Investments totalling US$425 million combined have been secured by US storage and solar developer-operators Lightshift Energy and MN8 Energy.
Storage developer and operator Lightshift Energy, until recently known as Delorean Power, has raised US$100 million from two separate sustainable infrastructure investment vehicles managed by Greenbacker Capital Management, split 80/20.
Lightshift said it has 20 battery energy storage system (BESS) projects contracted to-date and a total pipeline of over 4,000MW. To-date it has mainly deployed and projects in the 3-20MW range in the Northeastern and Southeastern regions of the US, a project size often called ‘distributed’ in the US market.
In November and October 2023 it announced four projects for Massachussetts municipal utilities: a 3MW/9MWh system for PMLD, two separate 2MW/9MWh projects for GELD and a 5MW/22MWh system for HMLD. Its first project was a 10.5MW/24.5MWh system in Virginia for Danville Utilities in 2022.
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Alongside the utility play, a large part of the market opportunity in Massachusetts is around attaching BESS to community solar projects, a segment driven by the state’s SMART programme. Other developers active there include Agilitas Energy and BlueWave (Premium).
Greenbacker already invested US$20 million in Lightshift/Delorean back in 2021.
Goldman Sachs spinout MN8 Energy bags US$325 million for solar and storage
In concurrent news, solar and storage developer and operator MN8 Energy has secured a private placement of US$325 million through selling convertible preferred stock to two investment firms.
US$200 million of the investment came from Mercuria Energy Group while the remaining US$125 million came from Ridgewood Infrastructure. Mercuria will obtain one board seat as well as an observer seat on the MN8 board, while Ridgewood will have an observer seat.
Jon Yoder, president and CEO of MN8 Energy said: “Our agreements with Mercuria and Ridgewood provide us with the financial means and capital to scale our growth, engineer innovative solutions for our clients and deliver enhanced value to our shareholders.”
MN8 was founded inside Goldman Sachs Asset Management as Goldman Sachs Renewable Power in 2017. In 2022 it was spun out into a separate, independently-owned company called MN8 with around 100 employees moving to the new entity.
MN8 said it has 3.2GW of solar PV projects spread across 875 projects in 28 states, an average project size of just over 3MW, and serves ‘enterprise customers’, implying it has a commercial and industrial (C&I) segment focus. However, it is in the grid-scale segment too, buying a stake in a 200MW California project in 2022, reported by our sister site PV Tech.
It also said it has 270MW of battery storage projects as well as EV charging solutions, though didn’t reveal how much of these are operational versus in development or deployment.
