Gridstor, a US-based developer and operator of grid-scale battery storage systems, has kicked off construction of its first project in the Texas ERCOT market.
The developer said last week (17 October) that construction is underway on the Hidden Lakes Reliability Project 220MW/440MWh standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in Texas’ Galveston County.
Gridstor said the site is currently being prepared and foundations are being placed, ahead of the delivery and installation of battery enclosures and supporting equipment in early 2025. The project is expected to go into commercial operation in the summer of 2025.
The developer counts Goldman Sachs Asset & Wealth Management among its investors. It is focused on target markets like ERCOT, which are seeing unpredictable weather events, including extreme heat, contribute to higher energy demand and electricity price volatility, as well as areas where ageing grid infrastructure and power plants put them at greater risk of grid instability.
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The Hidden Lakes project was acquired by Gridstor in March this year from utility-scale solar PV and BESS developer Balanced Rock Power.
The project was referred to then as Evelyn Battery Energy Storage but has been renamed. Gridstor said upon its purchase that the fact that the system can connect to an existing substation, owned by utility Texas New Mexico Power, would enable a quick grid interconnection process.
The project’s output and capacity were given as 450MW/900MWh at that time, but this appears to have been revised down to the 220MW/440MWh figures that were given in the latest announcement. The chosen BESS supplier or system integrator was not disclosed, although on the Goleta project in California, pictured above, Gridstor opted for Tesla Megapacks.
Energy-Storage.news first covered Gridstor in October 2022 when it announced the acquisition of a 500MW/2,000MWh portfolio of in-development BESS projects in California’s Los Angeles Basin from Upstream Energy.
It then announced the following June that construction was underway on its first project, a 60MW/160MWh system in Santa Barbra County, California, and that it had signed a resource adequacy (RA) contract with utility Southern California Edison (SCE).
The RA contract was for 40MW of output, with the project’s inverters sized at 60MW to allow the BESS to put more power into the grid if signalled by the CAISO wholesale market. Goldman Sachs Asset Management originated the project’s development before transferring it to Gridstor, and it went into commercial operation just before the end of 2023.
Gridstor made an investment tax credit (ITC) transfer deal for the Goleta BESS a few months later. CFO Frank Burkhartsmeyer spoke with Energy-Storage.news Premium after that deal was completed. Burkhartsmeyer said that while the company was pleased with the transaction and how the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) had unlocked ITC transferability, it was a complex operation that came with various possible downsides, such as ‘recapture risk’, where a tax credit may be invalidated because of a mistake in the quantity or calculation within five years after the project’s commercial operation date.
