Private equity firm KKR’s investment vehicle ContourGlobal has acquired BESS projects in Italy totalling 1.6GW of power and up to 9.5GWh of capacity, with an eye on the MACSE auctions in September.
The battery energy storage system (BESS) project acquisitions have taken place of the past six months, the company said, and are spread throughout the country.
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The bulk of the projects, 1.5GW, are being acquired from an unnamed Italian developer. That pipeline comprises one ‘advanced’ 750MW tranche of three projects in Southern Italy in the advanced permitting phase and eligible for the first MACSE auction, and a separate early-stage tranche of the same size. A separate, 98MW project in Southern Italy has been acquired by an international developer.
All projects are expected to come online in 2028, and are targeting durations of between 4 and 8-hours. They will build on the firm’s existing 100MW operational PV portfolio in Italy.
MACSE stands for Meccanismo di Approvvigionamento di Capacità di Stoccaggio Elettrico (Electricity Storage Capacity Procurement Mechanism), and is a first-of-its-kind energy storage capacity procurement scheme. It will allow energy storage resources to sell their flexible capacity into a centralised platform run by Terna, which will make that capacity available to renewables operators.
It provides 15-year contracts, making projects highly bankable. It will mainly be used in Southern Italy where the bulk of the country’s solar PV capacity will be. Combined with the Capacity Market (CM) in the North, Italy looks set to be one of most potentially bankable storage markets in Europe.
Italy is targeting 50GWh of new energy storage by 2030, something the CEO of developer GCSS Roberto Castiglioni suggested may be overly ambitious in a recent interview (Premium access). GCSS is the development partner for investor Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ (CIP) for BESS in Italy.
ContourGlobal is also the owner of the first three phases of one the largest solar-plus-storage projects in the world, the Oasis de Atamacama project in Chile, with its portion totalling 451MW of solar and 2.5 GWh of BESS. KKR meanwhile has also backed energy storage projects in India via other vehicles.
