Solmar Insights
Avantus has reached commercial operation for its 200 MW solar and 500 MWh storage installation, Aratina 1, in Kern County, California, solidifying its presence in the state’s utility-scale clean energy market. Alongside this milestone, Avantus has secured $525 million in funding to commence the 150 MW, 452 MWh Aratina 2 expansion, set to deepen its contribution to California’s renewable grid mix.
Key figures
200 MW solar and 500 MWh storage (Aratina 1)
150 MW solar and 452 MWh storage (Aratina 2)
$525 million in phase 2 financing
15-year PPA with Southern California Edison for Aratina 2
Phase one operational impact
The opening of Aratina 1 marks the operational debut of a major solar-plus-storage resource for California’s power system. Serving Central Coast Community Energy and Silicon Valley Clean Energy through long-term contracts, the facility provides enough clean electricity to power around 105,000 homes annually. By pairing 200 MW of solar output with 500 MWh of battery storage, Avantus is delivering not only bulk renewable energy but also grid reliability and peak demand management solutions.
This site adds valuable flexibility to the region’s power market, offering dispatchable renewables that can alleviate stress during California’s evening ramp and contribute to resource adequacy requirements. For buyers, particularly the contracting CCAs, signing onto bundled solar-plus-storage PPAs provides a hedge against extreme peak prices and supports decarbonization mandates established by state policy.
The project’s financing, orchestrated by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., Truist Securities, ING Capital, and Mizuho, included over $500 million in capital and a $300 million tax equity commitment from Truist Bank. During construction, Aratina 1 created roughly 500 jobs, demonstrating the economic development benefits tied to utility-scale energy infrastructure in rural areas.
Avantus’s commercial strategy, maintaining partial ownership and operational control, also creates longer-term revenue streams, an increasingly common approach as merchant risk in wholesale markets grows and utilities seek project partners with dependable operational capabilities.
Second phase: financing and PPA structure
For Aratina 2, Avantus secured a $525 million package from BBVA, CIBC, and Santander, structured to include construction debt, a tax equity bridge loan, and letters of credit. The blend allows Avantus to draw capital through the project’s build phase and manage tax credit monetization, reflecting evolving financial engineering in renewable asset development.
This second phase features a 150 MW solar array and 452 MWh of battery storage, demonstrating a continued emphasis on coupling PV generation with flexible energy storage. Unlike Aratina 1’s CCA offtake, Aratina 2 is anchored by a 15-year power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison (SCE), signaling robust utility appetite for long-duration renewable capacity.
The choice of debt and tax equity partners in both phases highlights the participation of both major U.S. and international banks in financing U.S. clean energy projects. The inclusion of construction and tax equity bridge loans is increasingly common, as developers aim to bridge project capital gaps until federal tax credits are realized or syndicated.
About 300 union construction jobs are being created during Aratina 2’s buildout. The project is targeted for commercial operation by the close of 2026, at which point the two phases will bring combined capacity to 350 MW solar and 952 MWh storage at the Aratina site.
Clean energy offtakers and market strategy
Avantus is leveraging its Independent Power Producer (IPP) model to hold equity interests in both Aratina projects, retaining operational oversight versus outright sale to third-party owners. This strategy supports stable recurring revenues and offers buyers assurance over project reliability and asset management quality.
The contracted buyers, 3CE and SVCE, are among California’s expanding community choice aggregators (CCAs), which are increasingly seeking directly sourced renewables and storage to fulfill regulatory and constituent expectations. For Aratina 2, the 15-year PPA with SCE further diversifies Avantus’s offtaker mix, ensuring a blend of utility and community-based offtake risk profiles.
These offtake arrangements are central to enabling project financings at this scale, as long-term contracts provide stable revenue floors for lenders and tax equity investors. In California’s resource-planning context, hybrid solar-storage assets like Aratina also support load-serving entities in meeting Resource Adequacy and clean energy portfolio requirements through a single bundled resource.
Avantus’s projects provide insight into the evolving strategies developers pursue in the West, integrating multiple offtake types and maintaining developer equity to capture post-construction project value, while also helping CCAs and IOUs meet policy-driven clean energy targets efficiently.
Regional portfolio and future expansion
Aratina represents just one node in Avantus’s expanding western U.S. portfolio, which the company reports now totals 13 GW of solar and 44 GWh of storage in development across California, Nevada, and Arizona. Such a distributed, high-volume pipeline is critical as western states accelerate the retirement of fossil generation and ramp up capacity procurement for system reliability.
Upcoming projects like Rexford 2 in Tulare County indicate Avantus’s further ambitions in hybrid renewable deployments, expected to leverage lessons from the Aratina structure and financing. As California relies more heavily on solar-plus-storage to manage net peak pricing and mitigate curtailment, hybrid projects’ dispatchable energy will be vital for grid operators and resource planners.
The technical maturity, financing competence, and offtaker engagement demonstrated at Aratina are benchmarks for developers seeking to participate competitively in upcoming RFOs and bilateral procurement rounds in the CAISO footprint and beyond.
For institutional investors and transmission planners, the ongoing buildout underscores the need to align grid interconnection capacity and congestion management planning with these sizable hybrid resources, as project clustering in regions like Kern County grows ever more pronounced.
Implications for CAISO and Western markets
The Aratina projects anchor significant new dispatchable capacity within CAISO, a market facing tight summer reserve margins and growing operational challenges from midday solar oversupply. By pairing nearly 1 GWh of battery storage with over 350 MW of new solar, Avantus directly addresses grid needs around flexibility, congestion mitigation, and fast-ramping ancillary services.
Securing financing and offtakers for nearly 1 GWh of storage demonstrates market confidence in the California solar-plus-storage model, even amid interconnection queue constraints and policy uncertainty. The transactions may serve as a bellwether for how hybrid projects secure large, multi-phase capital injections and long-term procurement commitments in competitive power markets.
Other developers, buyers, and lenders will closely monitor the performance of Aratina’s storage fleet, as CAISO continues to refine market rules for co-located and hybrid assets. The project’s dual phase structure also offers lessons for how to stage large infrastructure investments while pulling revenue forward through tax equity and PPA structures that accommodate rapid policy-driven procurement cycles.
As the Western interconnection evolves, these kinds of deployments highlight the role of fast-cycle project finance, union labor requirements, and CCA-centric procurement in shaping the next wave of grid modernization investment.
What this means for buyers
For institutional buyers and energy market participants, Avantus’s layered development and finance approach for Aratina underscores the central role of hybrid assets in near-term capacity procurement. The use of multi-offtaker strategies and long-term PPAs with both CCAs and a major utility enhances revenue certainty and risk diversification, which will be critical as California’s power mix continues to evolve. Buyers should note the increasing sophistication in project finance structures and the ongoing need for reliable sponsors with operational depth. The scaling of hybrid solar-storage assets like Aratina is positioned to set procurement and grid integration precedents for similar transactions across Western power markets.
