US solar PV and energy storage project developer Intersect Power has closed two financing deals worth US$837 million for three battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in Texas.
The trio of projects are 2-hour duration systems, each of 320MWh storage capacity (160MW power output), scheduled to go into commercial operation during this year.
Designed to add fleet-level flexibility to the developer’s 1.2GWp of operational solar PV capacity in Texas, they all qualify for investment tax credit (ITC) incentives which were opened up to standalone battery storage projects under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Intersect Power said the transactions cover portfolio-level construction debt, tax equity and term debt financing. Morgan Stanley will provide tax equity financing, while construction debt and term debt financing will come from funds and accounts managed by New York-headquartered HPS Investment Partners.
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Additionally, Deutsche Bank is partnering with HPS in the construction debt facility and also providing operational letters of credit for the three projects.
“These standalone batteries are much-needed infrastructure that will increase grid reliability and improve energy security as the US transitions to a low-carbon economy,” Morgan Stanley managing director and renewable energy investment head Jorge Iragorri said.
Intersect CEO: ‘Projects enable more consistent financial performance’
Previously, Morgan Stanley and HPS Investment Partners were among the financiers participating as Intersect Power raised US$2.6 billion across eight transactions, as reported by sister site PV Tech in November 2021.
This was for a six-project portfolio of solar PV and energy storage projects: three in California and the same three Texas projects that were subject to the latest financing, totalling 2.2GWdc of PV and 1.4GWh of energy storage.
At that time, Intersect CEO Sheldon Kimber claimed that the financing structures put in place around the company’s portfolio were preferable to “today’s long-term contract structures,” which the CEO claimed “destroy value”.
The combination of different kinds of finance, such as construction financing, tax equity, land financing and portfolio-level term debt, allowed Intersect to seek “more valuable offtake structures,” Kimber said three years ago.
Speaking yesterday, the Intersect Power chief executive said that the three Texas BESS assets, “should allow us to provide more consistent financial performance from a diversified fleet of renewable generation and storage, benefiting from increasing market volatility and periods of high prices while protecting us from periods of low market prices.”
86 Tesla Megapacks at each site
The Texas projects, named Lumina I, Lumina II and Radian, will utilise Tesla Megapack BESS solutions, with each comprising 86 Megapack units. Two of them, Lumina II and Radian, will be operated in the market using Tesla’s Autobidder optimisation and trading platform.
At the beginning of 2023, Intersect Power announced that its Athos III solar-plus-storage project in Riverside County, California, had been brought online shortly before the end of the previous year.
Athos III was one of the other projects financed with that earlier US$2.6 billion set of transactions, and featured 112MW/448MWh battery storage and 224MWac/310MWp solar PV.
Around the same time its start of commercial operations at Athos III was announced, the company also brought online the 828MWp/640MWac Lumina PV project in Texas, from which Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) are being sold to two undisclosed Fortune 100 companies.
