More recently, energy company Enel Green Power completed a wind-plus-storage project, and RWE completed the installation of inverters for a project, both in Texas, USA.
The recently completed Azure Sky Wind + Storage Power Station in Throckmorton County, Texas, which combines 350MW of wind power with 136.5MW/204.6MWh of battery storage, is Enel Green Power's first in the world Large-scale hybrid wind power projects.
One of the power off-takers for the plant, breakfast cereal company Kellogg, will buy 360GWh of the project's projected 1,300GWh of electricity per year.
The companies said the projects will strengthen Texas' grid during periods of peak power demand with clean generation and dispatchable energy storage resources.
The company will also build three more wind-plus-storage projects in Texas, with construction to begin within a few months of the completion of the Azure Sky project, and a companion PV-plus-storage project -- Azure Sky PV-storage -- Under development in Haskell County, it includes 284MW of photovoltaics and 95MW of battery storage.
Additionally, Germany-based global energy company RWE recently completed the installation of all inverters on site for its Texas Waves II project, a 30MW/30MWh battery energy storage project adjacent to the existing Pydon wind farm that is expected to Coming online in late 2022, it will be RWE's largest AC-coupled battery system in the Americas.
RWE said the project will provide grid ancillary services to the Electric Reliability Commission of Texas (ERCOT), as well as participate in the electric energy market through load shifting services, and the two services will share half of the revenue of the energy storage project.
So far, the coordination of energy storage and renewable energy generation has mainly been in the field of photovoltaic distribution and storage, rather than wind power distribution and storage, because wind power projects are often large in scale, which means larger batteries are required, and the intermittent volatility of wind power generation Also more violent than photovoltaics, meaning the battery undergoes more cycles and ages faster, while photovoltaics are somewhat predictable.
The intermittency of wind power has also led some flow battery companies to believe that flow batteries are more suitable for supporting wind power than lithium-ion batteries. However, to date, most wind power distribution and storage projects, including the latest from RWE and Enel Green Power, still use common lithium-ion batteries.
