CPS Energy, a utility serving residents of San Antonio, Texas, has just broken ground on the first solar-plus-storage project it will own outright.

Known historically for its oil and in the present day for deploying large amounts of wind energy and latterly for deploying batteries at wind farms, the US state of Texas is less well known for solar-plus-storage projects.

Vistra Energy has contracted energy storage integrator FlexGen to install a 10MW / 42MWh energy storage system (ESS) at the 180MW Upton 2 Solar Power Plant in Texas.

News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

German-American system integrator and technology provider Younicos has completed a two-phase operation to upgrade a lead acid energy storage system for lithium batteries, at the 36MW Notrees facility in Texas.

Toshiba and NRG Energy have completed a new battery energy storage system that will benefit the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT) grid.

Ideal Power, the US company best known for its power conversion systems for energy storage, has announced two recent project orders totalling 1.6MW in northern Texas and in California.

Austin Energy, a publicly-owned electric utility in Texas, is delivering megawatt-scale storage systems as part of the US Department of Energy’s Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) project.

The North American subsidiary of international investor-owned energy supplier E.ON has partnered with Greensmith Energy to deliver two grid-scale energy storage systems known as the Texas Waves projects.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) and Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) have been awarded a US$3.24 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to demonstrate the use of energy storage to stabilise high penetrations of solar energy into Texas’ electric grid.