SRP has been an early adopter of battery storage technology, which can help the company meet growing peak demand and complement fixed resources such as flexible natural gas to ensure reliable and affordable electricity supply to its customers.
Salt River Project (SRP) and Aypa Power have entered into an agreement to provide 250 megawatts (MW)/1,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of new energy storage to Arizona’s power grid.
The Signal Butte Energy Storage Project will be a 250 MW, four-hour battery storage system located in the Elliot Road Technology Corridor in East Mesa. The project will utilize lithium-ion technology and have the capacity to power over 50,000 average-sized homes for four hours. The project is expected to be operational by mid-2026.
“SRP is proud of our ongoing efforts to deploy battery storage, which will help us maximize the use of renewable resources and decarbonize our portfolio in the years to come,” said Bobby Olsen, deputy general manager and senior planner, strategy and sustainability manager at SRP. “The Signal Butte project will also help us meet the growing capacity needs of the Phoenix metropolitan area.”
“We are proud to announce our first energy storage project in Arizona. It is an important milestone in our efforts to support one of the fastest growing markets in the country,” said Moe Hajabed, CEO of Aypa Power. “The Signal Butte project builds on SRP’s sustainability commitments and helps meet the reliability needs of its customers.”
Signal Butte was selected through SRP’s 2023 All-Source Request for Proposals process. The project was jointly bid by Eolian, LP (Eolian), the project’s original developer, and Aypa Power. The project will be owned and operated by Aypa Power. Aypa Power purchased this late-stage battery storage project from Eolian and will handle the remaining development and construction required to bring the project into operation. Once the project is online, SRP will have full dispatch control of the storage system and will decide when to deliver energy output to its grid. The project will typically charge when energy costs are lowest and discharge in the early evening when demand is highest.
“Signal Butte’s location adjacent to a substation that serves several data centers in operation and under construction was no accident when we began developing the project in 2018. Now more than ever, the continued growth of our economy depends on deploying responsive and flexible resources in the right locations to provide critical instantaneous capacity, and battery energy storage projects like Signal Butte can be built at a pace that matches and enables continued rapid growth in electricity demand,” added Aaron Zubaty, CEO of Eolian, LP.
SRP has been an early adopter of battery storage technology, which can help the company meet growing peak demand and complement fixed resources such as flexible natural gas to ensure reliable and affordable electricity supply to its customers.
SRP currently has almost 1,300 MW Batteries and pumped storage, as well as 2,300 megawatts of carbon-free resources, are available to its customers. SRP is also developing significantly more solar and storage capacity, which, when operational by the end of 2027, will make almost half of SRP’s electricity generation carbon-free.
