Enel Green Power North America has begun construction of a wind-plus-storage hybrid resources project in Texas that will serve off takers including breakfast cereal maker Kellogg Company.

The Azure Sky wind and storage project will pair 350 MW of wind power capacity with “approximately 137MW of battery storage” in Throckmorton County, Texas, the renewable energy developer’s parent company Enel said in a press release last week. The expected capacity of the battery portion was not revealed.

Azure Sky will generate more than 1300 GWh of electricity annually from its 79 wind turbines. Enel said that the battery storage system will store some of that power while also providing grid services. A 100 MW virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) has been signed with Kellogg Company for 360 GWh of that expected annual generation, equivalent to around half the electricity demand from Kellogg’s manufacturing facilities in North America today.

This will be Enel’s first-ever large-scale wind project combined with battery storage and third renewables-plus-storage hybrid in total. All three are being built in Texas. Enel Green Power broke ground on Lily solar-storage in Texas’ Kaufman County, the group’s first solar-plus-storage hybrid project, last summer. It is also now building Azure Sky solar and storage, which is near to the wind hybrid and has 284 MW of solar generation capacity, of which 225 MW peak power can be injected into the grid.

When it announced the start of construction of the Lily 146 MW solar PV project, with 50 MW/75 MWh of battery-storage, in July 2020, the company said that it intends to deploy 1 GW of battery storage to be colocated with new and existing renewable energy facilities over two years. This was in addition to a new target of installing around 1 GW of solar and wind during that timeframe, which the company set itself and its North American subsidiary.

Acknowledgement

This article was first published by Energy-Storage News