French oil giant TotalEnergies has reached commercial operations of a 380MWp solar-plus-storage project in Texas, US.
Located south of Houston, Myrtle Solar is co-located with 225MWh of energy storage systems (ESS) supplied by affiliate entity Saft, and includes 705,000 solar panels.
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Most of the capacity of the plant, 70%, will be supplied to the company’s own industrial plants in the US Golf Coast region, while the remaining 30% will be supplied to real estate firm Kilroy Realty under a 15-year corporate power purchase agreement (cPPA) indexed on merchant prices.
Interest in Texas keeps increasing, both at a downstream and upstream level, with the US state second to California in terms of installed solar capacity, but is expected to add the most solar PV in the coming five years, with more than 40GW, according to trade association Solar Energy Industries Association.
In order to achieve this, Texas will need to invest in upgrading its transmission grid if it wants to avoid any curtailment across the state as projections expect Texas to more than double its solar and wind capacity by 2035.
TotalEnergies is currently developing a 720MW solar farm in the state, for which it recently secured a PPA with French building materials manufacturer Saint-Gobin for 100MW of the plant’s capacity.
The project – which was initially developed by SunChase Power and Eolian – benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) tax credit mechanisms, according to TotalEnergies.
“We are very proud to start up Myrtle, TotalEnergies’ largest-to-date operated utility-scale solar farm with storage in the US. This startup is another milestone in achieving our goal to build an integrated and profitable position in Texas, where the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is the main electrical grid operator,” said Vincent Stoquart, senior vice president of Renewables at TotalEnergies.
Present in more than 30 US states, TotalEnergies has a portfolio of 25GW of solar, wind and storage projects operational and in various stages of development in the US.