Benton County project set to boost Arkansas grid stability
A $130 million battery energy storage development is planned for southern Benton County, and the 250-megawatt project is expected to bolster grid stability as more renewable energy projects come online.
Within the footprint of Little Rock-based regional transmission organization Southwest Power Pool (SPP), Boulder, Colo.-based SMT Energy is expected to build and operate the battery energy storage system on more than 40 acres about 10 miles southeast of Siloam Springs. It’s planned to be interconnected to the grid at an adjacent electric substation on Chamber Springs Road, just south of Arkansas Highway 16
By Jeff Della Rosa
Talk Business & Politics
A $130 million battery energy storage development is planned for southern Benton County, and the 250-megawatt project is expected to bolster grid stability as more renewable energy projects come online.
Within the footprint of Little Rock-based regional transmission organization Southwest Power Pool (SPP), Boulder, Colo.-based SMT Energy is expected to build and operate the battery energy storage system on more than 40 acres about 10 miles southeast of Siloam Springs. It’s planned to be interconnected to the grid at an adjacent electric substation on Chamber Springs Road, just south of Arkansas Highway 16.
John Switzer and David Spotts, co-founders of SMT Energy, have 10 battery systems in operation, and the company’s largest will be a 304-megawatt project it’s developing in Texas. The system on Chamber Springs Road will be SMT Energy’s first in Arkansas and its largest in SPP’s footprint, which spans 14 states, including Arkansas.
“At our core…we work in data science, and we’ve identified an opportunity at the Chamber Springs substation to support the grid with real-time operations…and provide a mixture of different services and benefits to SPP to improve reliability and grid stability,” Spotts said. “The power will be called upon by Southwest Power Pool and dispatched as needed to support the grid.”
Construction of the battery system is expected to start in 2026 and take about a year to complete. The battery is anticipated to begin operating in 2027.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. battery energy storage capacity has risen since 2021 and reached about 16 gigawatts at the end of 2023. It might increase by 89% to nearly 31 gigawatts by the end of this year if developers’ planned projects are completed on schedule. Developers have another 9 gigawatts in the works for 2025. About half of the more than 300 utility-scale battery projects set to start operating in the United States by 2025 are planned for Texas.
As of November, California had the most battery storage capacity, at 7.3 gigawatts, and the largest U.S. battery system, at 750 megawatts. Vistra owns that system. Texas was second with 3.16 gigawatts.
According to December EIA data, Arkansas has three battery systems in operation: two 6-megawatt systems in Washington County and one 10-megawatt system in White County. The latter is part of the Searcy Solar Energy Center that started operating in 2022. The Entergy Arkansas project was among the first utility-scale solar farms to include battery storage. Today’s Power Inc. installed the two systems in Washington County that began operating in 2019 as part of a 10-megawatt solar array project for the city of Fayetteville. At the time, it was the largest array built on city-owned land in Arkansas and the only one in the state with on-site utility-scale storage.
Read more here.
