By ESS news
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office has made a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of up to $861 million to finance the construction of solar-plus-storage and standalone storage projects in Puerto Rico.
The project developer and potential borrower, Clean Flexible Energy LLC, is an indirect subsidiary of AES Corporation (AES) and TotalEnergies Holdings USA, Inc., and is operated under a joint venture agreement between the two.
The planned facilities, located in the municipalities of Guayama and Salinas, include two sites with 200 MW of solar energy, along with 285 MW of four-hour batteries (1.14 GWh). Two other standalone battery storage sites are said to have storage capacities not disclosed by DOE.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Puerto Rico currently has 154 MW of utility-scale solar power.
Distributed solar capacity in the US territory reached 842 MW in April this year, while residential storage reached 1.6 GWh. The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie has predicted that over the next decade, more than 90% of solar additions in Puerto Rico will be distributed solar.
Puerto Rico’s Act 17 calls for reaching 40% renewable generation by 2025 – a target that is now very difficult to achieve – and reaching 60% by 2040 and 100% by 2050.
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