CSI Solar, the system integration and manufacturing arm of Canadian Solar, has received an order for battery energy storage systems (BESS) from UBS Asset Management.
Vertically integrated solar PV company Canadian Solar made the announcement yesterday as it prepared to release its latest quarterly financials today.
The parent company said CSI Solar’s CSI Energy Storage division will supply “up to 2.6GWh” of battery storage systems for projects in North America for UBS Asset Management’s Real Estate and Private Markets business division.
Europe-headquartered UBS formed an Energy Storage Infrastructure team in 2021 to take on opportunities in the space. Earlier this year, the company bought 700MW of BESS projects in development in Texas’ ERCOT market, from Black Mountain Energy Storage (BMES), as reported by Energy-Storage.news in August.
Readers will be interested to hear that Canadian Solar’s North American project development subsidiary Recurrent Energy, also bought projects from the same developer in ERCOT totalling 100MW/400MWh across two sites, shortly before UBS Asset Management did.
After the sale to Recurrent, BMES claimed it had sold 1,200MW/1,700MWh of ERCOT projects with due online dates in 2024 within two months, having also sold 400MW/600MWh to Cypress Creek Renewables within that timeframe.
The projects for which CSI Solar will supply full end-to-end turnkey BESS solutions are due online in 2024 and 2025. Locations and further details of projects were not disclosed in a Canadian Solar press release, but the company did say their primary application will be in ancillary services markets to help maintain grid stability.
The systems supplied will be CSI Energy Storage Solbanks. The CSI Solar ESS division launched the Solbank in September this year, targeting utility-scale applications and with Canadian Solar announcing at the same time that CSI’s energy storage manufacturing will finish ramping up from 2.5GWh to 10GWh annual production capacity by the end of 2023.
UBS has followed other major asset managers into the energy storage space, such as Blackrock and Goldman Sachs, which have both made investments and acquisitions into the sector in diverse geographies, although their early emphasis appears to broadly favour the US and Australian markets.
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