Eni Plenitude, the utility arm of the large oil and gas major Eni, has completed construction of the 200MW/400MWh Guajillo battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Texas, US.
The company announced on 13 January that it had completed the BESS in Webb County, Southwest Texas, through its subsidiary, Eni New Energy US.
The BESS, scheduled to be operational by mid-2025, uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells and was built next to Plenitude’s 266MWdc/200MWac Corazon Solar Farm.
Eni New Energy US has been building a notable solar PV portfolio in the US, recently acquiring 272MWac of under-construction solar projects and in 2022, the 81MW Kellam PV plant in North Texas.
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Before Guajillo, the company only had one operational battery project in its US portfolio, a 6.6MWh system in Massachusetts, which was acquired from Falck Renewables, another Italian company that formed Novis Renewables, a joint renewable energy and storage development platform with Eni New Energy US in 2019.
Texas, where the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is the second most active BESS market in the US after California, though developing there is not without its challenges.
For example, in Van Zandt County, 20 residents have filed a lawsuit seeking damages and an injunction (Premium access article) against the renewable energy investment arm of Finland’s Taaleri Group and the US arm of UK-based RES Group over the construction of a lithium-ion BESS.
This followed the October news that council members at Katy, Texas voted to deny a Special Use Permit for a 500MW standalone BESS proposed by IPP Vesper Energy (Premium access article).
Guajillo, however, is not the first BESS in Webb County. In 2022, Aypa Power closed a US$88 million construction and term loan for Wolf Tank, a 173MWh BESS in the county.
Eni and its subsidiaries are active in energy storage markets across the globe. In 2023 Eni Platitude put into operation a 15MW/9MWh BESS in Assemini, Cagliari. In 2019, Eni Australia acquired a 33.7MW solar-plus-storage project in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Patrick Monino, Head of Plenitude Renewables Northa America and Managing Director of Eni New Energy US said of the Guajillo project: “Large lithium-ion batteries are a rapidly expanding technology, enabling an increasing penetration of renewable energies in electrical systems.”
“Guajillo’s completion positions Plenitude at the forefront also in this sector and consolidates our presence in the U.S. renewable energy market, where we have reached 1.5 GW of installed capacity.”
