Active construction at Intersect Power’s Lumina II battery energy storage system project in Scurry County, Texas. (Intersect Power)

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On Wednesday, Intersect Power announced $837 million in financing commitments for three battery projects in Texas, totaling nearly 1 gigawatt-hour of energy storage capacity. The financing includes portfolio-level construction debt and term debt financing from HPS and Deutsche Bank as well as tax equity financing from Morgan Stanley. It comes on top of the roughly $5 billion in project financing the Beaverton, Oregon, company has raised to date.

The three Texas battery installations — Lumina I, Lumina II, and Radian — are expected to be up and running in 2024. They will store solar power already flowing from Intersect’s 640 megawatt Lumina project and its 320 megawatt Radian project in Texas, helping provide additional flexibility to a state that outpaced California in solar deployment as of last year and is forecasted to beat California in energy storage deployment in 2024.

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Clean energy developers and energy market analysts agree that the U.S. grid isn’t being expanded quickly enough to build ever-cheaper solar, wind, and battery capacity at the pace needed to meet electricity demand. Nor is it moving fast enough to reduce carbon emissions in line with the country’s Paris Agreement goals.

Outside of Texas, energy project developers across the country face years-long wait times just to win the rights to interconnect to transmission grids. Even after the wait, those interconnection rights often come along with grid upgrade fees so high that developers opt to walk away from their proposed projects.

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