Texas solar facility adds battery for when the sun does not shine on its business

Fuel Fix:
Texas' largest solar farm will soon have a big battery to go with it.

FlexGen, an advance battery maker headquartered in Los Angeles, will supply a grid-scale battery to Vistra Energy's Upton 2 solar farm in West Texas that is capable of storing enough electricity to provide 10 megawatts an hour for more than four hours. One megawatt can power 200 Texas homes in the summer.

The Upton 2 solar farm, which has a generating capacity of 180 megawatts, went online June 1 and is the largest in the state.

The battery system will be housed in 40 shipping container-sized boxes on the site, where work has been going on since May, said FlexGen CEO Josh Prueher. The battery is expected to be online by the end of 2018.
...
The company did not disclose the cost but past discussions of using storage batteries have said the cost is prohibitive.  The batteries are needed to deal with one of the glaring weaknesses of solar energy.  It is a daylight business and four hours of back up won't get you through the night.  Solar also has the problem of an inability to scale to deal with demand.  The battery may mitigate that problem to a limited extent but would likely not be adequate to deal with extreme weather events.

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