Houston-based developer claims $98 million tax equity investment for Texas energy storage facility

seeing green

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.

Plus Power has announced its Oahu, Hawaii, facility is up and running. Photo via pluspower.com

Houston clean energy company goes online with Hawaii facility

aloha

Houston-based Plus Power announced it has begun operating a new facility on Oahu, Hawaii.

The Kapolei Energy Storage, or KES, facility is “the most advanced grid-scale battery energy storage system in the world,” which will help transition the state's electric power from coal and oil to solar and wind, according to the company.

The KES battery project is located on 8 acres of industrial land on the southwest side of Oahu near Honolulu, and will use 158 Tesla Megapack 2 XL lithium iron phosphate batteries. It will offer the grid 185 megawatts of total power capacity and 565 megawatt-hours of electricity. This will act as an electrical "shock absorber" that will be served by combustion-powered peaker plants to respond in 250 milliseconds according to Power Plus.

"This is a landmark milestone in the transition to clean energy," Brandon Keefe, Plus Power's executive chairman, says in a news release. "It's the first time a battery has been used by a major utility to balance the grid: providing fast frequency response, synthetic inertia, and black start. This project is a postcard from the future — batteries will soon be providing these services, at scale, on the mainland."

The KES plant interconnects three of Hawaiian Electric's critical power generation facilities, which can enable KES to support the reboot of power plants in the event of a state-wide emergency.The KES batteries will help replace the grid capacity formerly provided by an AES coal power plant.

By June 2024, Plus Power aims to operate seven large-scale battery energy storage plants across Arizona and Texas. Last year, the company secured $1.8 billion in new financing for a handful of ongoing projects — most of which are in Texas.

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.

Plus Power, which recently relocated its HQ to Houston, has moved into a larger office space. Image via cushmanwakefield.com

Energy storage startup moves into larger Houston-area space, plans to grow team

expansion plans

A Northern California-born energy storage startup has established its headquarters in The Woodlands.

Plus Power, which develops battery systems designed to store backup power for electric grids, 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.

The company, founded in 2018, shifted its headquarters from San Francisco to the Houston area last year.

“We chose The Woodlands for its beauty, and walkable access to great nearby hotels, restaurants, and healthy groceries,” says Brandon Keefe, CEO of Plus Power. “A Houston base reflects our deep focus on the Texas market, as we are investing nearly $1 billion in several projects here that will be online by the first quarter of 2024, with more in [the works] behind that.”

About 40 employees work from Plus Power’s new office in The Woodlands. Across North America, the company employs about 130 people, including several in Austin. As of July 10, the startup listed nine job openings.

Plus Power develops, owns, and operates utility-scale systems that store energy in huge lithium-ion batteries during low-demand periods. In times of peak demand, power providers can tap into this stored energy.

“Standalone energy storage is rapidly transforming the U.S. energy markets, because it is cheaper than new natural gas plants, faster to build than fossil peakers or transmission, and able to perform diverse energy services,” the company explains in its job postings.

Peakers are backup power plants that run on fossil fuels.

One of Plus Power’s storage facilities is the 100-megawatt Gambit project, which opened two years ago in Angleton. The nearly eight-acre facility supports power supplies for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs the power grid for 90 percent of Texas.

The company says the Angleton facility has fed backup energy to ERCOT during this year’s and last year’s heatwaves, as well as last December’s winter freeze.

The Gambit facility might ring a bell with some folks in the Houston area. In January 2022, Austin-based automaker Tesla unveiled a backup power storage facility in Angleton. Plus Power bought the project from Tesla in June 2022.

Plus Power’s development pipeline contains 10 gigawatts’ worth of energy storage projects in 28 states and Canada. That includes massive projects on tap for Hawaii and Arizona.

Last November, Plus Power announced it had secured $219 million in debt financing for construction of the 185-megawatt Kapolei project on a roughly eight-acre site in Oahu, Hawaii. The facility will be tied to Hawaiian Electric’s power grid. Mizuho Securities USA and KeyBank led the financing.

This April, Plus Power held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Sierra Estrella project in Tolleson, a Phoenix suburb. The 250-megawatt system will serve Salt River Project (SRP), a utility provider in the Phoenix area. The roughly 11-acre Tolleson facility is set to open next year, as is another Plus Power project for SRP — the 90-megawatt Superstition facility in Gilbert, another Phoenix suburb.

As its development pipeline demonstrates, Plus Power is firmly plugged into the fast-growing energy storage market.

According to the Houston-based energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, the U.S. energy storage market installed a record-breaking 4.8 gigawatts of capacity in 2022. This year, that number is projected to approach 75 gigawatts.

In a March 2023 news release, John Hensley, the clean power group’s vice president of research and analytics, says the U.S. market “is on a rapid growth curve and is already a key component of building a resilient grid that supports abundant clean energy.”

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Houston researchers earn $3.3M in DOE funding to develop safer underground power line installation

going under

Researchers from the University of Houston — along with a Hawaiian company — have received $3.3 million in funding to explore artificial intelligence-backed subsurface sensing system for safe and efficient underground power line installation.

Houston's power lines are above ground, but studies show underground power is more reliable. Installing underground power lines is costly and disruptive, but the U.S. Department of Energy, in an effort to find a solution, has put $34 million into its new GOPHURRS program, which stands for Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience, and Security. The funding has been distributed across 12 projects in 11 states.

“Modernizing our nation’s power grid is essential to building a clean energy future that lowers energy costs for working Americans and strengthens our national security,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in a DOE press release.

UH and Hawaii-based Oceanit are behind one of the funded projects, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Real-Time Advanced Look-Ahead Subsurface Sensor.”

The researchers are looking a developing a subsurface sensing system for underground power line installation, potentially using machine learning, electromagnetic resistivity well logging, and drone technology to predict and sense obstacles to installation.

Jiefu Chen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH, is a key collaborator on the project, focused on electromagnetic antennas installed on UAV and HDD drilling string. He's working with Yueqin Huang, assistant professor of information science technology, who leads the geophysical signal processing and Xuqing Wu, associate professor of computer information systems, responsible for integrating machine learning.

“Advanced subsurface sensing and characterization technologies are essential for the undergrounding of power lines,” says Chen in the release. “This initiative can enhance the grid's resilience against natural hazards such as wildfires and hurricanes.”

“If proven successful, our proposed look-ahead subsurface sensing system could significantly reduce the costs of horizontal directional drilling for installing underground utilities,” Chen continues. “Promoting HDD offers environmental advantages over traditional trenching methods and enhances the power grid’s resilience.”

Emission-free hydrogen research, Enron's return, and more trending Houston energy news

top stories

Editor's note: From Caliche Development Partners finding fresh funding for a Beaumont plant to an energy transition SPAC going public, these are the top headlines that resonated with EnergyCapital readers on social media and daily newsletter this week.

Houston researchers develop catalyst for emission-free hydrogen production using light instead of heat

Researchers created a light-driven catalyst for hydrogen production, offering an emission-free alternative to traditional methods. Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Researchers at Rice University have developed a catalyst that could render steam methane reforming, or SMR, entirely emission-free by using light rather than heat to drive the reaction.

The researchers believe the work could prove to be a breakthrough for extending catalyst lifetimes. This will improve efficiencies and reduce costs for a number of industrial processes that are affected by a form of carbon buildup that can deactivate catalysts called coking.

The new copper-rhodium photocatalyst uses an antenna-reactor design. When it is exposed to a specific wavelength of light it breaks down methane and water vapor without external heating into hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The importance of this is it is a chemical industry feedstock that is not a greenhouse gas. Rice’s work also shows that the antenna-reactor technology can overcome catalyst deactivation due to oxidation and coking by employing hot carriers to remove oxygen species and carbon deposits, which effectively regenerates the catalyst with light. Continue reading.

Is Enron back? Houstonians aren't laughing at the joke

If its return is comedic, some former employees who lost everything in Enron’s collapse aren’t laughing. Photo by James Nielsen/Getty Images

An elaborate parody appears to be behind an effort to resurrect Enron, the Houston-based energy company that exemplified the worst in American corporate fraud and greed after it went bankrupt in 2001.

If its return is comedic, some former employees who lost everything in Enron’s collapse aren’t laughing.

“It’s a pretty sick joke and it disparages the people that did work there. And why would you want to even bring it back up again?” said former Enron employee Diana Peters, who represented workers in the company’s bankruptcy proceedings. Continue reading.

Houston to host cleantech collaboration with delegation from Belgium

Houston-based energy tech-oriented companies will be invited to the pitching event for Antwerp and Houston Cleantech Entrepreneurs from 2 to 5 pm on December 3 at The Ion. Photo via the Ion

A delegation of nine startups from Antwerp, Belgium, along with industry experts will visit Houston from December 2 through December 6, which will include The Greater Houston Partnership, Greentown Labs, The Ion, and The Cannon.

The delegation will represent cleantech, sustainable chemistry, and energy tech sectors to engage with Houston’s energy transition ecosystem and identify collaboration and investment opportunities.

Houston-based energy tech-oriented companies will be invited to the pitching event for Antwerp and Houston Cleantech Entrepreneurs from 2 to 5 pm on December 3 at The Ion. Continue reading.

New Mexico court upholds emissions crackdown impacting oil, gas operations along Texas border

Some of those counties affected include production hot spots within the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico and the Permian Basin, which straddles the New Mexico-Texas line. Photo via Getty Images

The New Mexico Court of Appeals has upheld regulations aimed at cracking down on emissions in one of the nation’s top-producing oil and gas states.

The case centered on a rule adopted in 2022 by state regulators that called for curbing the pollutants that chemically react in the presence of sunlight to create ground-level ozone, commonly known as smog. High ozone levels can cause respiratory problems, including asthma and chronic bronchitis.

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's administration has long argued that the adoption of the ozone precursor rule along with regulations to limit methane emissions from the industry were necessary to combat climate change and meet federal clean air standards. Continue reading.

Uniquely Houston event to convene innovation experts across aerospace, energy, and medicine

Every year, Houston's legacy industries — energy, medicine, and aerospace — come together to share innovative ideas and collaborate on future opportunities.

For the eighteenth year in a row, the annual Pumps & Pipes event will showcase and explore convergence innovation and common technology themes across Houston’s three major industries. The hosting organization, also called Pumps & Pipes, was established in 2007 in Houston and is dedicated to fostering collaboration amongst the city's three major industries. Continue reading.

Aramco partners to demonstrate compact carbon capture technology for gas turbines

dream team

Integrated energy and chemicals company Aramco has signed a collaboration agreement with Carbon Clean and SAMSUNG E&A in an effort to showcase new carbon capture technology.

The technology demonstration will be used to deploy Carbon Clean’s novel CycloneCC technology to capture CO2 from natural gas turbine exhaust streams containing approximately 4 percent CO2, according to Aramco.

Carbon Clean, which U.S. headquarters are located in Houston at the Ion, boasts technology that has captured nearly two million tons of carbon dioxide at almost 50 sites around the world. Aramco’s U.S. headquarters is also in Houston.

“The potential for CycloneCC in the US and Houston area is huge,” Aniruddha Sharma, chair and CEO of Carbon Clean, previously shared with EnergyCapital. “It is optimised for low to medium scale industrial emitters and recent Rice University research on the US Gulf Coast, for example, found that it is well suited to 73 percent of Gulf Coast emitters.”

The modular CycloneCC unit has a 50 percent smaller footprint compared to conventional carbon capture processes. The CycloneCC technology is estimated to reduce the total installed cost of carbon capture systems by up to 50 percent compared to conventional systems if successful. The goal is to also maintain process efficiency even at low CO2 concentrations. CycloneCC’s performance is achieved through two process intensification technologies, rotating packed beds (RPBs) and Carbon Clean’s proprietary APBS-CDRMax solvent.

“Its compact, modular design should be easily integrated with gas turbines, delivering high performance carbon capture in an industrial setting where space is typically limited,” Sharma says in a news release.

The engineering, procurement and construction of the plant will be done by SAMSUNG E&A .The unit will be installed on the sales gas compressor turbine exhaust gas stack,which can provide performance data under real-world conditions.

“Aramco and Samsung Ventures are investors in Carbon Clean, so we’re proud to deepen our relationship through this partnership,” Sharma adds. “This first-of-a-kind deployment capturing very low concentrations of CO2 is a key milestone in scaling up and commercializing CycloneCC.”

In September, Carbon Clean also announced a deal with PETRONAS CCS Solution to collaborate and evaluate Carbon Clean’s carbon capture and storage technology with Carbon Clean's CycloneCC tech. Last year, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) selected Carbon Clean for a carbon capture project in Abu Dhabi.

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