The Race to Build the World's Largest Solar-Storage Plant Is On

[jpak]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-28/the-race-to-build-the-world-s-largest-solar-storage-plant-is-on

Last year, a company won a contract to build a 65-megawatt solar and battery farm in Arizona. A month later, the Saudis came out with a $200 billion plan to build the world’s biggest battery-backed solar farm by 2030. Then a firm proposed a nearly 500-megawatt solar-storage site in Texas’s oil patch.

The race to build the biggest solar-battery plant is officially on.

And the latest to join the competition is renewable energy giant NextEra Energy Inc., which said Thursday that it’ll build a project in Florida that will claim the title of the largest solar-powered battery in the world. The 409-megawatt battery will be added to an existing 74.5-megawatt solar plant on the west coast of the state near Tampa, a company statement shows.

The project would be four times larger than any other battery system in operation. It’s all a testament to how powerful of a combination solar and storage has become. Batteries and renewable energy paired together are now threatening the economics of fossil fuel-fired power plants around the world. A BloombergNEF analysis issued this week showed storage is now, for the first time, the cheapest option for meeting peak power demand in some cases.

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