Sungrow will provide Spearmint Energy with more than a gigawatt-hour of battery energy storage system (BESS) technology after signing an agreement with the US developer.
The Chinese PV inverter manufacturer and battery storage system integrator will deploy its PowerTitan 2.0 liquid-cooled containerised BESS solution at Spearmint Energy projects in the Texas ERCOT market.
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The two companies announced the deal last week (23 August). PowerTitan 2.0 will be installed at Texas projects through 2025.
It builds on an existing relationship which has seen Sungrow BESS units power Spearmint’s first major project, also in Texas.
Completed at the end of last year, Spearmint’s 150MW/300MWh Revolution project features 134 Sungrow BESS containers and 45 Sungrow power conversion system (PCS) units.
Spearmint acquired Revolution from Con Edison in 2022 before breaking ground on it in December of that year.
It was thought to be one of the US’ first-ever BESS projects to leverage the investment tax credit (ITC) for standalone storage as the developer secured US$92 million in tax equity financing.
While a release from Sungrow and Spearmint did not disclose details of the projects to be included in the scope of the new agreement, in March 2023 Spearmint acquired a 900MW three-project portfolio in Texas from an unnamed developer, set to come online during 2025.
Research firm Wood Mackenzie ranked Sungrow as the second-top energy storage system integrator globally for 2023 in a recent report. Sungrow had been top in 2022 but lost out to Tesla last year. Meanwhile, Sungrow, Tesla and Fluence, the top three in Wood Mackenzie’s rankings for the US market, increased their combined market share of the US market to 72% last year from 60% the year before.
Thanks to ERCOT’s deregulated wholesale electricity market, Texas has the second largest installed base of grid-scale battery storage assets by state in the US after California, with about 5GW participating in ERCOT, to more than 10GW already online on California’s CAISO grid.
ERCOT also appears to be growing faster than California’s CAISO market and is due to close in on around 9.5GW of cumulative installs by the end of this year, by some projections.
BESS revenues in ERCOT average at about US$200,000/MW/year in 2023, according to Modo Energy ERCOT lead Brandt Vermillion. Speaking to Energy-Storage.news Premium for a recent interview, Vermillion said that revenues will be lower in 2024, but the wholesale price volatility that battery storage assets are well-placed to capture will increase.
