Jeff Guldner, President of APS

PUF's Steve Mitnick: There's a lot going on at APS. What are some of the most impactful changes for customers?

Jeff Guldner: We recently made an announcement that is an important indicator of where the Desert Southwest is going. We announced a plan, following the results of an RFP, to pursue battery storage at a significant scale. We made a commitment that between now and 2025, we'll be adding eight hundred and fifty megawatts of battery storage, including one hundred megawatts of new solar-plus storage. 

Let me break that into a couple of compartments. One is that we've got a number of utility-scale solar plants currently on our system. We have about one thousand five-hundred megawatts of solar on the system in a combination of solar thermal, rooftop solar and utility-scale solar.

For each of our Arizona Sun utility-scale projects we'll be adding a battery storage component. We'll also add an additional one hundred megawatts of solar with storage. 

We're taking advantage of the declining price of battery technology with the abundant solar energy that we see during the day that stops at four or five in the afternoon. We peak after that, so we have to find some way that we can store the energy and then use it later at peak and in the evening hours.