Elected officials and energy company executives gathered last week in rural Oregon to mark the completion of Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility, a project that combines a wind farm, solar array and battery storage.
This is the fourth and the largest project in the United States to combine those three renewable energy resources on the same site.
Energy companies call this combination a “hybrid” power plant, an increasingly popular approach to development in which companies see the opportunity to save money and provide steadier electricity output by building different renewable resources next to each other.
To understand the significance of the Wheatridge project, I reached out to Mark Bolinger of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, co-author of a series of reports about hybrid renewables, the most recent of which came out in August.
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