How do you see the market for solar and storage projects in the United States this year? How is demand spread across the different regions and grid providers?
This is probably one of the first times in the past few decades where there’s been a sustained projected demand increase for electricity. If you look at all the projections out to the next five to 10 years, you see massive, multi-gigawatt growth rates across various markets in the US.
The top three markets that that we see growth in are ERCOT [Texas], PJM [Eastern US], and MISO [Central]. They’re driven by large loads, so manufacturing, data centers, etc., that are requiring power to connect to the grid. That’s where we’re seeing the big sources of demand, although other markets in the US are attractive and are experiencing a lot of electricity demand growth as well.
Vesper has a sizable pipeline of projects on the way. How are those split between solar and energy storage?
Almost every project in our pipeline has storage. We’ve got one major project operating right now, the Hornet Solar project, that’s PV only. We have another project, the 200 MW Nazareth Solar, that is also PV only. But the majority of projects in our pipeline have some aspect of storage associated with them. I’d say roughly 60% of our pipeline is PV plus storage and the other 40% is standalone storage.
Do you see much of a retrofit market, adding co-located storage to older solar projects?
Source link
