“OUR STRATEGY IN BATTERIES AIMS TO BOOST THE GROWTH OF RENEWABLES”
“Energy storage is a key solution to address the intermittent availability of renewable energy sources and increase grid stability. The challenge is an important one: to make renewable energy more reliable and competitive in the global energy market. Omnes, via its Capenergie 5 fund, is actively committed to meeting that challenge, as shown by its 2022 investment in TagEnergy, a wellknown innovator in this space.”
Increasing grid stability with batteries
TagEnergy, a French company belonging to the Impala group, stands out by having full control of its value chain: from development, financing, construction and management of wind, to solar and storage assets.
“We knew from the start that batteries would be at the core of our development,” explains Monica Andreu, TagEnergy’s CTO. “Eight years ago, TagEnergy’s co-founders were living in Australia. The power grid was paralyzed by increasingly violent storms. Energy security became a priority for the government, which adopted an initiative to roll out battery storage across the country.”
Batteries were chosen as the solution to stabilize the grid, ensuring a constant supply of electricity by actively contributing to the national grid’s balancing reserve.
Increasing the overall supply of green energy
We wanted to innovate and change what it means to be an IPP. We thought that the merchant model would be the way to go, at a time when nobody was thinking about merchant exposure,” says Monica Andreu. With batteries, it was possible to follow that path. “For our industrial clients, we are working on pooling batteries between facilities to optimize the capacity of industrial grids and reduce costs. We want to address demand for local assets in a more specific way, for example in the case of a factory that has a high level of energy demand during peak production times,” explains TagEnergy’s CTO. “We make the electricity market more flexible in general by increasing supply.”
A fast-growing UK market
“In recent years, the UK has developed offshore wind, but without really having a grid large enough to deal with its intermittent availability. The government appointed us to stabilize storage quickly,” says Monica Andreu. TagEnergy boosted its business by acquiring a 60% stake in two battery storage projects as part of a joint venture with Harmony Energy in 2023, and through another partnership with Tesla, Habitat Energy and RES. These projects, and TagEnergy’s other sites under construction, will add over 350 MW of storage capacity to the UK power grid in the next two years alone.
TagEnergy operates in France, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Australia and will soon look to expand in other countries. “We are very excited about what’s coming next for renewable energy and batteries and we expect to be one of the major players in this sector,” adds Monica Andreu.
First published in Scope Fall 2024