Maryland awards 440 MW in first storage round, 360 MW below its target

Maryland's Public Service Commission awarded 440 MW/1,760 MWh in the first round of solicitation under the Next Generation Energy Act on Thursday, the statute's deadline for the decision, leaving the round 360 MW short of the 800-MW target set for it. The arithmetic lands exactly on the eligibility floor: projects must be capable of discharging at full power for at least four hours, and 1,760 MWh divided by 440 MW is exactly four, so the round's selected capacity cleared at the minimum duration rather than above it.

The commission places Flatiron Energy's project at NRG's oil- and gas-fired Chalk Point power plant in the southeastern corner of Prince George's County and REV Renewables' project on a portion of a reclaimed coal mine in mountainous Garrett County, close to the West Virginia and Pennsylvania borders. Both developers belong to MAREC Action, the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition, whose more than 50 developers and manufacturers serve the region's utility-scale solar, wind and battery storage market.

Two other proposals went unawarded, though neither was ruled out. The commission declined the 500-MW/3,000-MWh Oystercatcher Energy Storage Project and a 135-MW/540-MWh expansion Flatiron requested for Chalk Point in a revised filing submitted after the first-round application window closed. It said Flatiron could reapply for the expansion and invited Oystercatcher to consider round two, citing the project's “desirable electric grid location and characteristics” in northeastern Maryland and “the need for continued engagement with local stakeholders in Harford County if the project is pursued further.”

The 2025 Next Generation Energy Act requires at least two solicitations for a combined 1.6 GW of storage, and with 440 MW now awarded the second round must find at least 1,160 MW to reach that figure on a fixed calendar: bidding opens by Jan. 1, 2027 and awards are due by Oct. 1, 2027. That gives the commission a year to buy more than two and a half times the capacity it has just awarded.

The shortfall lands against PJM Interconnection's continuing capacity crunch, the backdrop for both solicitations. “These projects can help meet growing electricity demand while reducing exposure to volatile capacity prices that ultimately affect customers' bills,” Evan Vaughan, executive director of MAREC Action, said in a statement. That is the standard case for state procurement in a capacity-constrained market: the megawatts get built on a policy calendar instead of a merchant one, and the resulting cost lands on bills the commission already regulates. REV Renewables, which the commission's account places in Garrett County, took a 300-MW hedge from a Maryland offtaker in August, a contract that removed merchant-price risk from one project while the wider generation trade keeps commoditizing around it.

Maryland's own deadlines explain the impatience. The state carries a statutory 2045 target for net-zero emissions and a 2035 goal of 100% carbon-free electricity set by gubernatorial order, and storage procurement is among the levers the commission holds directly. Chair Kumar Barve called the first-round award a milestone in the state's effort to meet those goals while acknowledging its relatively modest contribution, and he put the shortfall in his own words: “we are disappointed that these awards are below our 800-MW target for Round 1.”

Both sites are conversions: one occupies the property of a plant that burns oil and gas, the other land a coal mine worked and gave back, so each project arrives at ground that has already been through an industrial use. West Virginia showed the same logic when a hyperscaler agreed to buy capacity from a solar-plus-storage project on a reclaimed coal mine and long-duration storage found the buyer it had been missing. Duration is the variable Maryland's statute treats as a floor—four hours is the minimum a project must be able to run at full power—and the round's aggregate lands exactly on that minimum, which suggests the two projects were sized to it.

The commission's reasoning about the project it declined is worth as much attention as the awards themselves. It praised Oystercatcher's grid location and then attached a stakeholder condition, which suggests that a connectable site and a county willing to host are now the two tests a Maryland storage proposal has to pass, and that the second can hold up the first. That reading fits the position this publication has taken on PJM: grid access is the deal currency, and a project without a power path is a development option rather than an investment. It also fits the wider reworking of grid-access rules across the region, of which Pennsylvania's move to price grid access for data centers is a recent example.

Round two carries the mandate, with the statute's 1.6 GW combined figure setting a floor of 1,160 MW against a first round that produced 440 MW and left a 500-MW project and a 135-MW expansion on the table. Whether the Oystercatcher project returns with the Harford County engagement the commission asked for, and whether Flatiron refiles the Chalk Point expansion, will begin to show how much of Maryland's remaining storage capacity is already sitting in developers' pipelines and how much has to be found fresh.