The twin smokestacks that make up the Moss Landing Power Plant tower over Monterey Bay. They can be seen across miles along this beautiful stretch of North Californian coastline; these 500-foot-high (150m) towers are the centerpiece of the state’s first electric power station, an enormous natural gas-powered generator. In the present, as California is steadily moving to reduce carbon emissions in its economy, these stacks are not in use and the facility is shut down. However, the plant is set to start its new life as the world’s most powerful battery, which is able to store surplus energy when wind farms and solar panels generate electricity and re-feeding it back to the grid when they aren’t.
Inside a cavernous turbine, A 300-megawatt lithium-ion lithium battery is being prepared for operation, with a 100-megawatt battery scheduled to go online in 2021.
The megapack batteries aren’t the only huge batteries that are scheduled to be operational within Moss Landing. Moss Landing plant. Additional 182.5 megawatts generated by the 256 Tesla megapack batteries are set to start feeding into California’s electric grid by the mid-2021 timeframe, and plans are to eventually expand the capacity at the plant that will power all homes within the vicinity of San Francisco for six hours in the words of the Bay Area utility, Pacific Gas and Electric who will manage and own the system. Additionally, in California, there is a storage facility of 250 megawatts. the project came online earlier in the year 2000. In San Diego, construction has started on a 150-megawatt system close to San Francisco, a 100-megawatt battery project is on the verge of the completion stage near the end of Long Beach, and a number of other projects are in different phases of development throughout the state.
California remains the world leader in the efforts to manage the fluctuation of renewable energy within electric grids by using utility-scale batteries However, the world is fast adopting the same model. The plans recently announced range from a 409-megawatt system located in South Florida, to a facility of 320 megawatts close to London located in the UK and a 200-megawatt plant located in Lithuania, and a unit of 112 megawatts in Chile.
Inspired by the steep fall in prices and the advancement of technology that allows batteries to store ever-greater quantities of energy Grid-scale systems are experiencing unprecedented growth. The majority of these improvements are the result of the race of automakers to create smaller, more affordable, and more powerful lithium-ion batteries to power electric vehicles. In the US states, clean energy mandates from the state and incentive tax credits for storage devices coupled with solar power installations are also playing an important part.
The widespread deployment of storage is likely to be able to overcome one of the major barriers to renewable energy – the cycle of oversupply during the time of the Sun’s rays or when the wind blows, and a shortage in the event that there is a shortage when the Sun goes down or when the wind slows. In balancing out the differences between demand and supply the advocates claim that batteries can substitute carbon-based “peaker” plants that kick into action for a short period of every day when energy needs increase. Therefore the widespread use of energy storage could be the key to increasing the availability of renewable energy and helping to speed the transition towards an energy grid that is carbon-free.
“Energy storage is actually the true bridge to a clean-energy future,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro who is Executive Director of the California Solar and Storage Association.
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How soon that day will come will depend mainly on how fast prices continue to drop. Already, the cost of storage on a large scale for utility purposes across the US has fallen by almost 70 percent between 2015 and 2018 as per the US Energy Information Administration. The dramatic price reduction has been accompanied by advancements in lithium-ion battery technology that have significantly improved performance. The capacity of batteries has also increased as facilities can store and release energy over longer and longer durations. Competition in the market and increasing battery production also play an important factor; a forecast from The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows the mid-range cost for lithium-ion batteries reducing by 45 percent between the years 2018 and 2030.
“We’re almost entirely piggybacking on the growth of lithium-ion battery technology, which is driven mostly by electric vehicles and consumer electronics,” says Ray Hohenstein, market applications director at Fluence the energy storage technology provider that has projects totaling close to one gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) scheduled to go live in California within the next 12 months. The research money that is being put into these applications is reducing costs everywhere Hohenstein says. Hohenstein. “It’s just like what we saw with solar panels.”
In California, declining battery prices as well as the state’s goal of an electric grid that is carbon-free in 2045, has created a glut of battery storage initiatives. A bill from 2013 set a goal of 1.325 gigawatts worth of energy storage that would be installed on the grid in 2020. The state’s grid is now 1.5 gigawatts in projects approved – which includes greater than 500 megawatts of power installed to date – the goal has already been met according to the California Public Utilities Commission.
The massive Moss Landing project is fully operational in the middle of 2021 It will nearly triple how much energy storage is available in California. A number of other states are in the process of launching massive Energy Storage projects. For instance, New York’s 316 megawatt Ravenswood project is expected to supply electricity to more than 250,000 homes for as long as eight hours and replace two peaker gas natural gas power plants located in Queens, the New York City borough of Queens. Also, the 409-megawatt Manatee system that is planned by South Florida will be charged by a nearby solar plant. The project is one that utilities Florida Power and Light says is the world’s biggest solar-powered battery, will replace two natural gas-fired units that are in need of replacement.
Overall the U.S.’s battery power for utility-scale batteries is predicted to rise to 1.2 gigawatts at the end of 2020 and close to 7.5 gigawatts in 2025 as per Wood MacKenzie, a natural resource research and consulting firm. Kelly Speakes Backman, director of the US Energy Storage Association, claims that battery storage capacity increased by a third in 2020 and could have been tripled if it weren’t due to the slowing of construction caused by the Covid-19 virus.
Europe has been slow to adopt storage. “In general, Europe is a bit more conservative” regarding such technological advances, says Daniele Gatti, an analyst for IDTechEx, a British market research company that specializes in the field of emerging technologies. The development of energy storage in Europe is slowed by the stifling market for electricity which is dominated by auctions conducted by the government which tends to overvalue storage, she adds. However, some large-battery initiatives are taking form, including the 320-megawatt Gateway system that is planned to be constructed in a port close to London.
The world over, Gatti projects rapid growth in energy storage to 1.2 Terawatts (1,200 gigawatts) over the next ten years. Some of the key players include Australia that in 2017 was the first country to put large battery storage in its grid. It is the 100-megawatt Hornsdale Power Reserve and is currently planning to build another 300 megawatts close to Victoria. This new power reserve will transfer power between states on a need-to-know basis, maximizing the efficiency of the existing transmission infrastructure, and decreasing the need to build new power lines that will be idle for the majority of the time. Similar projects are in the process of being developed in Baden-Wurttemberg in southwest Germany.
The American Moss Landing is set to be the world’s biggest battery and is expected to remain so for a long time. Saudi Arabia has just announced plans to compete for the title and is building a massive solar-plus-storage facility on the country’s west coast. The project will supply all-natural energy round all the time to a resort that comprises 50 hotels and 1,300 houses that are being constructed on the Red Sea.
Recent research has found that the majority of fossil power stations in the US are expected to reach an end to their operating lifespan in 2035, experts claim that the time to accelerate expansion in the field of large-scale energy storage is near. Yiyi Zhou, a renewable power systems specialist at Bloomberg NEF, says that batteries stored in renewable sources are already a viable economic alternative to the construction of new gas peaker power plants. The combination of electricity generation and storage is especially effective when it comes to the sun’s energy that typically is predictable in its daily schedule. In addition, according to Zhou, when more solar energy is added to the grid, so does the price of operating gas stations actually increases.
“That’s mainly because [gas plants] are forced to cycle on and off much more now because of solar penetration,” Zhou claims. “This adds wear-and-tear, and shortens their lifetime.”
Solar batteries are getting closer to a size of around 200 megawatts which allows renewable energy to replace small to medium-sized natural gas generators. Fluence’s Hohenstein. “Now we’re able to truly build these hybrid resources – solar, storage, wind – and do the job that was traditionally done by fossil fuel power plants,” Hohenstein adds that his Fluence is experiencing increasing interest in large-scale projects.
The addition of storage helps make renewable energy more profitable according to Wesley Cole, an energy analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “One of the challenges of renewable energy is the more you put on the grid, the more the value declines,” Cole states. Storage can help with that by absorbing excess energy that could have been wasted in-between hours when the demand for electricity is lower and then transferring it to a time it’s more useful.
Energy storage is growing in high-value markets like California; however, the cost of batteries requires a significant reduction in order to enable widespread global deployment. However, analysts are hopeful that prices for batteries will eventually fall to levels that are enough to allow large-scale energy storage.
“We see storage being a large player across effectively every future we look at,” Cole says. Cole. “And not just one or two gigawatts… but tens to hundreds of gigawatts.”
