Plus Power's storage facility, being built on 13 acres in Comal County, is scheduled to come online this spring. Photo courtesy of Plus Power

The Woodlands-based Plus Power has collected an estimated $98 million tax equity investment for its 200-megawatt Ebony Energy Storage facility near San Antonio.

Plus Power says the investment from Solana Beach, California-based Greenprint Capital Management will help stabilize the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power system “during dynamic summer demand and cold winter storms while helping to integrate more renewable energy into the grid.”

The storage facility, being built on 13 acres in Comal County, is scheduled to come online this spring.

Peter DeFazio, managing director of Greenprint, calls Plus Power “a first mover” among owner-operators of standalone battery energy storage facilities in the U.S. Plus Power owns a portfolio of large-scale lithium-ion battery systems in more than 25 states and Canada.

“As the state and the country experience increasingly extreme temperatures, we are proud that our projects can provide grid services that will help ERCOT increase reliability and meet abnormally high demand,” says Josh Goldstein, chief financial officer of Plus Power.

By this summer, Plus Power expects to be operating four storage plants in the ERCOT market with 800 megawatts of total capacity.

Plus Power announced in 2023 that it completed a $1.8 billion financing for Ebony and four other projects in Texas and Arizona. The financing included $196 million in construction and term financing for the Comal County project.

Five of Plus Power's projects received financing from nearly a dozen financial partners. Photo courtesy of Plus Power

Houston renewable energy storage developer secures $1.8B in financing

money moves

A Houston company that develops standalone battery energy storage systems has reportedly secured $1.8 billion in new financing for a handful of ongoing projects — most of which are in Texas.

"Over the last year, Plus Power has raised an unparalleled amount of capital for standalone storage projects from a wide range of leading energy project finance banks and investors," Josh Goldstein, CFO of Plus Power, says in a news release. "This capital will support the ongoing buildout of the largest and most diverse portfolio of standalone storage projects in the U.S. The scale highlights our first-mover advantage in bringing high-quality projects to market as well as the tremendous work by our fantastic team."

The funding will be distributed to the following projects, which are expected to have a total of 1,040 megawatts of capacity, according to the release:

  • The 250-megawatt Sierra Estrella Energy Storage facility in Avondale, Arizona, west of Phoenix will use $707 million of the financing — $202 million of tax equity and a $505 million construction, term loan, and letter of credit facility from Bank of America. Expected to deliver by summer of next year, the 11-acre facility will be the largest to date for a standalone energy storage project, according to Plus Power.
  • $212.2 million of tax equity financing from Foss & Company, as well as $276 million of construction and term financing, for the 300 MW / 600 MWh Rodeo Ranch Energy Storage facility in Pecos.
  • $196 million of construction and term financing for the 200 MW / 400 MWh Ebony Energy Storage facility in Comal County, northeast of San Antonio.
  • $200 million of construction and term financing for the 200 MW / 400 MWh Anemoi Energy Storage facility in Hidalgo County, on the Mexican border northwest of Matamoros.
  • $196 million construction, term loan and letter of credit facility for the 90 MW / 360 MWh Superstition Energy Storage project in Gilbert, southeast of Phoenix.

The $884 million committed to three new standalone storage facilities in Texas bring Plus Power's current ERCOT portfolio to 800 MW. Deutsche Bank and First Citizens Bank were the coordinating lead arrangers, per the news release.

"Plus Power is a market leader in the battery energy storage sector and we are honored to have collaborated with them on these breakthrough financings," Jeremy Eisman, managing director and head of Infrastructure & Energy Financing at Deutsche Bank, says in a statement. "We acknowledge the important role that battery storage plays in ensuring a clean and reliable electric grid and look forward to continuing to support the Plus Power team's continued growth in this sector."

Plus Power's portfolio includes large-scale lithium-ion battery systems across 25 states and Canada. The company reports that three of the projects will be completed before next year's summer heat rolls back in.

Originally founded in San Francisco in 2018, Plus Power moved its HQ to Houston last year. The company recently signed a lease for nearly 7,000 square feet at Three Hughes Landing in The Woodlands. The company previously was based in coworking space at the Rayford Office Park in Spring.

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SLB and NVIDIA expand partnership to scale AI across energy sector

AI partnership

Houston-based energy technology company SLB has expanded its 18-year tech collaboration with chipmaker NVIDIA to include the development of an “AI factory for energy.”

Through their partnership, SLB and NVIDIA will create AI infrastructure and models built around SLB’s existing digital platforms to help energy companies scale AI for data and operations.

In addition to the development of the “AI factory,” SLB will:

  • Provide modular design services to enhance NVIDIA’s blueprint for building, launching and operating gigawatt-scale AI data centers. In this case, modular design involves manufacturing data center components off-site.
  • Use NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure to improve the processing of large datasets and AI models across SLB’s digital platforms.

Energy companies generate vast amounts of operational data, which can slow down and silo decision-making, SLB says. By combining NVIDIA’s Omniverse libraries and its Nemotron open models with SLB’s digital and AI platforms, the companies aim to more rapidly transform data into actionable insights.

Omniverse libraries are sets of prebuilt 3D elements, such as objects, surfaces and interactive features, that make it easier to construct detailed virtual spaces without having to design everything manually. They’re commonly used for building immersive environments, digital replicas of real-world systems and simulation scenarios.

Nemotron open models are AI models that are freely available to download and modify. Instead of relying on a hosted service, you can run them on your own infrastructure and tailor them to fit specific needs.

Vladimir Troy, vice president of AI infrastructure at NVIDIA, says the energy sector is at the forefront of AI driving a “new industrial revolution.”

“The winners in AI will be companies with the best data, the deepest domain expertise, and the ability to scale,” Demos Pafitis, SLB’s chief technology officer, added. “By collaborating with NVIDIA to advance modular data center construction and harness our domain expertise and digital platforms, we’re enabling the energy industry to deploy AI at scale and transform operational data into smarter decisions.”

Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub to retire, Reuters reports

retirement plans

Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental (Oxy), is set to retire this year, Reuters first reported Thursday.

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the oil and gas giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as chief operating officer and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Reuters reports that a firm date for her retirement has not been set. Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, is expected to replace Hollub in the CEO role.

Oxy is leading a number of energy transition projects.

It's subsidiary 1PointFive is developing a $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area that is slated to be the largest facility of its kind in the world. Known as STRATOS, it's designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.

The company shared recently that Phase 1 of the project is expected to go online in Q2, with Phase 2 ramping up through the remainder of 2026.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos last year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” she added.

Oxy was one of the first to set ambitious net-zero goals. In a 2020 interview during CERAWeek, Hollub outlined Oxy's future as a “carbon management company.”

“Ultimately, I don’t know how many years from now, Occidental becomes a carbon management company, and our oil and gas would be a support business unit for the management of that carbon. We would be not only using [CO2] in oil reservoirs [but] capturing it for sequestration as well,” Hollub said.

Oxy opened its Oxy Innovation Center in the Ion last year, focused on advancing low-carbon technology. It also operates Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others.