New Cost-Effective Battery Tested to Store Wind-Power
For the first time in America, a company has developed an efficient battery solution to storing wind power, a clear answer to critics who claim turbines are unreliable.
Xcel Energy’s “Wind-to-Battery” project is currently being tested on a Minnesota wind farm. The company believes that the 80-ton battery will power 500 homes for 7 hours when fully charged. The battery’s 20 50-kilowatt modules together are roughly the size of two semi- trailers and can store 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity.
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“Energy storage is key to expanding the use of renewable energy,” said Dick Kelly, Xcel Energy Chairman, President and CEO. “This technology has the potential to reduce the impact caused by the variability and limited predictability of wind energy generation. As the nation’s leader in distributing wind energy, this will be very important to both us and our customers.”
The sodium-sulfur battery technology has already been used in a variety of forms in the United States, but Xcel says their pilot program is the first time any practical and efficient battery storage technology has been used on a wind farm.
Photo Credit: Ryan McD on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
Pump storage is also a method of alternative energy storage. Water is pumped up from large reservoirs at night using wind or hydro and released during peak electricity usage to turn turbines on the way back down. New systems are drilling large caverns into bedrock, rather than using natural ponds/lakes with unequal heights.
I’m not sure which is more efficient, nor do I know what the environmental impacts of pump storage would be on a natural ecosystem. Is anyone able to compare and contrast?
I also wonder what will happen to the “peak” electricity usage during the day, once everyone is possibly plugging in their cars at night. Does anyone know anything about that?
It seems as though the “peak” electricity during the day would not change if everyone would plug their car into an outlet with a simple timer that would start charging at bed time. This would just make the valleys of usage less severe and allow the utilites to better utilize their generating assets by running them more constantly (as opposed to shutting some generators down every night).
What exactly is the technology of this battery? I did a piece last week on Vanadium battery technology for renewable storage applications - is this what we’re talking about here?
http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/vanadium-battery-technology-makes-commer.php
I think this the missing ingredient in our conversation over growing renewable portfolios…
While many eco activists channel their emotions at Big Oil (as the great conspiracy) it is actually ‘Big Grid’ which holds the key to success for solar and wind.
Without energy storage systems, they are not likely to evolve…
Thanks for the post!!
Garry Golden
Editor
The Energy Roadmap.com
http://www.theenergyroadmap.com
This is molton sodium sulfur, the NAS battery developed by NGK of Japan - runs over 300 Centigrade. 1 MW at 7.2 hours of storage is their standard configuration. Since NGK sells so many products to utilities already - ceramic insulators for electric distribution lines for example - many utilities seem to be focusing on them and ignoring other technologies like vanadium flow batteries. Too bad we seem to be sole sourcing a Japanese technology instead of supporting systems made in North America.
The author was a bit duped by Xcel, the vanadium battery has been used for wind farms in Japan and Tazmania for several years - including a 6 MW system on Hokkaido.
I’m glad to see that progress is being made on large-scale energy storage. I agree with the comments above saying that it is effectively a requirement before wind power really takes off and becomes a significant part of the global energy portfolio.
However, I’m a little concerned about the 80 ton weight remark - especially the energy required to complete the mining, processing, engineering and component fabrication. It would be interesting to know what the overhead costs of the battery currently are (in terms of the equivalent # of years of an operating wind unit).
Hopefully, much like when computers were giant multi-ton beasts 50 years ago, these batteries will go through a rapid miniaturization process!
I also wonder what will happen to the “peak” electricity usage during the day, once everyone is possibly plugging in their cars at night. Does anyone know anything about that?
How many recharges are the batteries good for until they die?
biganon…”Water is pumped up from large reservoirs at night using wind or hydro “…Pumped storage is indeed an interesting option. However, in the above statement I assume you are not suggesting that someone would let water flow through a dam to generate electricity so as to then pump water up hill…Rather I’m guessing what you’re talking about is that that hydro power is similar to pumped storage and can be used in a similar way to mitigate variable wind rates (with hydo power, rather than wind doing the pumping, in hydro power the sun is effectively “pumping” the water up hill by evaporating it) but either way you can control when and where you release it once it is captured.