AES, EsVolta secure US$481m financing for respective East and West Coast US portfolios

In just the past few days, nearly US$500 million has been committed to downstream activity in the battery energy storage space in the US, with AES Distributed Energy raising US$341 million of debt financing and EsVolta US$140 million of borrowing.

AES Distributed Energy, the subsidiary of AES Corporation which focuses on solar PV and solar-plus-battery storage projects, is seeking to develop and execute projects in the Northeastern US, entering into the US$341 million deal for a “portfolio of distributed energy projects”.

Parent company AES is also joint owner of energy storage technology provider Fluence – along with Siemens. The company did not specify the projects in its pipeline, nor give numbers but did suggest that it would include “community” projects.

Lead arrangers for the permanent debt facility were Silicon Valley Bank and KeyBank, both US-based financial services institutions, along with Japan’s Nomura.

Meanwhile, utility-scale energy storage project developer, operator and owner esVolta said this week that is has closed a “senior secured credit facility,” for financing a portfolio of energy storage projects. The company did not give the exact figures for the facility but put it at “around US$140 million”, meaning that between the pair, AES DE and esVolta have secured US$481 million.

Power and energy industry debt financing specialist CIT was the Mandated Lead in the arrangement of esVolta’s credit facility, while Siemens Financial Services (SFS), CoBank, ACB, and KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc served as joint lead arrangers.

EsVolta did give more specifics on the portfoilio to be financed: the company said the credit will be used for eight projects providing various services to California’s electric grid, that it has dubbed the ‘esFaraday’ portfolio, totalling 136MW of output and 480MWh of capacity.