Black Mountain, a privately-held energy and natural resources company, wants to sell its division for power-storage projects amid soaring demand for battery installations used to help stabilize electricity grids.
(Bloomberg) — Black Mountain, a privately-held energy and natural resources company, wants to sell its division for power-storage projects amid soaring demand for battery installations used to help stabilize electricity grids.Â
Austin-based Black Mountain Energy Storage has a pipeline of 32 projects projected to produce 6.4 gigawatts of battery power when completed, according to a marketing document seen by Bloomberg. The projects are being built mostly in Texas, but also include some sites in the Midwest and East Coast.Â
The asset may fetch around $300 million, a person familiar with the matter said.Â
A spokesman for Black Mountain declined to comment.
Demand for battery-power storage is increasing rapidly because it can offer low-carbon backup for wind and solar energy. Batteries are able to store electricity when renewable generation is high and supply it to the grid when generation is low. The ability to build batteries quickly could lower the need for expensive new transmission lines in some areas.Â
Even as storage project costs jumped nearly 30% in 2022 due to higher commodity prices, BloombergNEF expects global energy storage capacity installed in 2023 to be almost double the volume installed in 2022. By the end of the decade, annual installations should be three times higher than this year.
Black Mountain Energy Storage acquires land, permits and does early-stage project planning before selling sites to investors such as infrastructure funds, which complete the development. It has sold shovel-ready projects to power companies such as Canadian Solar Inc. and infrastructure investors including UBS Group AG’s asset management division.Â
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