-
The Power of Scalable Battery Power
One of the killer features of renewables is that they’re modular, scalable, and can be fit in right where they’re needed. Less so for wind turbines, perhaps, but the innovation happening with batteries is showing this at virtually every level. At the smallest scale – personal, even – electricity can be stored in portable solar generators (I just got a small one of these to keep my phone, laptop, & more running; $300 and free power from the sun for years to come). On the bigger end are utility-scale “BESS” (battery energy storage systems), which add resiliency at the electrical grid level.
The biggest of those BESS projects can be subject to the delays inherent in any big construction effort: bureaucracy, complexity, NIMBYism, fear mongering about their supposed dangers (a topic for another post), cost and schedule overruns, etc. That’s where the killer feature of scalability comes in: these solutions don’t all have to be so big. As in this story from Canary Media: Small but mighty grid batteries take root in Virginia amid energy crunch.
The 10-megawatt, four-hour batteries, one each in the tiny towns of Exmore and Tasley, represent this “missing middle,” said Chris Cucci, chief strategy officer for Climate First Bank, which provided $32 million in financing for the two units. Batteries are a critical technology in the shift to renewable energy because they can store wind and solar electrons and discharge them when the sun isn’t shining or breezes die down.
When it comes to energy storage, “we need volume, but we also need speed to market,” Cucci said. “The big projects do move the needle, but they can take a few years to come online.” And in rural Virginia, batteries paired with enormous solar arrays — which can span 100-plus acres — face increasing headwinds, in part over the concern that they’re displacing farmland.
The Exmore and Tasley systems, by contrast, took about a year to permit, broke ground in April, and came online this fall, Cucci said. Sited at two substations 10 miles apart, the batteries occupy about 1 acre each.
These “small but mighty” batteries can fill the crucial gap when production from solar or wind dips, as well as when demand spikes. That kind of capacity planning is crucial for utilities, to protect their users in the event of severe weather, summer heat as well as winter storms. A popular solution to these eventualities in the past has been gas-powered “peaker” plants. But in addition to the power they provide being more expensive, there are other problems with those.
“Peaker plants are smaller power plants that are in closer proximity to the populations they serve, and [they] are traditionally very dirty,” Cucci said. “They’re also economically inefficient to run. Battery storage is cleaner, more efficient, and easier to deploy.”
Gas peaker plants are wasteful partly because of all the energy required to drill and transport the fuel that fires them, said Nate Benforado, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group.
“Then you get [the fuel] to your power plant, and you have to burn it,” Benforado said. “And guess what? You only capture a relatively small portion of the potential energy in those carbon molecules.”
Single-cycle peaker plants, the most common type, can go from zero to full power in minutes, much like a jet engine. Their efficiency ranges between 33% and 43%.
The other good news for these grid battery installations is that federal tax credits for them managed to survive Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, and are still in effect. This is a clean, proven, and inexpensive technology that can be – no, should be – deployed wherever needed.
It's high time to go solar