Black Mountain CCO talks storage in MISO and SPP

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Oct 5, 2024 — Standalone storage developer Black Mountain Energy Storage has pivoted its development expertise to SPP and MISO as its home market of ERCOT has continued to get over-saturated.

BMES presently has over a 1 GW of storage projects collectively across both grid operators and both regions offer attractive attributes for the developer, said the company’s chief commercial officer Witt Duncan in an interview with NPM.

The route to commercialization, across both grid operators, includes a level of contractedness, either through a flat toll or through capacity contracts, said Duncan, adding that capacity contracts “provide load serving entities, who are beholden to resource adequacy measures, capacity attributes of the facility while project owners collect a flat capacity payment plus energy and ancillary services revenue-similar to the RA construct in CAISO.”

Both grid operators also support four-hour batteries.

What will occupy BMES in the coming weeks is SPP as the grid operator has an October 31st deadline looming for projects to be submitted for interconnection studies. The SPP has elected to forego the 2025 cluster year, so developers either submit or have a two-year waiting period to get their respective projects in the queue.

Duncan said BMES has four projects which it intends to submit into queue studies ahead of the deadline, if the deadline isn’t pushed back.

SPP is facing “looming retirement of thermal capacity, load growth and offers ELCC rating of renewables,” said Duncan. The SPP had proposed ELCC a performance-based accreditation (PBA) earlier this year to FERC which would allow them to understand which resources will be available when needed based on their past performance.

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