LG Energy Solution Vertech’s Korea Operation Head Park Jae-hong, second from left, and OCI Energy President Sabah Bayatli, third from left, pose with Kim Cheong-ho, center, chief executive of OCI Enterprises and CPS Energy President and CEO Rudy D. Garza, fifth from left, during a groundbreaking ceremony for a major utility-scale battery storage project in Bexar County, Texas. Courtesy of OCI Holdings
OCI Holdings, the green energy and chemical conglomerate best known for producing polysilicon for solar panels, is expanding its footprint in the North American power grid.
The company said Wednesday that its Houston-based subsidiary, OCI Energy, has broken ground on a major utility-scale battery storage project in Bexar County, Texas, amid a broader corporate push into the North American renewable energy market.
The project, dubbed Alamo City, is being developed in partnership with San Antonio’s municipal utility, CPS Energy. Spanning a 140,000-square-meter site, the facility will boast an output capacity of 120 megawatts and a storage capacity of 480 megawatt-hours, making it one of the more significant grid-balancing installations in the region.
Scheduled to begin commercial operations in 2027, the installation is engineered to discharge up to four hours of continuous backup electricity during peak demand periods — enough to supply roughly 30,000 households in the San Antonio metropolitan area.
Key attendees at the ceremony included Kim Cheong-ho, chief executive of OCI Enterprises, OCI Energy President Sabah Bayatli, CPS Energy President and CEO Rudy D. Garza, and Park Jae-hong, head of LG Energy Solution Vertech’s Korea operations.
The deal is backed by project financing from ING Capital. LG Energy Solution Vertech has been tapped to supply the battery systems, while Elgin Power Solutions will oversee engineering, procurement and construction. Under a 20-year capacity agreement, OCI will sell the stored electricity back to CPS Energy, which serves 1.28 million households across Texas and has maintained a development partnership with OCI since 2012.
The groundbreaking follows a separate announcement on May 14, in which OCI Energy sold a 50 percent stake in its 500-megawatt La Salle solar project to Arava Power, an Israeli energy firm. The two companies plan to break ground on that site later this year.
With these latest moves, OCI Energy said it now commands a North American development pipeline of 31 projects totaling 7 gigawatts, split almost evenly between utility-scale solar and energy storage systems.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.
