GlidePath Power Solutions has acquired eight wind projects in North Texas with a total capacity of 149MW.

The portfolio, purchased from Exelon Generation, will be optimised by GlidePath while it plans how best to add energy storage on-site at each project. The projects are all north of Amarillo and sell into the Southwest Power Pool (SPP).

Chris McKissack, Chief Operating Officer for GlidePath told Energy-Storage.News:

“We believe there’s an opportunity to build out storage facilities up to the nameplate capacity of the wind farms in the portfolio. There’s great potential for storage to reduce transmission congestion and improve the economics of wind farms in SPP and other markets.”

According to GlidePath, they will be the first battery storage projects in the SPP.

“The high penetration of wind energy in North Texas offers us an excellent opportunity to pair these facilities with the latest battery storage technology,” said David Braun, president, GlidePath Asset Management. “We look forward to managing these wind assets in a way that will hopefully strengthen the reliability of supply in the local electric grid and deliver benefits for Texas power consumers.”

In June, SPP revealed that it would launch the Western Energy Imbalance Service market (WEIS) with settlements every five minutes. The previous balancing market run by SPP was launched in 2007 and paid out US$103 million in its first year.

GlidePath has a 1GW battery storage development portfolio, including a 10MW /10MWh project in Texas announced in April this year.