Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Westwood Professional Services. Corio Generation signed a memorandum of understanding with Brazilian shipyard EBR to explore offshore wind in Brazil. AGL Energy has acquired Firm Power and Terrain Solar for $250 million Australian.

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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor.com.

Australian utility giant AGL Energy has announced a major acquisition, agreeing to purchase two domestic renewable energy developers, battery storage specialist Firm Power and solar farm developer Terrain Solar for 250 million Australian dollars. This deal will add an impressive 8. 1 gigawatts to AGL's development pipeline, bringing their total to over 14 gigawatts.

The acquisition includes 6. 1 gigawatts of battery storage projects across five states, 1. 8 gigawatts of solar schemes, and 250 megawatts of onshore wind project in New South Wales. AGL CEO Damian Nix emphasized that this high quality pipeline will help firm renewable energy generation as thermal baseload generation exits the national electricity market.

Now Phil There's been a lot of discussion most recently in Australia about removing natural gas and other forms of thermal energy from the electricity grid. This makes a lot of sense for AGL to step into the void, right?

Philip Totaro: It does. And when you also consider that they've had a lot of, recent price fluctuations which a lot of wind and solar opponents were trying to blame on wind and solar, but in reality, it's, it's because they don't have the right kind of balance and mix in the electricity market.

And as we talked about on the show before as well They don't have intrastate energy trading and market balancing that allows them to really take advantage of supply and demand disparities. So the fact that AGL, which is kind of a national utility, they have the ability to do things, across multiple states that will be to the benefit of the entire grid and state level stability.

Joel Saxum: So the, the, one of the things I love about what a Australia does in the renewable energy grid is they're, they make pretty good moves to, to really remove some of the old stuff. And their solar gen generation and their wind generation are kicking butt. But what this deal, really what shines in this deal to me, is the 6.1 gigawatts of battery storage.

So whether you're using battery storage. Depending on what kind of battery storage it is, because batteries don't mean, double A's that you have in your calculator. They can be all kinds of different things. But it's a really good way to get rid of the thermal base load generation, because if there is slowdowns, in peak periods or whatever, the batteries can kick in to make that happen.

So, of this, these acquisitions, 6. 1 gigawatts of battery storage is really nice to see, and I'm excited to see some of the same things start to happen in the United States.

Allen Hall: Offshore wind developer Corio Generation has signed a memorandum of understanding with Brazilian shipyard EBR.