Renewable energy development company Ameresco has signed a non-exclusive purchasing framework with system integrator Powin Energy, totalling 2.5GWh of Powin’s Stack750 battery energy storage system (BESS) product until 2025.
The agreement will supply a portion of Ameresco’s BESS needs for a variety of customer projects through mid-2025. The company said it chose Powin’s Stack750 product thanks to its suitability for a range of projects, reduced deployment time and footprint and lower overall capital costs.
Doran Hole, EVP and CFO of Ameresco commented: “As costs have declined and the technology matured, battery storage has rapidly become a go to clean energy technology. Whether as a standalone system or as part of an integrated solar or microgrid solution, BESS have become an integral technology for customers looking to increase energy resiliency and reliability.”
“This agreement is designed to bolster our BESS availability with a high quality, flexible product and offer advantageous equipment delivery timelines to support our growing base of customers throughout our various vertical markets.”
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The agreement is not related to the 2.15GWh that Ameresco is delivering for utility Southern California Edison across three sites, which was recently delayed, as reported by Energy-Storage.news. Ameresco said the Powin equipment covered by the latest deal will be used at projects for customers ranging from small municipal utilities to US federal agencies. The latter is a niche Ameresco has somewhat specialised in over the last few years, as discussed in this 2021 interview with Nicole Bulgarino, executive VP and general manager at the company’s federal solutions division.
Projects for government customers have exacting requirements on both performance and cost and are important for energy storage in the sense that they help prove the technical and business case for batteries, Bulgarino said.
Ameresco also recently agreed to supply a 6MW, one-hour BESS to a military base in the US state of Maryland, Fort Detrick, to supplement the base’s existing 18MW solar facility. The supplier of the storage system will be LS Energy Solutions, part of the large Korean conglomerate LS Group, which will provide its recently-launched AiON-ESS product.
The microgrid-ready BESS will help the military base lower its electricity spend through participating in the PJM grid‘s frequency regulation, demand response, and energy supply markets.
Meanwhile Powin is the fifth-largest commercial and industrial (C&I) or utility-scale BESS system integrator in the world according to IHS Markit. It recently announced that it would produce its Centipede platform, which Stack750 is part of, in North America, through manufacturer Celestica’s facility in Mexico.
“With our new North American production facility, we plan to provide Ameresco with both the advanced, modular and energy-dense hardware required for their use cases as well as the experience needed to navigate supply chain constraints,” said Powin CEO Geoff Brown, commenting on the purchasing framework announcement.
The Oregon-based company has built over 2GWh of systems in 12 states in the US and seven other countries and has a contracted pipeline to supply over 5.8GWh of energy storage systems globally over the next three years.
