Retrofitting batteries into existing solar plants

A former military microgrid developer will create the largest battery storage system in the state of Texas. A 10-megawatt/42-megawatt-hour storage system at the 180-megawatt Upton 2 solar plant in West Texas will be completed by the end of this year. It has a larger power capacity, but stores fewer megawatt-hours.
 

Retrofit existing solar plants

Large-scale storage retrofitted existing solar plants. At peak solar times, the plant creates about 20 megawatts more than it can export under its interconnection arrangement. The AC-coupled battery captures some of that energy that would’ve been wasted. This project took place because of its eligibility for the federal Investment Tax Credit, use of existing site and energy arbitrage opportunities. This front-of-the-meter battery project is led by Navy veteran Josh Prueher. After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prueher founded the company to give distributed energy systems for deployment in battlefield environments. The business  also worked on storage-backed microgrids to decrease fuel consumption. It deployed its first grid-tied storage  with a DC-coupled solar-plus-storage system in Puerto Rico. Prueher assembled a 525-megawatt-hour pipeline for solar-paired storage, mostly retrofits on existing utility-scale solar plants. “Adding storage to existing solar sites, particularly DC-coupled, is the lowest-cost way to deliver scaled storage attributes for their system,” he said. DC-coupled provides energy from solar modules and batteries through the same power conversion. Doing so saves on equipment costs and round-trip efficiency.
 

Looking for supplemental flexible services 

A growing number of utilities have been looking for supplemental flexible services without needing more renewable generation. Storage retrofits takes care of this. The firm takes existing solar generation and retrofit piggybacks on work done to plan the site for a power plant. This method is more cost effective to include storage capacity than it would be to add a new site. The Texas regulatory sector has been difficult for storage, noted Ravi Manghani, energy storage director at GTM Research. At the same time, grid operator ERCOT lacks capacity market, so storage can’t look into a value stream. “The Public Utility Commission of Texas has finally indicated interest in addressing the broader policy questions on treatment of storage, so there may be a thawing of policies in the coming years,” Manghani said. The increase of Texas solar contributes to the urgency to the storage policy issues. ERCOT has 27.8 gigawatts of solar capacity. As solar increases, ancillary services will gain in value that creates new market opportunities for storage. “Folks that understand not just how it can operate today, but over the life of the project, they have the vision to know that the regulatory structure is going to change,” Prueher said. Prueher draws battle-tested control system and operational data to design systems with 20-year lives. The controls shifting to different use cases automatically. He’s scaling project revenue and a $25.5 million Series A that includes investments from GE and Caterpillar. 
 
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