Visiting APS
Jeff Burke is the Director for Resource Planning at Arizona Public Service Company.
PUF's Liz Stipnieks: APS just made a ground-breaking announcement on adding eight hundred and fifty megawatts of battery storage, along with an additional one hundred megawatts of solar.
Jeff Burke: Yes, we're excited about the commitment of a gigawatt of new clean tech on the APS system. To our knowledge, that is the largest installment of energy storage, anywhere.
Specifically, we're installing two hundred megawatts of three-hour storage on our existing Arizona Sun solar facilities. We signed two, four-hour energy storage contracts that total one hundred and fifty MW of capacity. We announced plans to develop one hundred MW of solar with storage by 2021, a PVS plant. And we have plans to install another four hundred MW of energy storage by 2025.
Adding energy storage installations on our existing AZ Sun facilities does a couple of things. They allow us to absorb energy when there's excess solar on the grid during midday in the non-summer months. We call that the duck curve. It also allows us to take the sun's energy, store it and use it when the sun goes down and effectively meet our system peaks when customers use more energy at night during the hot Arizona summers. That's the idea driving the retrofits to these existing APS-owned solar facilities.