Located in the City of Peoria in Maricopa County, the developer hopes to begin construction on the project, Beehive Battery Energy Storage System, in 2025 and for it to enter commercial operation the following year.

The system will charge with energy from the grid when renewable energy production is abundant, discharging when demand peaks.

The PPA is among numerous long-term contracts for capacity or services from third-party BESS facilities that APS and fellow Arizona utilities, including Salt River Project (SRP), have signed to date.

Driven forward by utility contracts for grid-scale BESS projects, the Southwestern US state saw the second-highest deployments among US states in megawatt-hour terms in the second quarter of 2024, according to Wood Mackenzie.

In its Q3 2024 US Energy Storage Monitor, the research firm found that Arizona saw 2,600MWh of installations in Q2, ahead of Texas’ 1,200MWh and behind California’s 4,492MWh. Arizona projects accounted for 23% of all US grid-scale storage capacity deployed in the quarter, Wood Mackenzie noted.

Activity appears to have remained at prolific levels in the third and quarters of this year, based on items this site has reported, including the bringing online of the state’s biggest BESS last month. The 1,200MWh system has been installed at a 300MW solar PV plant by Ørsted and Salt River Project in Pinal County, with social media tech company Meta as its main offtaker.  

APS has just signed another 20-year storage PPA, with Canadian Solar’s developer subsidiary Recurrent Energy for the 600MWh Desert Bloom Storage BESS project alongside a solar deal and building on a 1.2GWh storage agreement between the pair signed last year, projects which like EDF’s Beehive BESS are also in Maricopa County.

While EDF Renewables North America has delivered and contracted numerous large-scale solar-plus-storage projects in its 18GW of total solar, wind and storage deployed to date, the Beehive BESS is only the company’s second multi-megawatt standalone storage project in the US.

Its first, McHenry Storage Project, went live in 2015 in Illinois, entering the then-buzzing PJM Interconnection ancillary services market, the first pay-for-performance opportunity for batteries to help regulate grid frequency in the US. That project is now owned by Cordelio Power, with US lithium-ion and system integrator firm Kore Power replacing the BESS units there.

Overseas, EDF is a major player in the UK BESS market, where it is developing a 2GW pipeline of projects in addition to trading and optimising third-party projects as a route-to-market provider. The group said in 2018 that it intended to invest around US$10 billion to develop 10GW of BESS worldwide by 2035.