More battery storage is coming to Texas, Spearmint and Sungrow team up again

Green services company Spearmint Energy and storage behemoth Sungrow USA have agreed to deploy more than 1 gigawatt hour (GWh) of additional energy storage capacity at Spearmint projects in Texas through 2025, promising to add to a growing queue of batteries interconnecting in ERCOT territory.

“We are pleased to once again partner with Sungrow – a producer of high-quality, low-cost products needed to advance the energy transition – to bring our battery storage projects to completion,” said Peter Rood, chief development officer of Spearmint. “Spearmint’s latest projects will leverage Sungrow’s integrated platform and allow us to quickly deploy new storage capacity to meet the growing need for the reliable, low-cost energy that powers the Texas economy while creating new jobs and additional tax revenue for local communities.”

Spearmint’s projects will utilize Sungrow’s PowerTitan 2.0, which the company describes as “A new, state-of-the-art energy storage system” that “includes an easily scalable design and enhanced fire suppression features, including advanced liquid-cooling technology.” Sungrow says its system maintains top performance in harsh environments (ones like Texas certainly can provide) and reduces auxiliary power consumption.

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This isn’t the first time Spearmint and Sungrow have teamed up, lending this new agreement extra weight. In January, Spearmint announced the completion of its inaugural project, Revolution – a 150 MW/300 MWh BESS in Crane, 30 miles south of Odessa in West Texas. Revolution utilizes Sungrow’s PowerTitan Series storage system and includes 134 battery containers holding 6,432 battery modules.

“Spearmint Energy has quickly become a leader in BESS, and we are excited to deepen our partnership with a market player of its caliber. Like Sungrow, Spearmint fundamentally believes in the power of cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions to enhance grid stability. We are pleased to have our products support Spearmint’s projects,” said Martial Yu, head of service at Sungrow.

Sungrow ranks amongst the top global producers in the BESS integrator market. After laying claim to the number one spot in 2022, the company was narrowly overtaken by Tesla in 2023, which earned a 15% market share according to Wood Mackenzie’s Global battery energy storage system integrator rankings report. Tesla, Sungrow, and Fluence captured 72% of North America’s market share for BESS shipments in 2023, growing 20% YoY.

As ERCOT powers through peak demand with an increasingly favorable mix of wind and solar generation, battery energy storage is dutifully lining up to lend support in Texas. The United States added nearly 4 gigawatts (GW) of storage capacity in the second quarter of this year according to S&P Global Commodity Insights, and more (1.2 GW) went to ERCOT than anywhere else.

Texas now boasts nearly 8 GW of storage capacity, trailing only California (10.3 GW) nationally. That figure is up about 35% from the start of the year, according to ERCOT. The state has been a bastion of BESS development since Winter Storm Uri killed 246 people and ravaged the Texas grid in February of 2021. Since then, ERCOT’s storage capacity has grown by more than 2400%, and places that could really use batteries are starting to get them, like central Houston’s new Callisto I Energy Center, a 200 MW/400 MWh battery energy storage system from Jupiter Power.

Originally published by Paul Gerke on renewableenergyworld.com