Arizona utility Salt River Project (SRP) and renewables developer NextEra Energy Resources have commissioned a 260MW solar-plus-storage project in Buckeye, Arizona, US.
The Sonoran Solar Energy Center includes a battery energy storage system (BESS) with the same power output as the PV plant (260MW) and a 1GWh capacity.
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The electricity produced will help power technology giant Google’s upcoming data centre campus in Mesa, Arizona. The surplus energy not used by the data centre will be provided to other SRP customers.
This latest project builds on a relationship between utility and developer, with both companies starting commercial operations of a 100MW battery storage system with 4-hour duration in Pinal County, Arizona, last December. Both companies have also built other renewables projects in Arizona which aim to power Google’s facilities, including the recently developed 88MW solar and BESS project in Coolidge.
Google is not the only big tech company to have secured power purchase agreements (PPAs) with the Arizona utility to power its data centres. Social media company Meta signed last December a solar-plus-storage PPA with SRP and Danish energy company Ørsted with energy provided through the Eleven Mile Solar Center in Arizona. The facility will have a 400MW solar PV plant along with a 300MW/1.2GWh BESS.
Moreover, the Arizonian utility currently has over 1GW of solar PV capacity operational.
This story was first published on our sister site, Energy-storage.news.