Borrego, a leading EPC and O&M provider for large-scale renewable energy projects throughout the United States, has completed construction on 15 solar-plus-energy storage projects in Massachusetts and New York for AES Corporation, a Fortune 500 global energy company. The solar installed across the projects totals 96 megawatts (MW) while the storage portion totals 50 MW/169 megawatt-hours (MWh), representing Borrego's largest storage portfolio built for one customer to date.
The solar-plus-storage systems range in size from 1.6 MW to 12 MW (solar) and 910 KW/1.7 MWh to 9 MW/17 MWh (storage). When fully interconnected, the portfolio will collectively generate enough clean electricity annually to power roughly 10,885 homes and offset 82,659 metric tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
The projects are among Borrego's first DC-coupled solar-plus-storage installations. The DC-coupling technology enables the solar arrays to generate up to 30% additional annual energy output for the same interconnection cost as they would have without storage.
These projects benefit the asset owner by taking full advantage of renewable energy state incentives, the utility by storing co-located solar system energy and community energy users as most projects are community solar. They also represent a variety of use cases, such as minimizing system peak demand through the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) program, maximizing the time-value of the plant's energy production under the NY Value of Distributed Energy Resource (VDER) tariff, and enabling wholesale market participation.
"Being an early adopter of energy storage and solar-plus-storage technologies has not been without its challenges, but the completion of the AES portfolio has made it all worthwhile," said John duPont, vice president of solutions at Borrego. "We collaborated with our product partners for years to develop and test the DC-coupled system hardware and energy management system controls that will enable these plants to deliver more solar generation per facility than was previously possible in this market."
