Over the past year, several companies have outlined plans to build solar-and-storage systems around the world—from Australia to Arizona and to the heart of the Permian oil patch in West Texas. As battery and renewable power generation costs continue to fall, utilities aim to combine solar farms with battery storage as a way to boost predictability of renewable energy generation. So power generation firms have launched an unofficial global competition for who will build the world’s biggest solar-and-storage facility. Analysts and scientists have recently suggested that hybrid renewable power generation systems—where batteries are co-located with wind or solar farms—could be the future of clean energy and could even displace some of the old natural gas-fired plants. Retiring fossil fuel generation is one of the goals with which Florida Power & Light Company, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, unveiled last week plans to build what it says will be the […]