Engie turns on Latin America’s largest storage battery

Engie Chile, the Chilean unit of French energy giant Engie, said it has finalized the construction of a 139 MW/638 MWh battery. It claimed it is the largest energy storage system to be installed in Latin America.

The storage facility is connected to the 181.2 MW Coya PV plant, in Maira Elena, in northern Chile’s Antofagasta region, which has one of the world’s highest levels of solar radiation. Engie announced the project in December 2022.

The installation consists of 232 containers that are distributed evenly among the 58 inverters of the solar plant. It is equivalent to the average delivery of 200 GWh per year.

“After the entry into commercial operation of BESS Coya, we now have 640 MWh of storage capacity in the country,” said Juan Villavicencio, managing director renewables for Engie Chile. “We will add two more projects that are currently under construction: BESS Tamaya (68 MW/418 MWh) and BESS Capricornio (48 MW/264 MWh). That will translate into around 255 MW of power for 5 hours of energy discharge mainly at night.”

Chinese manufacturer Sungrow supplied batteries for the project. The storage systems are based on the company’s PowerTitan liquid cooling energy storage technology.

The Coya solar plant began operating in April 2023. Engie currently operates another storage system in Arica, Chile. The system, which was commissioned in 2019, is based on lithium-ion batteries and has a capacity of 2 MWh.