It’s not that Invenergy was ever shy about its storage ambitions.
The Chicago-based developer, which has built 22,600 megawatts of wind, solar and natural-gas generation, entered the storage market in a big way back in 2015. It delivered two 31.5-megawatt projects within six months of each other, outranking any other batteries installed in the U.S. that year.
Then the company went quiet — a fittingly massive followup didn’t materialize. Until early this year, when Invenergy revealed that it would supply much of utility Arizona Public Service’s landmark 850-megawatt energy storage procurement, designed to shift its ample solar resource into nighttime capacity.
APS enlisted Invenergy to supply a 50-megawatt system under a power-purchase agreement, and to build and transfer a portfolio of 140 megawatts connected to APS solar plants (more may follow, as the details get ironed out).
These and a few other projects bring Invenergy’s portfolio of operating or contracted storage to 260 megawatts and 700 megawatt-hours. To top it off, the Energy Storage Association awarded Invenergy the Outstanding Industry Achievement Award at this week’s conference in Phoenix, not far from where the big battery will appear.
Greentech Media sat down with Kris Zadlo, Invenergy’s senior vice president in charge of storage development, to hear how the company got to where it is now.
Build and learn
Zadlo’s team began investigating storage in 2011, and installed its first pilot in 2012 — a 2.5-megawatt system in the PJM grid.
The company followed up with the two 31.5-megawatt deployments in 2015, both operating as merchant frequency regulation plays in PJM, the first major utility-scale storage market. One of those, the Grand Ridge Energy Center, won the innovation award from Energy Storage North America.
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