Grid battery storage gets big in the States
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Energy Quarterly
Grid battery storage gets big in the States By Prachi Patel Feature Editor Brian Perusse
P
icture this: It’s holiday season and days before the busiest shopping week. A retailer in a large city is about to run out of the season’s hottest toy. A quick call to the local warehouse, and disaster is averted. The retail industry could not operate without thousands of cubic meters worth of storage warehouses. Yet, the power sector, one of the biggest industries in the world, works with minimal storage. Instead, the norm is to make power plants with spare generating capacity or to build extra natural gas “peaker” plants. Utilities kick on the plants during high demand— when air conditioners run at full blast in the summer or when lights go on at dusk. But most of the time, generating equipment sits unused or inefficiently running below maximum output. It’s like having a toy factory sitting on standby to make a thousand new toys for the one day when your store shelves are empty. Or, as Brian Perusse of power company AES put it, “You need to buy a whole car when all you need is the radio.” Storing electricity on a large scale would make the grid more efficient and
reliable. The idea is to run power plants at a steady level, which is more fuelefficient, store excess generated energy when grid-load is low, and use those stores when demand spikes. More than 99% of grid storage—127 GW according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)—is done today by pumping water into elevated reservoirs during off-peak hours and flowing it through electricitygenerating turbines when needed. But sites suitable for such pumped hydro systems are hard to come by. Batteries, which are portable, modular, and easier to install, are increasingly attractive for grid storage. They still have high capital costs, and there is no onesize-fits-all solution to various applications that require anywhere from a few kW to tens of MW for times ranging between a few seconds to hours. But developers can reap benefits by matching grid application with the right technology. As of April 2010, batteries stored 451 MW of electric power for the grid worldwide. In Japan, batteries have been connected to the grid since the early 1990s. Now the technology is cropping up at power plants and wind farms across the United States. Fairbanks, Alaska boasts the world’s most powerful storage system: a bank of nickel-cadmium batteries that can provide 46 MW for five minutes. AES has connected 72 MW of batteries to grids in the United States and Chile. Utilities such as Duke Energy and Southern California Edison are investing in large battery systems. Flow battery-maker Primus Power is constructing a large system in California, while Xtreme Power has a fleet of advanced lead-acid battery systems in Hawaii. EPRI, meanwhile, is trying to develop industry standards for grid battery storage, which should make it easier for utilities to install battery systems in the future. With more experience, better technologies, and bigger production scales, largescale bat
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