Wind turbines in Ireland will store power in batteries to be released when needed. The turbines and batteries are from GE. Microsoft has agreed to buy 15 years worth of power for use by its data centers. This is a smallish project, 37 MW. Hopefully soon there will be gigawatts of such power.
In addition to producing energy, the project will produce valuable data on energy storage. Each turbine will have an integrated battery; Microsoft and GE will test how these batteries can be used to capture and store excess energy, and then provide it back to the grid as needed. This provides more predictable power to an increasingly green Irish grid, by smoothing out peaks and valleys in wind production. This will better enable intermittent clean power sources like wind energy to be added to the Irish grid. This will be the first deployment of battery integration into wind turbines to store energy in Europe.