Chile's giant batteries are learning to save the sunshine for after dark

Engie has started commercial operations at two large battery projects north of Santiago, Chile — Libélula and Los Loros — with a combined 251 megawatts and 1,309 megawatt-hours of storage, in a commissioning round totalling 802 megawatt-hours reported by Energy-Storage.News. Storage like this lets solar farms keep their midday surplus instead of switching off, then release it into the evening peak. Chile's Atacama region, one of the sunniest places on Earth, is becoming a testbed for exactly that shift.