Eni Plenitude completes construction of 200MW/400MWh Texas BESS

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The BESS, scheduled to be operational by mid-2025, uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells and was built next to Plenitude’s 266MWdc/200MWac Corazon Solar Farm.

Eni New Energy US has been building a notable solar PV portfolio in the US, recently acquiring 272MWac of under-construction solar projects and in 2022, the 81MW Kellam PV plant in North Texas.  

Before Guajillo, the company only had one operational battery project in its US portfolio, a 6.6MWh system in Massachusetts, which was acquired from Falck Renewables, another Italian company that formed Novis Renewables, a joint renewable energy and storage development platform with Eni New Energy US in 2019.

Texas, where the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is the second most active BESS market in the US after California, though developing there is not without its challenges.

For example, in Van Zandt County, 20 residents have filed a lawsuit seeking damages and an injunction (Premium access article) against the renewable energy investment arm of Finland’s Taaleri Group and the US arm of UK-based RES Group over the construction of a lithium-ion BESS.

This followed the October news that council members at Katy, Texas voted to deny a Special Use Permit for a 500MW standalone BESS proposed by IPP Vesper Energy (Premium access article).

Guajillo, however, is not the first BESS in Webb County. In 2022, Aypa Power closed a US$88 million construction and term loan for Wolf Tank, a 173MWh BESS in the county.

Eni and its subsidiaries are active in energy storage markets across the globe. In 2023 Eni Platitude put into operation a 15MW/9MWh BESS in Assemini, Cagliari. In 2019, Eni Australia acquired a 33.7MW solar-plus-storage project in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Patrick Monino, Head of Plenitude Renewables Northa America and Managing Director of Eni New Energy US said of the Guajillo project: “Large lithium-ion batteries are a rapidly expanding technology, enabling an increasing penetration of renewable energies in electrical systems.”

“Guajillo’s completion positions Plenitude at the forefront also in this sector and consolidates our presence in the U.S. renewable energy market, where we have reached 1.5 GW of installed capacity.”

Energy storage deployments globally increased by over half in 2024, with the grid-scale segment the driver of this, market intelligence firm Rho Motion’s head of research writes in this contributed article.

Developer Boralex and its partner Walpole Island First Nation have announced a CA$172 million (US$119 million) financing for the 80MW/320MWh Tilbury battery energy storage system (BESS).

Rho Motion’s head of research Iola Hughes analyses some of the trends shaping the battery storage supply chain as market growth accelerates worldwide.

Chinese multinational renewable energy solutions provider Envision Energy will supply a 320MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) to Juniper Green Energy in India.

The energy storage team at EPC firm Burns & McDonnell offers its take on the year just gone and looks ahead to 2025.