Enchanted Rock, a Texas-based microgrid company, today announced a deal with the City of Houston to build the largest microgrid yet for a water pumping plant.

The 30-MW microgrid will serve the city’s Northeast Water Purification Plant (NEWPP) Expansion facility, a new project scheduled to be completed in spring 2022.

The Houston project marks the second microgrid Enchanted Rock announced this summer for a water facility. The other is a 2.4 MW project for the North Fort Bend Water Authority.

The announcements follow heightened interest in microgrids, driven by several recent major power outages, among them the rolling blackouts in California, Iowa’s derecho that left 75,000 still without power one week later, and outages from Tropical Storm Isaias in the Northeast and Hurricane Hanna in Texas.

“Almost every day there’s something in the news about power outages,” said Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer for Enchanted Rock. “Throw COVID on top of all of this, and it’s really a challenge for a lot of people, a lot of organizations. “

Schurr said he is seeing growing attention to power interruptions in risk management and business continuity preparation.

Read the full article  on the Microgrid Knowledge site here.

Read the press release here.