Optimiser Gridmatic and Energy Vault have entered into a 10-year deal for a BESS project in ERCOT, Texas, expected to be online by summer 2025.
Energy Vault has concurrently reached final investment decision (FID) for the project, a 57MW/114MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) called Cross Trails, located in Scurry County, Texas. Construction will start in Q1 2025 for commercial operation in summer.
That will make Cross Trails one of the first few standalone BESS projects to come online with a long-term offtake agreement in place in the ERCOT market, and it may have one of the longest such agreements.
Energy Vault said it is the first offtake agreement with a physically settled revenue floor contract to be signed for a BESS in ERCOT.
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The vast majority of BESS in Texas, where ERCOT is the grid operator, are commercialised via in-house trading teams or with ‘revenue-share’ optimisation agreements.
Other BESS owner-operators such as Jupiter Power, Eolian and Ormat Technologies have offtake deals, or ‘tolling agreements’ for projects and analytics firm Modo Energy expects some 2GWh of projects under offtake deals to be online by the end of 2026.
Gridmatic raised US$50 million for its offtake or ‘tolling’ business model in August last year, shortly after its VP business development David Miller discussed optimisation models with Energy-Storage.news (both articles Premium access).
Energy Vault meanwhile is a company known primarily for its gravity-based long-duration energy storage (LDES) technology, but has more recently moved into deploying BESS and shifted to owning and operating its own projects too (though this is its first owned BESS project we are aware of).
