‘Several other large opportunities’ in battery storage being pursued

On those supply chain shortages, the company’s technology agnostic approach has enabled it to “go out shopping,” and Ameresco’s flexible strategy gave it a “tremendous competitive advantage” on the SCE project, Sakellaris said in reply to an analyst’s question.

The engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) deal with SCE almost doubled the company’s project backlog sequentially to US$1.5 billion, while the company is pursuing “several other large opportunities” that it expects to win. 

News of the deal has raised both Ameresco’s profile and the profile of battery storage for electricity suppliers in the US, and requests from both utilities and smaller cooperatives have picked up “considerably,” Sakellaris said. 

While the company expected that most of the contracts it will win in the near term will not be as large as 2.15GWh, it would “love to tackle projects of similar size,” and the CEO said that now that Ameresco knows “much much more about this project,” its teams feel more comfortable about its execution. 

“Battery storage is a key market for us and this project puts us in a different level of competitors,” he said. 

Some of those BESS project contracts will be EPC contracts, others will be systems that Ameresco will ultimately own. Often the nature of that ownership structure is an ongoing conversation during negotiations ahead of contracts being signed, Ameresco CFO and senior VP Doran Hole said.

In other words, a mix of power purchase agreement (PPA) -style contracts for assets the company will own, as well as EPC contracts to build for the customer.  

The CFO said that for assets it has in development, for which it has a strong confidence contracts will be signed imminently, Ameresco has about 266MW of solar and battery storage, with about 60MW of battery storage in there and 45MW of standalone battery storage. Storage project durations vary, with most of either two-hour or four-hour durations, Hole said. 

Some light was shed on Ameresco’s capital expenditure and EBITDA performance expectations in response to another analyst question.

According to Doran Hole, solar PV capex and battery storage are similar, at a “couple of dollars per watt,” although battery pricing has more ups and downs to consider at present. EBITDA is likewise similar, about US$250,000 per megawatt per year, with a 75% EBITDA margin range. 

Energy storage system integrator and technology provider FlexGen was selected by Ameresco to supply the full BESS solutions for the SCE project. FlexGen CEO Kelsey Pegler spoke to Energy-Storage.news for an exclusive interview shortly after that announcement was made.

“There’s a lot of eyes on this project. California and beyond will be looking at this,” Pegler said, discussing the technologies FlexGen will be using and sharing further views on the present state and evolution of the battery storage business.

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Honeywell Energy Storage Solutions will deliver the 20MW energy storage system. Image: Public Service Company of New Mexico.

Technology group Honeywell’s energy storage solutions arm will supply a 20MW/80MWh battery system for renewables group Hecate Energy’s solar farm in New Mexico, USA.

NASDAQ-listed Honeywell will deliver the battery energy storage system (BESS) combined with its energy management system (EMS), the Experion Energy Control System to the PNM Solar Direct solar farm. It will be a lithium-ion system, the company told Energy-storage.news.

The combined platform will allow for asset monitoring and distributed energy resource management allowing Hecate to optimise energy costs at the 50MW solar farm, which is located on the Jicarilla Apache Nation, north of Albuquerque, and set to open in late 2022. The city is subscribing to 25MW or half of the site’s solar off-take.

Honeywell says it is providing outcome-based guarantees around cost, uptime and revenue stacking abilities including peak shaving, backup power and demand response programs.

Honeywell is a Fortune 100 technology group whose four main segments are aerospace, building technologies, performance materials and technologies, and safety and productivity solutions. Energy storage is currently a negligible part of the company’s top line of US$34.3 billion but it has made deep inroads into the sector since entering in 2019 with clear ambitions to expand.

It has a pipeline of 300-400MW behind-the-meter storage with Canadian developer NRStor and supplied equipment for Ukraine’s first grid-scale BESS.

It has also launched its own unique 12-hour flow battery product. The company’s Sustainable Technology Solutions (Honeywell STS) vice president previously told Energy-storage.news that long duration flow batteries were a natural fit for its experience in more conventional power sectors.

Hecate Energy is a developer of solar power plants, wind power plants, and energy storage solutions. It has a 40GW-plus development pipeline of projects. Of the 25.2GW spelt out on its website, 7GW is storage, 17.1GW is solar and 1.1GW is solar and storage.

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Battery Reliability Laboratory. Image: Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) has made a third semi-exclusive commercial licence for vanadium redox flow battery technology available.

The national laboratory has already partnered with two companies for the long-duration storage technology and this third licence is its final one for vanadium redox, PNNL said.

In addition to the commercial licence, PNNL has also developed a high-performance mixed-acid electrolyte compatible with vanadium redox batteries which it says can store more energy than many other technologies over a range of temperatures. The electrolyte is available on a non-exclusive basis.

“This emerging grid-scale storage technology has great commercial and energy security potential. We are eager to partner with additional industry partners to bring this technology to market and to support expanded use of renewable energies on the grid,” said Allan Tuan, commercialisation manager for energy, grid and advanced fuel research at PNNL.

In an interview last year with our quarterly journal PV Tech Power, Prof Maria Skyllas-Kazacos, one of the inventors of the vanadium flow battery nearly 40 years ago at the University of New South Wales in Australia talked about how the patents expired for key aspects of the technology from 2006.

This opened up the opportunity for companies and research groups to get involved, Prof Skyllas-Kazacos said, but it took a while longer for the wider energy sector to take an interest in its long-duration storage potential.

“It took quite a long time, but once they started observing huge issues with grid stability, they realised the grid isn’t so good at stabilising all these renewable energies,” Skyllas-Kazacos said.

“People have realised that for the sort of energy storage we need for renewables, you really need long duration. And that’s why flow batteries have been attracting a lot of attention.”

The US government has identified long-duration storage as a key pillar in its move to de-carbonise its energy sector with the Secretary of Energy tweeting that flow batteries are “good for grid storage”. Over the past year, it has announced nearly US$100 million in funding for long-duration energy storage research and support.

US$17.9 million went to four flow battery manufacturing research & development (R&D) projects, while US$75 million is being spent on a long-duration energy storage research centre at PNNL, expected to open in 2025.

The UK government has dedicated £68 million (US$90 million) to long-duration storage through a competitive funding opportunity, making the first £6.7 million of awards public last week, with funding going to 24 separate projects across a range of technologies.

In Europe meanwhile a group of national and continental trade associations recently urged the European Union to support long-duration storage in the European Green Deal package.

California’s state government recently announced US$380 million in support for long-duration energy storage projects across two years, the biggest example of such funding to date.

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The Energy Storage Summit ran over 22-23 February in London. Image: Solar Media.

The implementation of regulative security is all that is needed to bring in investment for long-duration energy storage (LDES), according to The Future of Long Duration panel at last week’s Energy Storage Summit 2022 in London.

What the best form of regulation is to incentivise storage however is still up in the air, with the conversation quickly turning to the potential of a cap and floor mechanism at the event, hosted by our publisher Solar Media.

Mark Wilson, CEO of developer Intelligent Land Investments Group (ILI Group) said: “We’ve been talking to the government for a few years, [together with] Drax and others, and if the cap and floor is put in place, similar to what interconnectors have from UK to Europe, then these projects will happen straight away. I’ve got a queue of investors globally lined up, ready to build our projects.”

The suggestion follows a recent report from Aurora Energy Research, which found that a cap and floor mechanism would be best positioned to support the deployment of long-duration storage in the UK, although it would not incentivise effective dispatch and additional reforms would still be required to incentivise investment.

Alan Greenshields, director for EMEA region at iron flow battery manufacturer ESS Inc. suggested an alternative form of the cap and floor mechanism, one without the cap. The goal, he said was to make technologies so “outrageously profitable that private capital pours into them”.

“If you can do that, then it no longer becomes a task of government, it becomes a task for the private sector, with companies deploying capital to actually build these assets. So I think the thing is to encourage the innovation with the clear goal of getting to a cost point. If you can’t get to a cost point, don’t try.”

An alternative to the cap and mechanism could be a tax credit system, Todd Mooney CFO of Enlighten Innovations Inc. suggested, pointing to their success driving the deployment of renewables in the United States. Enlighten makes a novel ‘Sodium (Na) Super Ionic Conductor’ membrane technology which can be used for electrochemical energy storage at long-durations, which is low cost, sustainable, safe and scalable, the company claims.

“They even survived the Trump administration, there was more renewable energy generated, renewable projects constructed and built during the Trump administration than in the preceding four years in the Obama administration, even though Trump hated renewables. And so that, to me, says there’s a really good policy mechanism that can be used to accelerate long-duration energy storage,” said Mooney.

There was general agreement amongst the panel of the viability of long-duration technologies in the long run, once they get over an innovation hurdle. One thing that is currently a challenge for reaching this point is the variety of technologies currently available.

As Georgina Morris, innovation programme manager from the UK government’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said in her presentation Energy Storage Innovation – Longer Duration Energy Storage, just ahead of the panel: “The key question, what is longer duration energy storage, that [is something] no one has yet agreed or defined.”

Morris’ presentation set out the recently announced financial support for 24 storage projects split into two streams and made up of power-to-x, thermal and electrical projects announced by BEIS on 23 February.

Following on from this initial phase demonstration and development, around six projects will be taken forwards towards commercialisation, said Morris.

The range of technologies may make some funding models challenging, but it is broadly a positive, said Wilson, as there is “no silver bullet”. Instead a host of technologies will be needed.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has published “America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition,” a comprehensive U.S. government plan to build an “energy sector industrial base.”

The strategy examines technologies and crosscutting topics for analysis in response to Executive Order 14017 on America’s Supply Chains and is part of a whole of government approach to chart a course for revitalizing the U.S. economy and domestic manufacturing by securing the country’s most critical supply chains.

The energy sector has undergone significant changes, including rapid cost reduction and increased deployment of solar and wind energy, and significant digitization of and strain on the U.S. electric grid.

In the decades to come, the energy sector will evolve at an accelerated pace reflecting continued innovation, investment trends in private capital markets, and the urgent need to combat global climate change. Demand for clean energy is projected to increase dramatically as the U.S. works toward the nation’s climate goals to cut emissions in half by 2030, create an emissions-free power sector by 2035, and achieve net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.

DOE recognizes that a secure, resilient energy supply chain will be critical in achieving these goals and capturing the economic opportunity inherent in the energy transition. In addition to the comprehensive strategy report, DOE developed 13 deep-dive assessments on specific technologies and crosscutting topics conducted by researchers from DOE and several of its national laboratories, in consultation with energy sector stakeholders.

Land-based wind turbines: Addressing logistical needs

Land-based wind components are approaching or over road and rail size limits, meaning the number of routes by which components can be transported from ports or factories to deployment sites is decreasing over time.

Permit requirements for transporting such large components vary significantly across state and even county lines, and large components moving from manufacturing to deployment sites may cross multiple states and dozens of counties. As wind components get larger and wind deployment increases, remaining routes are likely to become increasingly congested, and complying with disparate permit requirements more difficult and costly – unless addressed with smart policy interventions.

Offshore wind turbines: Upgrading port and vessel infrastructure

Offshore wind development requires specialized port infrastructure and Jones Act-compliant specialized maritime vessels. The business case for such investments is challenged by lack of certainty in near-term offshore wind demand; uncertainty in demand is exacerbated by the lack of specialized vessels and port infrastructure.

Without strong policy interventions, the lack of sufficient specialized port infrastructure and vessels could create significant bottlenecks as offshore wind installations ramp up through this decade and pose a risk both to achieving the 30 GW by 2030 offshore wind deployment goal and to broader supply chain development.

Building a solar supply chain not dependent on China

The global demand for solar PV is anticipated to explode in the coming years as countries race to meet their climate goals. With the right combination of targeted policies and incentives, the solar PV industry could respond rapidly at home and across the globe to diversify the global solar supply chain and reduce reliance on China.

Significant financial support and incentives from the U.S. government could lead to the reestablishment of a strong domestic solar manufacturing sector. In developing a strategy for diversifying global solar PV supply chains and increasing global production, the U.S. Government has an opportunity to prioritize full utilization of existing U.S. capacity, reshore domestic production, and expand opportunities abroad with allies and partner countries. About $8 billion of investment in domestic supply chain facilities is needed to meet an anticipated domestic demand of 40 GW DC per year by 2030.10 DOE estimates indicate with manufacturing incentives domestic solar production capacity could reach 10 GWdc in two years, 15 GWdc within three years, and meet the current domestic demand of 25 GW DC in five years.

Read the full report here.

Image: Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

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No U.S. cities have done anything like what Cohoes, N.Y. was proposing: a floating solar installation owned and operated by the municipality – but there was no reason it would not work. Two city employees of Cohoes, N.Y. were brainstorming how to power the city’s municipal buildings with renewable energy, but few options made sense. Cohoes does not have acres of unused land for solar panels, and the slate-topped buildings cannot hold rooftop solar. Moreover, with its high amount of low- and moderate-income (LMI) residents, 17,000-person Cohoes was not swimming in cash. The solution had to be something local – something to keep cost savings within the community.

“We looked at every aspect of how to add clean energy to our working-class community,” says Theresa Bourgeois, director of operations for the city of Cohoes. “Then my colleague came upon the idea of floating solar. We considered our 10-acre water reservoir and asked, ‘Can we really utilize this?’ The more we researched, we realized yes, we can! In fact, it’s the best possible answer.”

Bourgeois and City Planner Joe Seman-Graves did their research and learned that the technology of floating solar is sound and that their reservoir could hold enough panels to power all Cohoes-owned buildings and streetlights – erasing around $500,000 in annual electricity costs – with 40% of the generated electricity remaining for civic use. Everything about the project lined up, but at a cost of $6 million, Cohoes needed buy-in from others.

Such clean energy investments are especially challenging for small and LMI cities because municipalities cannot access the same tax incentives as private companies when developing renewable energy. Instead, the city would need to make the case for state, federal and foundation funding; for that, they found their pitch in a 2018 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report.

The NREL report that Bourgeois discovered was “Floating Photovoltaic Systems: Assessing the Technical Potential of Photovoltaic Systems on Man-Made Water Bodies in the Continental United States.” It provides coarse yet comprehensive data about potential U.S. “floatovoltaic” sites, including each reservoir’s estimated size, proximity to electric transmission, ownership status and current use. For Bourgeois and Seman-Graves, NREL’s data set was the missing link.

“NREL’s study gave us confidence and credibility in the power of this idea, that we could generate clean energy in Cohoes,” Bourgeois says. “We used the basic results in that study to provide information to Congress, to our representatives, to the public, showing that we have a viable option. It really drove our success in building support for the project.”

The report portrays floatovoltaics as a large, unexplored opportunity for renewable energy. NREL found that if even a portion of the most suitable reservoirs were covered, floating solar could generate almost 10% of national electricity. That includes almost 25,000 human-made water bodies unused for recreation, mine tailings, and fish and wildlife.

In one instance, the report was invaluable when Cohoes first ran the idea by New York state agency officials. Bourgeois and Seman-Graves referenced the number of possible reservoirs that could support floating solar – 492 in New York – to substantiate that not only are floatovoltaics viable, but that Cohoes could be at the forefront of a replicable model worth pursuing and funding. It was a strong enough case to win Cohoes some preliminary support.

Cohoes had similar success when running the idea by elected officials. NREL’s data identifies a value proposition for renewable energy that appealed to state and federal representatives alike, with the latter advocating to fund about 50% or more of project costs.

NREL also found that many of the suitable reservoirs are in water-stressed areas with expensive land and electricity – these areas could find a shortcut to solar power with floatovoltaics. But for Cohoes, one statistic was missing in the data: What about floating solar’s proximity to low-income communities? If the technology is such a practical option, how many other communities can use their own down-the-road reservoir for clean energy?

As the Cohoes Municipal Floating Solar Demonstration project becomes a model for municipal ownership and small-city sustainability, the city is using NREL’s data to share resources, educate and advocate for environmental justice in related clean energy projects around the state, region, and country.

While pitching the project, Bourgeois wondered whether NREL’s data could be even more impactful; a visualization that breaks the data into congressional districts and economic factors might sum all 7,000 words up in a few seconds to show the economic imperative for Cohoes. Bourgeois connected with NREL and learned that no such visuals were planned, but the authors would happily provide input; so, Bourgeois teamed with nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sending NREL’s paper to Rensselaer’s Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA) where students and faculty engage with data of imminent societal importance.

The request was shared with John Erickson, director of research operations at IDEA, who is drawn to visualizing economic and technical data. His first goal was to visualize NREL’s data overlaid with LMI maps. He collaborated with Bourgeois and Seman-Graves to create the Floating Solar Explorer. The exploration tool is available online and includes a map of all the suitable reservoirs identified by NREL, as well as congressional district-scale LMI information layered over New York. Erickson originally bootstrapped the data explorer to share with Cohoes project stakeholders, but it is now shaping up to be a nice undergraduate elective.

“We try to have our students be driven by questions from elsewhere. NREL’s floating solar data set is an excellent launching point for students to use data to explore topics of deep importance,” Erickson mentions.

The exploration tool is an example of the cross-community collaboration that Bourgeois and Seman-Graves envision and which is already accounted for. They plan for NREL’s data and accompanying visualization to be part of a wider virtual platform where the city can share and access information about the floating solar installation and where Cohoes can be a resource for K–12 education, university-based research, workforce development, and economic collaboration, all of which provide a roadmap for others to adopt community ownership.

NREL also began cost benchmarking floating PV systems in 2021 to track their cost competitiveness nationwide. Another recent publication analyzed the benefits of pairing hydropower and floating PV systems around the world—a hybrid energy opportunity that could also be surprisingly cost friendly.

Read the full story and report here.

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Mazen Turk

Greenwood Sustainable Infrastructure, a solar energy investment and development subsidiary of the Libra Group, has acquired a scalable portfolio of solar developments from AquaSan Network-subsidiary CMDAJ Holdings LLC. This acquisition positions GSI to provide up to 233 MW in affordable, utility scale solar energy to new markets, including Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

Initially, GSI will develop 40 MW of early-stage utility scale solar developments in Minnesota, with the option to build an additional 193 MW in Colorado, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin, doubling its current footprint to 10 U.S. states. Following this transaction, Libra Group subsidiaries, including GSI, will be close to reaching 1 GW development mark, proving 950 MW in solar, wind and waste-to-energy with over 220 projects owned, currently under development or previously developed in six countries.

These developments will provide power to a combination of regulated utilities, investor-owned utilities and U.S. businesses allowing them to purchase solar energy to meet clean energy goals and lock in reduced electricity costs. The portfolio will increase access to reliable, clean energy and promote local job creation and the provision of clean, reliable and renewable water. 

“We were proud to partner with CMDAJ, a team of experienced renewable energy and water project developers in Denver Colorado, to complete this deal which will increase access to reliable, clean energy and promote local job creation,” says Camilo Patrignani, Libra Group’s EVP of energy. “The company and this transaction represent a key part of the Libra Group’s commitment to renewable energy in the Americas and around the world.”

The assets from this deal will be co-owned and co-developed by the GSI and CMDAJ partnership. Once the projects are ready to build, GSI plans to construct and operate the power plants.

“This is a very exciting announcement that will cement GSI’s growth plans hand in hand with CMDAJ, and continue to support and advance the nation’s transition to a reliable, clean energy future,” comments Mazen Turk, GSI’s CEO. “Since the start of operations in 2010, GSI has developed and built over 32 renewable energy assets and this acquisition furthers our exposure to the utility scale energy segment.”

“CMDAJ’s team has developed over 2 GW of thermal, solar, biomass and wind projects over the last 20 years and this partnership will enable us to expand our development portfolio and vertically integrate our efforts in renewable energy and water” states Carmine Iadarola, CEO of CMDAJ and AquaSan Network Inc.

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Peabody has launched R3 Renewables LLC, a renewable energy development company, in a joint venture with Riverstone Credit Partners and Summit Partners Credit Advisors. R3 Renewables will pursue the development of over 3.3 GW of solar PV and 1.6 GW of battery storage capacity over the next five years.

Initially, R3 Renewables will be engaged in the development of six potential sites on large tracts of land on or near previous coal mining operations in Indiana and Illinois. The portfolio size and strategic site locations, each of which is in close proximity to grid injection points, offer the potential for the development of the largest solar and battery storage projects in both Indiana and Illinois.

John Jones has been appointed as CEO. John brings nearly 30 years of expertise in the independent power industry, including senior roles at renewable industry leaders GE EFS, Lincoln Clean Energy (now Ørsted North America Onshore) and Invenergy.

“We are pleased to announce this new joint venture as part of Peabody’s commitment to be the coal producer of choice, creating additional value from our existing assets, supporting our own and our customers’ ESG ambitions and providing added economic benefits for the communities in which we work and live,” says Jim Grech, president and CEO of Peabody. “Both Riverstone and Summit Partners have deep experience across energy and growth sectors, and we believe R3 will benefit from their collective perspective on renewable energy solutions.”

“We are excited to partner with Peabody and Summit Partners as we launch R3 Renewables,” states Daniel Flannery, a managing director at Riverstone. “As one of the world’s largest private investment firms focused on energy, power, decarbonization and infrastructure, we believe we are well positioned to assist R3 Renewables to reclaim, reimagine and repower the region by pursuing these ambitious and transformative renewable energy projects.”

Image: Photo by Jadon Kelly on Unsplash

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