Developer Acciona Energia will add a gigawatt-hour-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) at an existing solar PV plant in Chile.
Located in the Atacama Desert, which has among the highest levels of solar irradiance in the world, Acciona Energia’s project will see a 200MW/1,000MWh (5-hour duration) BESS deployed at the site of its Malgarida solar PV complex.
The 238MWp Malgarida complex, comprising two phases, was commissioned in mid-2021, with the developer citing an associated investment cost of US$170 million for the 535-hectare facility at that time.
Acciona Energia—a full lifecycle renewable energy developer and a subsidiary of Spain-headquartered infrastructure and renewables developer Acciona—said the batteries will allow the PV plant’s output to be stored, managed and dispatched as required.
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BESS technology integral to managing Chile’s rapid renewables adoption
Chile’s abundant solar natural resources led the country to become a rapid adopter of the technology in recent years. The country has also embraced wind power generation. According to think tank Ember, renewables provided 70% of the country’s electricity in 2024, compared to just 47% in 2019.
This has also led to a recognition that energy storage resources are vital to grid integration of those renewables. Chile took centre stage at the Energy Storage Summit Latin America 2025 hosted by our publisher Solar Media last month in the capital, Santiago.
At the conference, Ana Lía Rojas, executive director at the Chilean renewable energy and energy storage association (ACERA) noted that 3.2TWh of solar PV and wind generation was curtailed during August this year alone.
Another speaker, the then-Chilean Minister of Energy Diego Pardow Lorenzo, said that the country is on track to smash a national 2GW by 2030 deployment target in January 2026, while the pipeline of 8GW under construction would mean Chile surpasses its 2050 target of 6GW by 2GW within the next two years.
That means Chile has a lot of energy storage that is either co-located as hybrid renewables-plus-storage plants, or standalone, while the use case for time-shifting solar PV outside daylight generation hours means that a 5-hour duration is currently very common for BESS plants in the South American country.
Notable projects under construction include two hybrid BESS projects announced in August by AES Andes, a regional subsidiary of US power company AES, which would feature a total 2.2GWh BESS capacity. That includes one solar-wind-BESS hybrid and one solar-plus-storage plant.
Developer Grenergy, meanwhile, is building two huge solar-plus-storage complexes in the Atacama region, which are being built in phases. The first one to start construction, Oasis de Atacama, will comprise 2GW of generation and 11GWh of energy storage when fully completed; the other, Central Oasis, will comprise 1.1GW of solar and 3.8GWh BESS capacity.
Grenergy kicked off construction of Central Oasis’ first 340MW PV/960MWh BESS first phase a few weeks ago.
As for Acciona Energia, the company said the BESS at Malgarida is one of three battery projects it is developing in Chile at its solar PV plants, with a cumulative BESS capacity of 1.5GWh. The firm currently has an operational renewables portfolio in the Latin American country of 922MW, comprising three wind power plants and five PV plants.
