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Utilities in the US are poised to leapfrog each other in the
race to have the largest installation in the country and the world,
as a California facility was expanded this month, but a Florida
utility will soon finish an even bigger project.
These developments support an assessment of the industry's
near-term potential issued by the US Energy Information
Administration (EIA) in August. EIA said project developers are
on track to install at least 10 GW of large-scale battery storage
capacity in the US during the years 2021 through 2023, which would
be about 10 times the storage capacity available in 2019.
On 19 August, Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility said
it completed Phase II of the world's largest battery storage
facility in Monterey County, California. The facility can now store
400 MW of power and provide up to 1,600 MWh of delivery
capacity.
Phase I, coming in at 300 MW of capacity, was connected to the
power grid in December 2020 and has been storing and delivering
power since then. The next tranche of 100 MW of storage came online
this month. The batteries are charged by excess wind and PV power
during the daytime, and then can release that power to the grid in
the evening when PV output drops.
Utility PG&E is the buyer of the power, and LG Energy
Solution provided the battery racks.
"With the disruptions that we're seeing to our energy grid from
wildfires to other extreme weather events, of course caused by
climate change, we need these types of low-emission grids that are
resilient and yes, that are very, very green," California
Representative Jimmy Panetta said at the ribbon cutting.
Ultimately, Vistra says it can reach 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh of
storage at the site. And at that point, it could again recapture
the title of largest facility in the world.
But temporarily at least, it will have to cede its position to
Florida Power and Light's (FP&L) Manatee Energy Storage Center in
Manatee County, Florida. FP&L said on 20 August that the
facility is 75% complete, with 100 of its 132 battery units
installed and all 132 inverters in place. (Inverters convert DC
electricity from batteries to AC electricity.)
The Manatee site is expected to be completed and hooked up to
the grid by the end of 2021, FP&L said in a statement. At
completion, the facility will have capacity of 409 MW and a
delivery capacity of 900 MWh.
IHS Markit tracks battery projects globally, and the other
largest projects currently in operation are a 202.8-MW facility in
Qinghai, China; a 111-MW facility in Jiangsu, China; and a 100-MW
facility in Tullamore, Ireland. Projects at 1,000 MW or larger have
been proposed for Qinghai, as well as Queensland, Australia, and
Oregon in the US, said Tiffany Wang, research analyst at IHS.
Augmentation
The lesson of the Moss Landing facility, though not Manatee, is
that augmentation of storage at existing sites is the way the
storage industry is evolving, said Jason Burwen, acting CEO of the
Energy Storage Association (ESA). Augmentation is adding more than
a marginal amount of new capacity at existing storage
locations.
On 23 August, ESA announced that its members have approved a merger with the
American Clean Power Association, which will likely become
effective on 1 January 2022.
"Augmentation is going to become a very regular part of these
battery storage facilities," Burwen said. "Costs [of storage] are
continuing to decline. As long as you have the footprint and
interconnection, there's no reason you can't keep expanding service
over time."
Burwen observed that augmentation at a modest level already is
common in the industry because battery systems degrade over time,
and some operators counteract this by replacing aging units with
the same-sized or slightly larger-sized systems. But the type of
augmentation at Moss Landing is of a different degree, as it added
100 MW to an existing site.
"A lot of folks have not really thought about it, but you can
augment fairly expeditiously," Burwen said. "You have all the
footprint you need [for placing the battery units]. You just need
interconnect service—upgrading the transmission line and adding
inverters to manage the power."
The other augmentation trend that Burwen sees involves
increasing the duration of power, rather than output for a moment
in time. In other words, new storage can lengthen the number of
hours that power can be sent back to the grid.
These expansions come from the modular nature of battery storage
industry, which enables quickly adding components where opportunity
and need arise. "The ability to build [along modular lines] doesn't
have a whole lot of precedent in the power sector," Burwen
said.
This gives operators tremendous flexibility, which will help to
drive further growth. For example, a utility that's considering a
storage option does not have to decide between four-hour and
six-hour storage, Burwen explained. Thanks to modularity, "you can
have a four-hour battery today, and it can be an eight-hour battery
at the same site thanks to augmentation."
Co-location
EIA's study also identified a feature of the new facilities that
is going to become increasingly common: co-location with
generation, including renewable power. Currently, about 38% of US battery storage is
co-located with generation, of which 8% is natural gas-fired and
30% wind and solar.
In the next few years, this will shift dramatically. "If all the
currently announced projects from 2021 to 2023 become operational,
then the share of US battery storage that is co-located with
[renewables] generation would increase from 30% to 60%," EIA
said.
To put it another way, EIA said that nearly 25% of all the
planned solar PV capacity for years 2021-2023 will include
co-located storage, compared with less than 2% of existing solar PV
capacity as of December 2020.
Growth factors
Burwen said several factors are driving the growth in battery
storage. The first is cost. "As cost comes down … you are finding
developers who are bringing on projects of larger and larger
sizes," he said.
Size has a complementary benefit, which is that as capacity
grows, stored power can become more important to energy
reliability. "You now have assets that can play the roles that
power plants have traditionally played through generation," he
said. "And there's no reason that [developers] can't build even
larger [facilities]. It's just a matter of making sure that your
cost points are hit well and that the intended application is sized
appropriately."
Furthermore, the small size and modular design means that
battery installations can be online in a matter of months, not the
years it takes to bring on new power generation, he said.
The modular design also saves money for battery developers, as
they do not have to invest large amounts of capital years before
power is needed, Burwen pointed out.
To continue the momentum or even increase the pace of battery
storage installations, Burwen said obtaining a federal storage
investment tax credit is at the "top of mind for us." He added that
the availability of such credits for wind and solar installations
has been proven to encourage new investment by improving cost
competitiveness, and he sees the same opportunity for batteries,
both in the number of installations and their size.
The other issue is one of planning, Burwen said. "In states that
have decarbonization goals or utilities that have made net-zero
pledges, they need to realize that investments being made today are
20- or 30-year investments," he said. "It raises the question in a
state that has to be carbon free in a couple of decades, what if my
utility is coming in with a [proposal for a new] gas-fired power
plant? Should we be doing that? Why not a portfolio of storage and
clean energy resources?"
Utility regulators in those states should demand the utility
explain why clean energy assets won't work, he said, rather than
the typical practice today of accepting the gas-fired unit if the
demand projections look reasonable.
The planning mindset also needs to recognize that battery
technology will continue to improve, Burwen said. "A lot of
utilities are doing larger [renewable energy] procurements, but
it's one of these things that if your planning process is looking
back even 18 months or two years old, you going to be missing how
fast storage is moving," he said.
Posted 25 August 2021 by Kevin Adler, Chief Editor