Salt River Project (SRP) and Flatland Storage, a subsidiary of EDP Renewables North America (EDPR NA), have entered into an agreement to provide new energy storage to Arizona’s grid.
The Flatland Energy Storage Project will be a 200 MW battery energy storage system located near Coolidge, Ariz. Scheduled to be online next year, the project will utilize lithium-ion technology, designed and manufactured in the U.S. by Tesla.
This is SRP’s second project in partnership with EDPR NA. The first, Brittlebush Solar Park, provides 200 MW of solar energy to SRP customers. The energy storage project is located within the solar park. The location will allow the battery to store energy from the grid or from the solar facility.
“We’re excited to be partnering with SRP on the largest utility-scale storage project in the EDP Group’s global portfolio to date,” says Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of EDPR NA.
“Storage is key to modernizing the U.S. power grid and is a requisite in accelerating the adoption of renewable energy, while boosting grid reliability and resiliency.”
Through its Integrated System Plan, SRP found it will need to at least double the number of generating resources on its power system in the next 10 years to meet increasing energy demand in the Phoenix metropolitan area as it moves forward with the planned retirement of 1,300 MW of coal resources.
SRP currently has 1,300 MW of storage and 3,000 MW online.