Developer Aypa Power has bought two “late-stage development” battery storage projects in Indiana, US, from Blue Steel Power.
Aypa Power develops utility-scale energy storage and hybrid renewables-plus-storage projects to own and operate. It said earlier this week (1 March) that it has acquired the Williams Power 150MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Indiana’s Jefferson County, and Fletcher Power, a 118MW project in Decatur County. Energy capacity figures in megawatt-hours (MWh) were not provided in an announcement.
Both will be connected to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) grid and deliver grid-balancing services as well as capacity. Transmission organisation MISO opened its market resource mix up to electricity storage in September last year.
The company is in the portfolio of private equity firm Blackstone. The developer recently secured a US$320 million credit facility to advance a claimed 15GW+ pipeline of projects in North America, as reported by Energy-Storage.news in January.
Meanwhile vendor Blue Steel Power is a joint venture (JV) between two other developers, Open Road Renewables, and Eolian. Eolian incidentally made headlines in 2022 for being the top recipient of venture capital (VC) funding in the energy storage sector during the calendar year with US$925 million raised, as tracked by research firm Mercom.
More recently Eolian claimed to have the first project in the US to avail of the newly-introduced investment tax credit (ITC) for standalone energy storage with a tax equity investment in two large-scale BESS projects in Texas’ ERCOT market.
Aypa will take over development of the Indiana projects from Blue Steel. Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty said Open Road and Eolian originated the projects in 2018 anticipating, “the need to add flexible, dispatchable resources to MISO”. Conditional use permits for the sites were granted in late 2022, Zubaty said.
“With anticipated shortfalls in capacity resources in MISO, developing and operating the Williams and Fletcher projects will be critical to efficiently improving grid resiliency,” Aypa Power CEO Moe Hajabed said.
Aypa Power was previously known as NRStor C&I and spun out from Canadian developer NRSTor before being sold to Blackstone in 2018 and rebranded, with a new head office in Texas and a pivot in focus from the commercial and industrial (C&I) segment to utility-scale.
The company recently contracted for the supply of 487MWh of BESS with Canadian Solar’s CSI Solar manufacturing/system integrator subsidiary. That deal was to cover equipment for Cald, a standalone BESS in California.
Cald is expected to come online in the first half of next year, while expected commissioning dates for the Williams Power and Fletcher Power projects in Indiana have not yet been announced.
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