CATL will supply the BESS units for Grenergy’s two large-scale energy storage projects in Spain, both of which have decade-long tolls.
The companies announced the deal for Grenergy’s 700MWh Oviedo standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) project and its 680MWh Escuderos solar-plus-storage project last week (21 May), its flagship storage projects in Spain.
Grenergy announced a 10-year toll for the Oviedo project with an unnamed international utility in February this year, and then a 12-toll for Escuderos’ BESS a few months later, also with an unnamed utility offtaker.
Both projects will become operational in 2027, while the toll for the Escuderos BESS starts in July 2028 (it didn’t specify this date for Oviedo).
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Spain’s energy storage industry has been relatively slow to take off considering its high solar PV penetration, in theory making it an attractive market for flexibility assets. Most put that down to an incomplete regulatory landscape.
Activity has markedly picked up since the Iberian blackout, which sharpened discussions around BESS’ role in grid stability and saw a law passed to prioritise hybridised renewables-plus-storage projects. Large projects and portfolios have been progressed towards construction this year by operators Engie, Return, FRV and Zelestra.
The Escuderos project replicates Grenergy’s model in Chile, where it is developing, securing offtake for and selling ownership stakes in two huge solar-plus-storage sites called Oasis de Atacama (eventually totalling 11GWh of storage) and Oasis Central (4GWh).
CATL also supplied BESS for a portion of the Atacama project, though most of it (and Central) are being supplied by competitor BYD.
CATL will supply 252 lithium iron phosphate-based (LFP) Tener Stack battery units across the Oviedo and Escuderos projects. It launched the product at the ees Europe trade show in Munich in May last year, and did a press Q&A on it that we attended. It enables stacking of two units on top of each other to maximise site-level energy density.
It is a sequel to the Tener product which introduced CATL’s ‘zero-degradation’ technology the previous year, which we also discussed with company executives in a Q&A.
Long-term offtakes for its projects, particularly solar-plus-storage, appears key to Grenergy’s long-term strategy. Last week it also announced a 20-year offtake deal with a local utility in Georgia, the US, for a solar and storage project.
