Macquarie’s Green Investment Group has closed a third round of debt financing for a customer sited energy storage project in southern California, US.
The cash raised will fund construction of an additional 97 megawatt hour (MWh) portion of a 63MW/340 MWh of behind-the-meter battery projects for Southern California Edison located in grid-constrained pockets of the West Los Angeles Basin service territory.
CIT Group has been the lead lender in all three rounds. Others include Rabobank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and ING.
Macquarie acquired the original portfolio from Advanced Microgrid Solutions in August 2016 and the two companies have been jointly developing and constructing the portfolio.
The project’s first debt financing in 2017 was a non-recourse project financing of distributed battery-based energy storage systems.
The battery systems are being installed across 89 sites, hosted by 28 customers throughout the West Los Angeles Basin region. They include various large-load commercial, industrial and government host sites.
The individual storage systems will be aggregated to function as a virtual power station dispatching electricity during periods of high demand, avoiding the need to use fossil fuel-generated peaking power.
CIT managing director Mike Lorusso said: “Businesses in the Southern California area increasingly depend on renewable power for their electricity.
“Battery projects like these also support the reliability of the grid.”
The battery fleet, located at will be used for utility grid services including flexible and reserve capacity, solar integration and voltage management in addition to retail energy services such as demand management, back up generation and enhanced power quality.