A report by IEEFA looks at trends in the U.S. to install utility scale batteries. The report’s author, Dennis Wamsted, gives examples of how it is replacing the peaking and seasonal generation being provided by gas and coal. Emissions aside, the numbers are starting to add up. In Hawaii the combination of solar generation and storage is expected to undercut the price for fossil fuel generation. In Texas, Vistra Energy’s batteries are soaking up the daytime solar peaks – otherwise curtailed and wasted – such that the investment is paying for itself. Utility-scale storage power capacity in the U.S. is still very small – at around 800MW – but Wamsted says the improving business case and economies of scale should drive its expansion faster. We give you the IEEFA press release, with additional graphics taken from the report.
Momentum is gaining around an industry shift toward utility-scale battery storage systems in the U.S., finds a report published in June by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
The report – Advances in Electricity Storage Suggest Rapid Disruption of U.S. Electricity Sector  – details upstart storage and storage-expansion projects in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nevada, Texas, and Vermont.
Dennis Wamsted, an IEEFA editor/analyst and lead author of the report, said recent evidence of utility-scale storage adoption is most likely the beginning of a trend that will take hold broadly across the industry, benefitting renewables at the expense of gas- and coal-fired plants.
“Bigger changes loom,” Wamsted said. “In the many examples we researched, each project, by and large was driven by one of several value streams—cutting transmission charges, providing grid resilience, offering peak power, allowing for early plant closures and the like—even if other benefits were accrued too.”
The report details dozens of examples of electric companies large and small finding an assortment of cost savings in electricity-storage technology and portability.
“Installation is still tiny in terms of absolute numbers, but power storage is now ubiquitous and energy storage is no longer a pie-in-the sky proposition,” Wamsted said. “These changes are taking place today.”
Excerpts from the report:
- Battery storage in combination with solar can be used to facilitate closure of coal and natural gas plants currently being used largely for peaking or seasonal needs, as shown by the NV Energy decision to close the North Valmy coal plant in Nevada, and by Florida Power & Light’s plan to shut two aging natural gas units in Florida.
- Battery storage can be used to meet system peak needs, as SCE is doing in California in replacing the two-unit Mandalay natural gas peaker plant.
- Battery storage can be used to provide firm renewable power, as both Arizona Public Service and Hawaiian Electric are demonstrating with projects they have named, respectively, “Solar after Sunset” and “Renewable Dispatchable Generation.”
- Battery storage offers utilities significant opportunities to boost system resilience and cut costs at the same time, as is being demonstrated in a number of other projects highlighted in the report.
- Battery storage can be used to enable more residential solar systems to be installed on local distribution lines without requiring potentially costly and time-consuming system upgrades, as can be seen in an existing program in Vermont and in one being proposed in New Hampshire.
- Battery storage can be used to improve the economics of existing utility-scale solar generation, as can be seen in the discussion about Vistra’s battery storage retrofit at a Texas PV plant.
Wamsted said economies of scale will help drive the expansion of utility-scale battery storage, as will a growing recognition by utility companies of the business case for embracing the shift: “It is likely that developers and utilities will be able to stack these benefits, making storage even more economically competitive.”
Full report:Â Advances in Electricity Storage Suggest Rapid Disruption of U.S. Electricity Sector
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Dennis Wamsted is an editor and analyst at IEEFA
This article is published with permission
Bob Cherba says
The only reason this is close to happening is because of government subsidies and regulations. Batteries may have some part to play in working for peaking, but what do you do when the wind doesn’t blow for a week or more, and the sun isn’t shining, or the solar collectors are covered in snow? I don’t see how we’re going to maintain current power reliability with batteries anytime soon.
By the way, why don’t any of these articles rate battery capacity in mwh? Isn’t that the important measure of battery capacity?
Bas Gresnigt says
For long periods without wind+solar (e.g. two months) the Germans are preparing Power-to-Gas (Hydrogen) with the gas being stored in deep earth caverns.
PtG(H2) pants are unmanned, have an efficiency >90% and are not very expensive so the owner can afford to operate only when the electricity price is (very) low.
They have already many major pilots running throughout Germany.
The retrieved H2 gas can be burned in an unmanned gas turbine or fuel cell assembly (efficiency >60%).