Terra-Gen’s $950M Lockhart pairs 365 MW solar with 173.7 MW storage

There's a new 538.7 MW power plant in Hinkley, California, and it comes in two parts. Terra-Gen announced on Nov. 10 that its $950 million Lockhart Solar and Storage project in San Bernardino County is in commercial operation, marked with a ribbon-cutting attended by employees, local and state officials, lenders, partners and customers. The company's release, distributed on PR Newswire, says the site can meet the annual electricity needs of about 350,000 homes and businesses.

The split between the two parts is the useful detail. Lockhart pairs 365 MW of solar with 173.7 MW of batteries, close to one megawatt of storage for every two of solar, which is how a plant that runs on daylight gets to sell power when it's needed most. Terra-Gen chief executive John O'Connor made the same case at the ceremony: solar is one of the cheapest sources of new electricity, and storage adds value by holding that energy for the hours of highest need.

The 538.7 MW headline is just those two numbers added together, so batteries make up about 32% of it. If you're comparing Lockhart with a solar-only plant, start from the 365 MW of panels. The batteries are best read the way O'Connor frames them, as a way to move some of that solar output to the hours when it's needed, not as a separate source of generation.

Anyone who buys power in California, whether a utility or a company signing its own supply contract, can use Lockhart as a reference. It is a recent, fully built example of how much battery capacity a large solar developer puts next to its panels, and who ends up buying the result.

Inside the Hinkley build

The supplier list shows how a project this size is split up. Cupertino Electric was the balance-of-plant engineering, procurement and construction contractor, and EPC Services handled the high-voltage work. First Solar supplied the modules and Nextpower supplied the tracking systems. Simon Day, Terra-Gen's vice president and head of solar development, said the team delivered on schedule and on budget while maintaining a strong focus on safety.

Some rough math helps put the price in context. Divide $950 million by 538.7 MW and you get about $1.76 million per megawatt of combined capacity. Treat that as an order of magnitude, not a benchmark. It mixes solar and storage in one figure, and the release doesn't break out costs for interconnection, land or financing.

The tax figure shows the county's side of the deal. More than $40 million over the plant's operating life comes to a little over 4% of the $950 million build cost. Terra-Gen says it will also make other contributions and provide other benefits to the local community.

The labor figures tell a story of their own. Terra-Gen says construction created more than 1,000 on-site jobs. Spread 880,000 hours across at least 1,000 workers and the average comes to no more than about 880 hours each, roughly 22 forty-hour weeks over a four-year build. Run it the other way and it's about 4,200 hours a week, or the equivalent of roughly 105 people working full time for the entire build.

That gap between more than 1,000 jobs and about 105 full-time equivalents suggests crews came and went as each trade's phase started and finished, rather than one workforce staying for the whole build. That is an inference from the averages, not a staffing record. If it holds, counties planning for housing, traffic and local hiring around the next big project could see headcount peak well above the average in some phases instead of holding steady.

Corporate buyers and utilities share the output

Terra-Gen sells Lockhart's power under two kinds of contract: offtake agreements with corporate buyers, and long-term power purchase agreements with California load-serving entities, the utilities and other retailers that buy electricity for their customers. Masdar, which co-owns Terra-Gen with Igneo Infrastructure Partners, described the same mix in its own statement on Nov. 13.

So a company buying clean power can sign up for the same storage-backed plant a utility buys from. The release doesn't name the buyers or describe their terms, so Lockhart's battery ratio doesn't prove that any particular buyer gets evening power. What it does show is the kind of plant a buyer in California can now contract with.

Hourly timing matters more to some buyers than others. A company with heavy evening or overnight load in California, or one reporting its clean energy hour by hour, should care more about how the battery output is assigned than one that only buys renewable energy certificates.

Masdar's 25 GW American target

Masdar framed the plant as part of a bigger US push. It says it has invested about $3 billion in the United States, plans to invest another $20 billion over the next decade, and wants its US portfolio to reach up to 25 GW by 2030. Terra-Gen's gross operating portfolio stands at 4.4 GW of wind, solar and battery storage across 34 sites, mostly in California and Texas, according to the corrected company boilerplate. Lockhart's 538.7 MW equals about an eighth of that figure.

The US goal sits inside a bigger one. Masdar was founded in 2006 and is jointly owned by TAQA, ADNOC and Mubadala. It says its portfolio already tops 65 GW across six continents and that it is aiming for 100 GW by 2030. At up to 25 GW, the US could account for as much as a quarter of that global target.

Terra-Gen's other owner has scale of its own. Igneo Infrastructure Partners, an autonomous investment team within First Sentier Group, managed US$34.7 billion as of Sept. 30, 2026, on behalf of more than 200 investors, according to the corrected release. Check which version you're quoting from: syndicated copies of the original, including those on Yahoo Finance and IndexBox, still carry an older figure of $24.5 billion as of March 31, 2026.

Khaleefa Almheiri, president and CEO of Masdar Americas, said in the statement that power demand is growing fast because of AI, advanced manufacturing and broader economic growth. He described the partnership as Masdar's global expertise and investment capacity combined with Terra-Gen's strong local presence, and Masdar says that through Terra-Gen it is supporting American jobs, local manufacturing and supply chains. TradeArabia carried the same remarks.

But Lockhart's own contracts point somewhere more ordinary. Nothing in either announcement ties the plant to a data center. Its buyers are corporate customers and California load-serving entities. The demand Masdar describes may be real, but this plant's power is going to the usual grid buyers.

The next test is what Terra-Gen builds next in California and Texas, the two states where most of its 34 sites are. If those projects also carry close to one battery megawatt for every two of solar, and come with published megawatt-hour ratings, buyers will have a working template for what a storage-backed solar contract should include as Masdar's $20 billion goes to work.