By Kate Rowland
In December, I wrote about the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing about grid-scale energy storage.
At
that hearing, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon
Wellinghoff stated in his testimony that distributed storage "can be
grid scale...but it doesn't mean we should ignore large-scale
centralized storage."
Wellinghoff's point: "It's a matter of looking at cost benefits and economics to determine what's viable."
On Wednesday, the Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA) and Ice Energy announced their intent to do just that.
Using
Ice Energy's Ice Bear smart grid-networked distributed energy storage
systems, SCPPA will shift approximately 64 gigawatts of on-peak
consumption to off-peak annually. The more than 1,500 host sites for the
Ice Bear will include government, commercial and industrial buildings
throughout Southern California within the SCPPA's 11 municipal utilities
(Anaheim, Azusa, Banning, Burbank, Cerritos, Colton, Glendale, Los
Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside and Vernon).
This
is no small pilot. In fact, it's the largest distributed energy storage
project of its kind anywhere in the world, and the United States' first
utility-scale, smart grid-enabled distributed energy storage project.
The intent of the 53-megawatt project is to help to permanently reduce
California's peak energy demand by shifting a significant amount of
on-peak electrical consumption to off-peak periods. This, in turn,
improves the reliability of the grid without the need for increased
generation.
"We analyzed this particular project
in several ways," said David Walden, SCPPA's energy systems manager,
"and made a decision to work on the demand side of the problem rather
than the supply side."
Even more interesting is
that this project is cost-effective, without the need for government
incentives to help bring implementation costs down. "Our technology is
cost-effective on a stand-alone basis, without support," Ice Energy's
chief executive officer, Frank Ramirez, said, while noting that, in
general, government incentives that drive the cost of new technology
very low "help break inertia."
Deployment will
begin immediately, to be completed over two years. Once a each site is
up and running, "they start working on Day One," Walden said.
Chris
Hickman, Ice Energy's senior vice president of utility solutions, noted
that "all forms of storage are good," and each type of storage provides
a solution to different problems on the grid. "Each utility will have
different needs." Hickman said flywheel is fast-acting, thermal (such as
Ice Energy's solution) can shape load, and large batteries fall in
between the two.
Smart Grid Demonstration Grant
projects recently announced will test a number of different approaches
to grid-scale energy storage. But while those projects gear up, all eyes
will be on Southern California as this project is deployed.