A big battery just went live in South Texas, and it's a sign of where the state's power grid is headed. Norwegian energy company Equinor, through its US subsidiary East Point Energy, switched on the Citrus Flatts Energy Center in Harlingen, Cameron County. It's a 100 megawatt/200 megawatt-hour battery — big enough, along with an earlier East Point project nearby, to power around 30,000 Texas homes for up to two hours.
This battery doesn't have a long-term utility contract. Instead, it works on the open market: charging up when electricity is cheap, selling power back when prices spike, and helping stabilize the grid in between. That's part of a broader shift in Texas, where solar and battery storage are being built at a rapid clip. Federal energy forecasters expect solar to outproduce coal in the state's grid this year for the first time, and battery capacity there is projected to more than double by the end of 2027.
None of this requires anything from homeowners directly, but it's worth knowing about if you live in Texas. More batteries and solar on the grid generally mean more stability during high-demand periods, like summer heat waves, and can help keep a lid on price spikes. Equinor's next batteries are already under construction in Virginia and expected online in 2027, so this kind of large-scale storage buildout is spreading beyond Texas too.
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