13 MW Of Solar Power And 6 MWh Of Storage For Connecticut

A 13 megawatt (MW) solar power system with 6 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy storage will be installed in southern Connecticut by SolarCity and Brightfields Development, in collaboration with the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative.

“CMEEC’s focus is on energizing customers and community prosperity, so we are excited to help create clean, reliable and locally based power resources.  These systems utilize leading edge technology that is both powerful and fiscally responsible,” said Drew Rankin, the utility’s CEO.

SolarCity and Brightfields have already starting working on the solar power project at 7 sites, which are located in Groton, Bozrah, and Norwich. The project sites are on former agricultural land that is not being farmed or land that is not being fully used. Mountain Ash Farm is one of the sites and it was used for dairy production and planting corn but soon it will be used for generating electricity. According to SEIA, Connecticut has about 219 MW of solar power installed.

13 MW of solar power is not a huge installation, but pairing it with energy storage is noteworthy because this combination can solve the intermittency issue with solar power. Increasingly, such deployments are taking place.

Because of the emergence of battery systems which are matched with solar power arrays, solar power is much more practical and attractive. So much so, that one of the major points of anti-solar people has been almost completely eliminated. As battery systems for solar power increase in size and efficiency with greater demand and more research, they will become more prevalent.

Currently, only about 1% of electricity generated in the United States comes from solar power, but that amount is set to increase fairly rapidly. Energy storage systems will only help accelerate solar power’s rise.

Image Credit: John Phelan, CC BY-SA 3.0