The president of Chile, José Antonio Kast Rist, was in attendance as independent power producer (IPP) Grenergy inaugurated a 3.5GWh battery energy storage system (BESS).
Spain-headquartered renewable energy IPP Grenergy held a ceremony earlier this week (8 June) to mark the completion of the battery storage project. Located in northern Chile’s portion of the Atacama Desert, the BESS comprises part of the sixth phase of the company’s huge Oasis de Atacama complex.
Oasis de Atacama co-locates battery storage and solar PV generation at multi-gigawatt and multi-gigawatt-hour scale. As it grows, Grenergy continues to scale up its scope and ambition.
For instance, as the IPP secured US$270 million in financing last September for Elena, the name given to Phase 6, Oasis de Atacama’s eventual target size was 2GW of solar PV paired with 11GWh of battery storage.
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This week, Grenergy said the platform will eventually comprise 2.1GW of solar alongside 14GWh of BESS capacity that will make the stored renewable energy generation dispatchable over longer periods and add more flexibility to the electricity grid.
Elena BESS features 6,240 containerised BYD MC Cube T energy storage units. The Chinese company also supplied units to a previous phase of Oasis de Atacama. Continued expansion of the complex will see the Elena storage system’s capacity doubled to 7GWh by 2028, according to a Grenergy business strategy roadmap.
In the announcement of that roadmap at a Capital Markets Day in May 2025, Grenergy said it planned to invest €3.5 billion (US$3.9 billion) to grow its energy storage and hybrid renewable energy portfolio by the end of next year.
Chile remains Grenergy’s biggest market to focus on, with the IPP having invested some US$2.8 billion there to date. It plans to invest a further US$2 billion in Chile within the next two years. The company is also building Oasis Central, a 1.4GW solar PV and 5GWh BESS complex, in the centre of the South American country.
It is broadly replicating the Oasis projects’ business model at Escuderos, a large solar-plus-storage complex in its home country, albeit on a smaller scale of 200MW solar and 704MWh BESS. The Spanish IPP has sold off the first four completed phases at the Chilean complex to investors, including KKR subsidiary ContourGlobal and infrastructure fund CVC DIF.
ContourGlobal recently brought the first three phases that it bought into commercial operation, featuring 6.5-hour duration battery storage (200MW/1.3GWh) and 231MW of solar PV generation capacity.
The developments highlight Chile’s place on the map as both a literal and metaphorical hotbed of solar and battery storage development within Latin America, alongside several other significant hybrid solar-plus-storage and standalone BESS projects.
Our publisher Solar Media, part of Informa Connect, will host the Energy Storage Summit Latin America 2026 on 27-28 October, 2026, in Santiago Chile. Use our discount code ESN20 for 20% off tickets.
