World’s biggest battery — to drill for oil

● The world’s largest battery could soon be storing solar energy deep in the heart of Texas oil country.

The 495MW storage system would be built in tandem with a solar farm of the same size in Borden County, Texas. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates most of the state’s grid, posted the details in a chart that shows the state’s battery storage will surge more than sixfold to 584MW when the projects are completed in 2021.

Bigger batteries are being developed to help make the electricity produced through solar and wind power more efficient, even when the sun goes down and it gets less breezy. Recent battery-backed solar projects have, at most, 100MW of panels and 30MW of storage, said Yayoi Sekine, an analyst at Bloomberg NEF. “This would be about five times that,” Sekine said.

The project underscores how Big Oil’s demand for power in the fossil fuels-rich Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico is, in a twist, boosting the case for renewable energy. Texas’s power grid operator has stressed the need for more electricity resources in the region to power oil and gas drilling operations.

IP Juno, a unit of San Francisco-based Intersect Power, has outlined plans to build a 400MW solar facility by the second quarter of 2021 in Borden County, according to an application concerning its state property taxes. Borden County, with a population of fewer than 700, is located within the oil-rich Permian Basin.

Vistra Energy just completed what is now the largest battery storage facility in Texas with a 10MW system connected to a solar farm. It is also planning a project at the Moss Landing power plant in California, which will store 300MW for as long as four hours.