Highlights Texas to get ‘big chunk’ of new US solar Used batteries to form ‘dirt cheap’ storage Austin, Texas — Solar energy — increasingly paired with battery storage — is likely to be the “next big thing” in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, attendees of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Alliance annual GridNEXT conference learned Monday. Receive daily email alerts, subscriber notes & personalize your experience. Register Now During a workshop about the Texas Power Market, Peter Kelly-Detwiler, principal of the NorthBridge Energy Partners consultancy in Lexington, Massachusetts, pointed out that ERCOT has about 20,000 MW of solar projects in the interconnection queue, which would represent an exponential increase in solar capacity from today’s roughly 1.5 GW. Utility-scale solar costs have plunged about 86% from 2009 through 2017, Kelly-Detwiler said. “At the same time, conventional generation costs are relatively flat-lined.” Not long ago, coal-fired generation was considered among […]