Dive Brief:
- Beginning next year, Excelsior Energy Capital will install 2.2 GWh of Fluence Energy’s Gridstack Pro batteries at U.S. energy storage facilities, Fluence said Tuesday.
- With battery cells manufactured in Tennessee and modules made in Utah, the Gridstack Pro line is among the “first energy storage solutions expected to qualify as domestic content under the Inflation Reduction Act,” Fluence said. The IRA authorizes a 10% bonus tax credit for clean energy systems that meet the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s domestic content requirements.
- “With this partnership, we have collectively stepped forward with Fluence as an early mover in domestic supply of [battery energy storage systems], which in turn serves as a stabilizing force for our BESS investments in the United States,” Excelsior Energy Capital partner Anne Marie Denman said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Under the agreement, Excelsior, a private equity firm, will install Gridstack Pro batteries at five to 10 project sites in markets across the United States, including the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and California Independent System Operator territories, Denman told Utility Dive.
Excelsior expects some of the projects to be storage-only and others to pair storage with solar or wind generation, Denman said.
In a statement, Fluence Americas President John Zahurancik hailed the agreement as “a testament to the competitiveness of U.S.-manufactured battery storage systems [and] a valuable way to mitigate uncertainties in [energy storage] projects.”
Fluence has taken steps to diversify its supply chain in response to geopolitical, climate and trade uncertainty amid an “aggressive volume of demand for large-scale, high performance and highly financeable systems,” the company said.
Earlier this year, Fluence announced plans to manufacture battery modules at its Utah facility beginning this summer. Fluence expects to produce domestic-content battery modules by the end of 2024 and deliver its first orders next year, the company said in its second quarter 2024 earnings report in May. In the same report, Fluence said its total order pipeline stood at 74.4 GW following 10 consecutive quarters during which orders outpaced recognized revenue.
Fluence supplies other utility-scale battery energy storage projects in the United States, including a 200-MW/800-MWh battery storage facility being developed by AES at its retiring Petersburg coal plant in southwestern Indiana. AES, which launched Fluence as a joint venture with Siemens in 2018 and retains a non-controlling stake in the company, received regulatory approval for the project in January and expects to bring it online by December.
Separately from its deal with Fluence, Excelsior has taken steps to invest in domestically produced solar technologies. The company announced in April a multiyear deal to procure 2 GW of U.S.-made solar photovoltaic modules from Heliene, a Canadian firm with manufacturing operations in Minnesota.
Excelsior is a major investor in Lydian Energy, an independent power producer that launched in April with plans to develop, build and operate utility-scale solar and storage projects in Texas and New Mexico. Lydian’s pipeline includes nine projects totaling 1.75 GW, according to its website.
