Independent Power Producer (IPP) Innergex Renewable Energy has ordered two battery energy storage system (BESS) projects from Mitsubishi Power Americas for co-located sites in Chile, South America.
Innergex has awarded Mitsubishi Power the order for its Emerald storage solution and the projects are expected to come online in 2023. Emerald is a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) based BESS product with a duration of up to six hours, although the two projects ordered will only be able to discharge for five hours.
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The projects will be co-located with existing solar PV facilities operated by Innergex and will provide load shifting capabilities, storing the solar energy during the day and dispatching it at night.
The 68MW Salvador solar PV facility will add 50MW/250MWh of storage while the 50.6MW Andrés site will add 35MW/175MWh of capacity. Innergex acquired the Salvador and Andrés sites in March 2020 and January 2022 respectively.
The BESS will receive capacity payments and trade energy on the wholesale energy, or ‘merchant’, market. They will also provide grid resiliency for Chile’s transmission and distribution infrastructure. A total of US$128.5 million will be invested into the two BESS facilities.
The press release said they will be among the first co-located solar and storage projects in Chile, as well as Innergex’s first BESS projects in Chile and Mitsubishi Power’s first in South America. The country is aiming for 80% clean electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
Mitsubishi Power Americas’ senior VP for energy storage Tom Cornell told Energy-storage.news in an exclusive interview recently that the storage market would broaden out into many more regions in 2022, having been dominated by a handful of US states last year, mainly California. The company has more than 1.7GWh of utility-scale BESS projects in deployment across the globe.
Commenting on the announcement, Cornell said: “We are excited to bring our technology to South America and grow our business beyond North America. The coupling of renewables and Mitsubishi Power’s Emerald storage solutions are enabling a better, smarter and more resilient energy future for our customers in Chile and around the globe.”
Michel Letellier, president and chief executive officer of Innergex, added: “The combination of hydro, wind, solar and battery energy storage systems enables Innergex to meet customer needs at any time of the day and offer 24/7 energy supply to industrial customers through its portfolio of projects. In addition, the capacity payments for energy storage enable these projects to benefit from stable and predictable revenues to which are added the revenues derived from the merchant market, making these projects viable.”
Mitsubishi Power is also bringing its own energy management system (EMS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform along with the delivery of the bricks-and-mortar BESS. Its Emerald Integrated Plant Controller provides real-time BESS operation and a monitoring/supervisory control platform.
Chile is set to hold another big auction for renewables and energy storage, which will contract 5,250GWh per annum for 15 years, later this year to support the government’s decarbonisation plans.
