The Keys to Energy Storage
If energy storage holds the key to the fates of wind and solar energy, then Beacon Power Corp. thinks it has the answer. It has just been awarded most of the money it needs to store up to 20 megawatts of power that it will deliver in New York State.
Energy storage gives utilities, power marketers and large commercial or industrial customers the flexibility they need to respond to power shortages, price spikes or brownouts. Utilities, for instance, must precisely measure their load generation with the demands of their end users -- a difficult task given that energy usage fluctuates, particularly at industrial sites that routinely implement new processes.
It is a budding concept, which is considered critical to building out the smart grid. In essence, it adds new efficiencies to the grid and thereby makes room for alternative sources of power. Utilities may have excess generation that serves to back-up the system in case of a failure, or during periods of peak demand. An energy storage device would give those power companies the latitude to harness energy when it is not needed and to release it when the demand for it is highest.
"We believe that there is no better way to provide efficient, grid-scale frequency regulation than our flywheel systems, and we're grateful to U.S. Department of Energy, through the Loan Programs Office, for its continued strong support and validation of this breakthrough technology," says Bill Capp, chief executive of Beacon.
The Energy Department has allocated $43 million of the total $69 million cost to build Beacon's so-called flywheel storage plant. That facility will hold 200 flywheels that store energy produced from natural gas. Advocates of the technology say it has the advantage of being able to quickly ramp up when supply and demand is out of whack.
Beacon's venture that won the federal grant is in Shephentown, New York. The company says that the facility should be operational next year and hold 10 percent of that area's capacity. It already has a pilot project going in California where, according to the state's independent system operator, the device is relieving congestion and may be capable in the future of delivering 4,200 MW of wind power.
"Successfully integrating renewable energy onto the grid is one of California's top energy priorities," says California's Energy Commissioner Jeffrey Byron. "As California builds the infrastructure to achieve 33 percent renewable energy resources by 2020, this research will be important in operating the transmission grid."
At this point, it is difficult to gauge just how efficient such devices are as well as the potential environmental affects. It's a technology, for example, that gets its energy supply from a generation source and must therefore be used in combination with either central or distributed generation resources. At the same time, the devices are now relatively expensive and it is still unknown how they would operate in a commercial setting.
Market Potential
Previous installations have only harnessed about 1 MW of electricity compared to the 20 MW promised in New York. In 2006, for example, American Electric Power and the Energy Department teamed up to do just that at a substation in West Virginia: Energy is stored at night and released over a six-hour time period during peak demand times.
According to the Energy Department, the technology has a lot of market potential and environmental benefits. It can help utilities avoid downtime and thereby save billions in repairs and lost opportunities while also allowing such companies to sell blocks of peak power at premium prices. Environmentally, it will facilitate the development of more wind and solar power that is not always available but which -- through storage devices -- can be bottled and then subsequently discharged when needed.
To be clear, storage devices come in all forms: The most prevalent ones today are batteries - the size of houses - that are linked to the transmission grid where they siphon off power and store it. That process can occur at night when the cost of electricity is lowest and it can be dispatched during the day when prices rise. The battery will remain fully charged until the power is needed.
There's also compressed air energy storage that holds air underground and releases it heated form to create electricity. Pike Research estimates that such compressed air platforms will grow from 453 MW today to about 7 giga-watts in 2020.
Fast response storage devices - flywheels - are now in the spotlight: Consulting firm KEMA says that 30-50 MW of power harnessed by flywheels are more effective than 100 MW of fossil-fired electricity coming out of a combustion turbine.
While storage devices suffer energy losses, Beacon says that flywheels outperform other, similar innovations and have 85 percent efficiency rates. Flywheels, further, respond with 10 times the rapidity when it comes to meeting minute-by-minute changes in demand.
The market has room for new storage technologies that will help facilitate the smart grid movement - the backbone of the New Energy Economy. "Effective energy storage systems are crucial to harnessing the power of renewable energy and getting it onto the grid," says Energy Secretary Stephen Chu.
Industry insists that it is eager to advance the cause -- to go from smaller demonstration projects to those that are more substantial. If pending projects established through the stimulus program perform as advertised, then the energy efficiencies would mount and the network could handle more green energy. The promise of the smart grid would then be partially fulfilled.
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