Italian utility group and renewables powerhouse Enel has recently announced a significant scale-up of its U.S. energy storage goals, claiming it will add one gigawatt (G.W.) of storage capacity to its U.S. renewables fleet by 2022.
In late 2019, the Italian company promised to build 14.1GW of renewable power capacity globally by 2022 via its Enel Green Power arm, alongside 300 megawatts of energy storage from its Enel X unit.
Enel X typically focuses on customer-sited, smaller batteries to help businesses with backup power, demand charges, and other needs. However, the new 1-gigawatt pledge applies to the company’s utility-scale renewables development business.
Enel’s renewables-plus-storage hybrid strategy will launch in Texas, with construction already underway and deliveries scheduled for the summer of 2021. Texas has been slow at the development of energy storage but recently has picked up the pace. “North America is very much at the forefront of Enel’s plans to roll out storage with its renewable generation fleet,” said Ryan Prescott, the head of growth strategy & energy storage development at Enel Green Power.
The tactical shift from standalone renewables to battery-paired hybrids benefits from:
- Falling battery costs
- The federal Investment Tax Credit
- Opportunities in wholesale markets that arise from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841, which enables storage to compete with other power sources
Prescott said:
We’re a fairly strong entity from a balance-sheet perspective. We’re able to leverage that corporate strength to do things in a market with good fundamentals but maybe not as many long-term offtakes.
Rome-based Enel, which is partly owned by the government of Italy, claims over 80GW of installed generating capacity around the world, with more than 50% of that coming from renewables such as hydro. In recent years, Enel has consistently been one of the U.S.’s largest wind developers, and it’s a growing player in the large-scale solar industry.
