A map of Boralex’s five winning solar projects, one of which – Fort Covington – is co-located with storage. Image: Boralex.
New York has awarded 22 solar PV projects totalling 2.4GW of power, including six co-located sites with a combined 159MW of battery energy storage systems (BESS).
The awards represent the state’s largest land-based procurement of renewable energy to-date, first covered by Energy-Storage.news‘ sister site PV Tech. The 22 projects will require US$2.7 billion in investment and some or all should be online by 2025.
Winning co-located projects from developers EDF Renewables (three) and Boralex (one) account for 85% of the 159MW of awarded BESS capacity, with ReneSola Power and Northland Power also adding storage onto their winning solar projects.
EDF Renewables, part of the global French state-owned energy group, will deliver three sites with 20MW of BESS each: Columbia Solar Energy Center in Herkimer County, Ridge View Solar Energy Center in Niagara County and Rich Road Solar Energy Center in St. Lawrence County.
Columbia and Ridge View are also the largest winning solar projects by power, with 350MWac each, and Rich Road’s 250MWac brings EDF’s total contribution to 950MW, 40% of the 2,408MW awarded.
Boralex is pairing its 250MW Fort Covington Solar Farm with a 77MW/308MWh (four hours) BESS, in Suffolk County, while its four other winning projects are standalone solar: all five total 540MW of solar power.
EDF has not revealed the duration/MWh of its three BESS projects. Though this varies greatly in the state of New York, it may be trending towards four hours with Boralex’s winning tender and a Summit Ridge project announced last week both opting for it. And in April, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) began a process of adapting fossil fuel sites to be replaced with four-hour BESS units.
Rounding off the winning co-located projects, Northland Power is adding 20MW of storage to its 100MW Alfred Oaks Solar project in Allegany county, while ReneSola Power is pairing its 19.99MW Roosevelt Solar project in St. Larwence with 2MW of storage.
“Today’s investments will put us on a path to making New York a greener place to live while also creating new jobs and spurring economic development,” governor Kathy Hochul said. “These projects will allow us to not just meet but exceed our goal of obtaining 70 percent of our electricity from renewable resources (by 2030) and will further cement New York as a national leader in the fight against climate change.”
The contracts for the 22 projects include an index REC (renewable energy certificate) structure which will help cushion electricity consumers in the state against spikes in energy prices. The weighted-average all-in development cost of the projects amounts to $63.08 per megawatt-hour.
