BYD will supply more than half of the total battery storage capacity at developer Grenergy’s 11GWh Oasis de Atacama project in Chile.
The energy storage arm of the Chinese battery and electric vehicle (EV) maker has signed a fresh 3.5GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) supply deal with Grenergy, the two companies announced yesterday (21 May). It is thought to be the biggest deal of its kind in Latin America to date.
It follows the pair cementing a 3GWh agreement in September last year, which itself was an extension from an initial 1.1GWh contract to supply the first phase of the project.
Customer Grenergy is a Spain-headquartered multinational solar and energy storage developer that has a development pipeline across Europe and the Americas. In its Q1 2025 financial results, which the company announced today, Grenergy said that most of its €165 million (US$186.3 million) Capex investments in the first quarter went into hybrid solar-plus-storage projects.
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Grenergy, which is due to announce its 2025-2027 strategic plan at a Capital Markets Day in London, UK, on 28 May, reported €62 million EBITDA and €237 million in revenue for Q1.
Oasis de Atacama is a multiple-phase solar PV and energy storage hybrid project in the Atacama Desert. The desert enjoys among the highest levels of solar irradiance in the world, making it a literal hotspot for large-scale solar PV—and more recently, battery storage—development.
Project contributing to rapid rise of Chile’s BESS market
In operational updates included in its financial results release, Grenergy said that it closed €324 million financing in the fourth phase of Oasis de Atacama during the first quarter. It also secured power purchase agreements (PPAs) with offtakers in Chile, including state-owned copper producer Codelco and an undisclosed energy utility.
As reported by our colleagues at PV Tech, the developer sold the first three phases of Oasis de Atacama late last year to investor ContourGlobal, a subsidiary of KKR, around the time it closed financing for the third phase, with those three totalling 451MW of solar PV capacity and 2.5GWh of BESS.
Grenergy and ContourGlobal subsequently celebrated the inauguration of the first and second phases of Oasis de Atacama last month.
The project is planned to feature a total 2GW of solar PV generation capacity. The deal just announced covers the sixth phase of construction, given the project name Elena, where BYD’s 3.5GWh of systems, spread across 6,240 of the company’s MC Cube-T BESS units, will feature 446MW of PV.
The Chinese company launched the MC Cube-T in 2024. It is a modular 500kWh unit that can be combined into enclosures of up to 6.4MWh capacity. It features a BESS version of BYD’s proprietary Blade lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery.
Chile has rapidly become one of the fastest-growing BESS markets in the world, with more than a gigawatt of cumulative installations reached this year.
According to figures from market intelligence firm Rho Motion—published in an update this week for ESN Premium subscribers—Chile and China were the two leading countries for deployment in April.
Earlier this week, another Spanish company active in Chile, independent power producer (IPP) Zelestra, signed a 1GWh supply deal for a solar-plus-storage hybrid project in the country with Chinese PV inverter and BESS provider Sungrow. While as mentioned, most of the market’s focus is on co-located PV and storage, IPP Atlas Renewable Energy brought online a 200MW/800MWh standalone BESS project a few weeks ago, claiming it to be the biggest of its type in Chile.
Read more Energy-Storage.news coverage of the energy storage market in Chile.
