Sweet. A utility called American Electric Power is going to set up a huge bank of batteries to store wind power.
The short write-up in the NYT is both exciting, in that it's good to see storage moving to the deployment phase, and sobering, in that it highlights the limitations of current battery technology.
Here's the setup:
The batteries can each deliver one megawatt of power -- enough to run a medium-size shopping center -- for a little more than seven hours. Replenished nightly, they give back about 80 percent of the electricity put into them. Each is the size of a double-decker bus, and installation is not permanent; they can be moved to another site as the need arises.
The batteries will be built by NGK Insulators Ltd. of Japan. They use a sodium sulfur chemistry and operate at temperatures of more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Unfortunately, at this stage, the bang-for-the-buck ratio isn't great:
At least at this stage, saving money by storing a windmill's production for peak-price hours will be difficult. The cost is very high, $27 million for six megawatts of capacity, or about $4,500 a kilowatt, including the price of substation improvements. Building a gas turbine of that size to meet peak needs would cost substantially less. ...
...
And while the batteries are large by the standards of previous installations, they are small relative to wind production; one battery would hold about as much energy as a single large wind machine could produce in a day, Mr. DeMeo pointed out. And they are small relative to total energy demand.
We really, really need some big breakthroughs in storage, and soon. Coal isn't waiting.
Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power?
To unlock wind power, put a price on carbon
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
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sunflower Posted 9:14 am
11 Sep 2007
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Sam Wells Posted 9:21 am
11 Sep 2007
But man I hate them freaking batteries. Waste of money and then they go bad. A new battery can be recharged about 80 percent. An old battery maybe 30 percent - then nothing. My point is that by design they WASTE electricity.
Onward through the fog
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:14 am
11 Sep 2007
http://electricitystorage.org/tech/photo_capitalcost.htm
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justlou Posted 9:24 pm
11 Sep 2007
What do we need to run 24/7? Does this fast paced world have us on a treadmill? When you think about it -- why? Where is it getting us?
Unless we can think outside the box we'll be constrained by this kind of "can't".
Plus, small scale, decentralized storage will probably be more feasible than large scale, centralized storage.
Living with renewable energy will entail a true revolution. The power centers that be will fight it tooth and nail. It does not lend itself to maintaining the status quo or the drive toward globalization. Choosing to go this route sets up a real conflict between world views.
Some will try to make it an ad on to the main operating system. But try making it the alternate operating system and you got yourself a real fight.
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Nucbuddy Posted 9:25 pm
11 Sep 2007
http://www.electricitystorage.org/pix/photo_ESACost.gif
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Sean Casten Posted 10:17 pm
11 Sep 2007
This logic has limits - indeed, some have suggested that the huge amount of wind in Denmark has caused grid disruptions as wind died down and voltage sagged on the system. But given as we are so far from those limits in most of the world, why is this AEP project a big deal? And why are they doing it at all? The only reason I can see for coupling storage to renewables in today's environment is if you can save power at off-peak hours and sell it when prices go up during peak. But this is a pretty thin arbitrage opportunity in most parts of the grid, especially once you take into account the round-trip efficiency of storage technologies and the need to recover their capex off that price differential.
What am I missing?
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Sean Casten Posted 10:22 pm
11 Sep 2007
In that vein, $4500/kW looks awfully high. My guess is that they've either included other unassociated costs with that storage or else are doing something unique - but that's certainly more than I'd expect for this class of technology.
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samircmi Posted 12:07 am
12 Sep 2007
A range of options is available for the remainder of the storage, including the use of plug-in hybrid cars, Mr. English said. The idea behind plug-in hybrids is that the owner of a car would charge the batteries every night when demand and cost of electricity were low. The next day, under a contract between the utility company and the driver, the car would be left plugged when not in use, and the power company could reverse the flow of electricity and draw power out of its batteries during times of peak demand.
The idea of moving our cars with wind-generated electricity sounds great to me.
Its puzzling to me though that they didn't mention compressed air energy storage (CAES), which as the ESA figure linked to above shows, is the lowest cost bulk storage technology. It can also ramp quickly, operate at high efficiency under part load, and appears to be widely available in wind-rich regions throughout the continental united states. The capital cost looks too high to make it readily economic, but it certainly looks better than sodium sulfur batteries in the short run. I guess blowing air underground is less sexy than high-tech batteries.
(Matt Wald's "Storing Sunshine" in the July 16th NYT does mention CAES however)
Sean asked about additional motivations for storage beyond simple arbitrage. One big one is transmission constraints. Storage allows you to put much more wind capacity behind a given transmission line and also allows you to run the line from the wind farm at a higher capacity factor thus better utilizing the transmission capital. If we start building dedicated transmission lines to remote wind resources, storage may become increasingly important.
Another reason to consider storage is that at high penetrations wind gets a smaller capacity credit. The declining load carrying capacity means that you need something else on line to come on when there is a lull. In the limit of high wind penetrations the value of wind is just the variable cost of running an open cycle gas turbine or something similar which can ramp quickly. So storage (together with other strategies like coupling geographically separated and temporally uncorrelated wind farms) can help firm up wind at high penetrations.
It also means that you use less fossil fired capacity to back wind. Remember that wind capacity factors are like 25-35%, so even if you have your wind capacity matched to your peak load, a large chunk of your energy is still coming from some other source. If that source is hydro (as in Denmark, with neighboring Norway providing lots of balancing) then no problem. If you are balancing with natural gas or even worse an old intermediate load coal plant, then you are really not doing a great job cutting CO2 emissions.
So if you have lots of transmission capacity to spare and can tie wind farms across the country, or if you have lots of eco-friendly hydro (not a lot of that in the great plains though), then you might not need storage. Otherwise, storage might be a good thing to consider. And considering lots of transmission projects are facing huge NIMBY (not in my backyard) and BANANA (build absolutley nothing anywhere near anything) issues, storage could likely play a big role as wind continues to expand
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sindark Posted 1:05 am
12 Sep 2007
The efficiency is comparable to the figure given above for batteries, and the up-front costs of installation are much lower.
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samircmi Posted 1:20 am
12 Sep 2007
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