Because of the nature of baseload power plants, only supplying enough to cover the base load, other plants have to be put online to cover any demand above the base load. These include load-following plants, which are more costly to run. In the old days, many of these ran on oil. Nowadays, the fuel of choice is natural gas, though the design of the plant is a different from that of a gas-fired baseload plant.
Today’s electric vehicles are essentially big batteries on wheels, with a significant capacity to store and discharge energy. The average utilization of privately owned vehicles is 5%, meaning that the average battery on wheels is underutilized for the vast majority of its useful life.
The massive 129 kWh Tesla Powerpack installation in South Australia has already been having a strong impact on the region’s electricity markets, saving grid operator Neoen and customers an estimated $25 million, or just over ⅓ of the purchase price, in its first year of operation.
A new report from Morgan Stanley claims that grid storage is now reliable enough to become a mainstay of the utility grid and marginalizing so-called peaker plants.
Millbrae, California–based Stem has been selected by Southern California Edison for 85 MW worth of distributed energy storage systems around LA. 85 MW is a big system in terms of energy storage, and all of it must be operational by 2021. “We could put thousands of our systems in buildings throughout … [continued]
