Tag Archives: Batteries

Los Angeles’s Low-Priced Solar Power Has Problems Coming Its Way

September 15, 2019 5:42 pm ,

By Cassie McCorkle, Energy Industry Reports

It has been more than a month that Los Angeles has signed a contract for record-cheap solar power and the officials are trying to deny it. The labor union is concerned over Mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to put an end to the three gas-fired power plants. It has been clearly mentioned in the 25-year contract signed with 8minute Solar Energy that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will pay 2 cents per kilowatt-hour or lower. This is the lowest price ever waged for solar power in the US and it is lower than the cost of electricity generated from the natural gas-fired power plant. The Eland project has 200 Megawatts of lithium-ion batteries planned other than the 400 Megawatts of solar power to store solar power for a complete day and to let it into the grid for 4 Hours each night.

The combined payment of L.A. payers for solar power could be 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. The concerns of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18 have forced the City Council to not approve the contract. IBEW Local 18 is concerned that Garcetti’s “Green New Deal” initiative has shutdown 3 coastal gas plants and would result in unemployment of 400 LADWP workers. The workers consider Garcetti’s plans to create unemployment and increase electricity prices. Others may consider the current plan as a childlike proposal but as per the Mayor, the Eland project may not replace the large plants instead can help reduce the dependency on gas. The pricing of 8minute that relies on the federal investment tax credit for solar energy is expected to drop by 26% by this year end. By December, the company plans to start construction to be eligible for the 30% tax credit.

Similarly, a 500 MW project is on its way to construction, as per the Kern County Board of Supervisors. This new project is the one more addition to the long list of large projects taking place in California. This project is a part of the Eland 1 Solar Project: 8minutenergy. The project will be started only after the Eland 1 Solar is approved.

Read full article from Energy Industry Reports

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LA & 8Minute Solar ink lowest cost solar-plus-storage deal in U.S. history

September 11, 2019 4:23 pm ,

By Steve Hanley, CleanTechnica

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has signed a groundbreaking 25-year power purchase agreement with 8Minute Solar. The deal will make possible the largest municipal solar plus storage facility in the US. But the best part is the combined price for solar energy plus storage is just 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, the lowest ever in the US and cheaper than electricity from a natural gas powered generating plant.

The electricity will come from a massive solar power plant located on 2000 acres of undeveloped desert in Kern County, just 70 miles from the city. Known as the Eland Solar and Storage Center, it will be built in two stages of 200 MW each, with the first coming online in 2022 and the second phase scheduled to be switched on the following year.

Los Angeles DWP will take 375 MWac of solar power coupled with 385.5 MW/1,150 MWh of energy storage, according to PV Magazine. Neighboring Glendale Water and Power will take 25 MWac of solar plus 12.5 MW/50 MWh of energy. The electricity from Eland I and II is expected to meet between 6 and 7% of Los Angeles’ needs, according to PV Magazine.

The Eland Solar & Storage Center has been engineered by 8minute to provide fully dispatchable power under control of the LADWP to meet its customers’ demands with reliable and cost-effective power — a capability previously reserved for large fossil fuel power plants. Eland’s ability to provide fully dispatchable power for less than the traditional cost of fossil fuels effectively positions solar PV as an attractive candidate to be the primary source of California’s 100% clean energy future.

Read full article from CleanTechnica

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Posted in: California News: Company News: Utilities (POUs & IOUs), California News: Installations , Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Los Angeles has lined up record-cheap solar power. But there’s a problem

August 27, 2019 4:43 pm ,

By Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles has been sitting on a contract for record-cheap solar power for more than a month — and city officials declined to approve it Tuesday because of concerns raised by the city-run utility’s labor union, which is still fuming over Mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to shut down three gas-fired power plants.

Under the 25-year contract with developer 8minute Solar Energy, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would pay less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour — a number city officials and independent experts say would be the lowest price ever paid for solar power in the United States, and cheaper than the cost of electricity from a typical natural gas-fired power plant.

In addition to 400 megawatts of solar power, the Eland project would include at least 200 megawatts of lithium-ion batteries, capable of storing solar power during the day and injecting it into the grid for four hours each night. The combined price to L.A. ratepayers of the solar and storage would be 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour — also a record low for this type of contract.

But LADWP’s Board of Commissioners voted not to send the contract to the City Council for approval, after utility staff said concerns had been raised by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, which represents utility employees. In recent months, IBEW Local 18 has run television and radio ads attacking Garcetti’s Green New Deal initiative, which includes the retirement of three coastal gas plants that employ more than 400 LADWP workers.

…The Eland project, which is planned for the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, wouldn’t replace those gas plants. But it could help L.A. reduce its reliance on gas, which has become California’s largest electricity source as utilities look for evening power sources to fill in for solar after the sun goes down.

Read full article in the Los Angeles Times

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Distributed residential solar+storage takes a seat at the adult table

February 8, 2019 3:11 pm ,

By John Weaver, pv magazine

We should thank Sunrun for continuing to break new ground, and for investing company resources in moving the industry forward. Now the industry has a new precedent that it will build upon; it has a piece of confidence to carry. And residential solar+storage is soon to be a fundamental building block of the Eastern Interconnection – argued to be the largest machine on the planet.

Sunrun has won a bid for 20 MW to participate in ISO New England’s 2022-2023 Forward Capacity Market. The bid means that Sunrun will be required to offer to the broader power grid 20 MW of power, 24 hours day for the single year period. The company will be paid $3.80/kW/month – totaling $76,000/mo, and $912,000 for the full year contract.

Sunrun notes that the capacity will be made possible by its Brightbox energy storage product line. Currently, this product is an LG Chem RESU. LG’s 48-volt battery comes with 3.3, 6.5 and 9.8 kilowatt-hour (kWh) ratings, and its 400-volt batteries offer 7.0 and 9.8 kWh ratings. Both AC- and DC-coupled versions are available. Sunrun noted they would need about 5,000 New England customers to meet the requirement – which would suggest somewhere between.

…This announcement comes of the heels of two very significant recent legislative victories for solar+storage. First, California is allowing DC coupled solar+storage to participate in net metering. And second, Massachusetts just ruled that energy storage that is in the SMART program has the right to sell its own energy into these same forward capacity markets that Sunrun just bid on. Sunrun was part of the negotiations with Massachusetts to push this legislation through.

Read full article from pv magazine

 

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Brown Signs “Sun Shine at Night” Bill

September 27, 2018 7:38 pm ,

Sacramento – With the Global Climate Action Summit in the rearview mirror, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 700 by Senator Scott Wiener (D-SF) keeping California in the driver’s seat of building a reliable and safe clean energy future.

“If we are going to get to 100% clean energy, we need to be using solar power every hour of the day, not just when the sun is shining,” said Senator Scott Wiener, author of SB 700. “This bill will protect clean energy jobs while also protecting consumers from ever rising energy bills.”

SB 700 will make the “sun shine at night” through the addition of hundreds of thousands of energy storage devices and batteries connected to hundreds of thousands of solar panels over the next 8-10 years. Energy storage is a critical technological partner in the widescale deployment of renewable energy. SB 700 will result in nearly three gigawatts of energy storage systems at schools, farms, homes, nonprofits and businesses in California by 2026 that will benefit consumers, ratepayers and the environment. The resulting program would be on par with the highly successful Million Solar Roofs Initiative launched back in 2006.

SB 700 re-authorizes the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) for five years, extending rebates for consumers through 2025. It would add up to $800 million for storage and other emerging clean energy technologies, resulting in a total investment of $1.2 billion for customer sited energy storage. Boosting energy storage will help California achieve its goal of generating 100% of its electricity from renewable resources, as called for in SB 100 (de Leon), which was signed into law on September 10th. A summary of SB 700 with more details about the SGIP program can be found here.

Read full press release from the California Solar & Storage Association

Related Article: California Passes Bill to Extend $800M in Incentives for Behind-the-Meter Batteries (Greentech Media) – Aug. 31, 2018

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The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid

July 27, 2018 2:08 pm ,

By James Temple, MIT Technology Review

A pair of 500-foot smokestacks rise from a natural-gas power plant on the harbor of Moss Landing, California, casting an industrial pall over the pretty seaside town. If state regulators sign off, however, it could be the site of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery project by late 2020, helping to balance fluctuating wind and solar energy on the California grid.

The 300-megawatt facility is one of four giant lithium-ion storage projects that Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, asked the California Public Utilities Commission to approve in late June. Collectively, they would add enough storage capacity to the grid to supply about 2,700 homes for a month (or to store about .0009 percent of the electricity the state uses each year).

The California projects are among a growing number of efforts around the world, including Tesla’s 100-megawatt battery array in South Australia, to build ever larger lithium-ion storage systems as prices decline and renewable generation increases. They’re fueling growing optimism that these giant batteries will allow wind and solar power to displace a growing share of fossil-fuel plants.

But there’s a problem with this rosy scenario. These batteries are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online—rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology—we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path.

Read full article from MIT Technology Review

 

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City of Los Angeles wants to turn Hoover Dam into world’s largest pumped energy storage facility

July 26, 2018 1:47 pm ,

By Steve Hanley, CleanTechnica

Hydroelectric power has many advantages. It is renewable and has no carbon emissions, but there is a catch. After the water passes through the turbines, it is discharged into the Colorado River and can no longer be used to make electricity until it is absorbed by the atmosphere, blown by prevailing winds upstream of the dam, falls as rain, and is redeposited in Lake Mead to begin the process all over again.

According to the New York Times (“$3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery”-  Jul. 24, 2018), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has a better idea. It wants to build a pumping station about 20 miles downstream from the Hoover Dam, recapture some of the water, and pump it back into Lake Mead where it can be used to generate more electricity once again. The proposed plan would cost about $3 billion.

The problem is that California has so much renewable energy available now, thanks in large measure to aggressive state mandated policies, that much of its is “constrained.” That’s utility industry speak for having to give it away or simply let it go to waste. In some cases, utilities in California actually pay other utility companies to take the excess electricity off their hands.

Why not store it all in some of Elon Musk’s grid scale batteries? Simply put, pumped hydroelectric storage is cheaper than battery storage, at least for now. Lazard, the financial advisory and asset management firm, estimates utility scale lithium-ion batteries cost 26 cents per kilowatt-hour compared with 15 cents for pumped hydro storage.

Read full article from CleanTechnica

 

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Boosting battery storage can lower utility bills — study

May 23, 2016 1:46 pm ,

By Daniel Cusick, Environment & Energy Publishing

Adding energy storage to an already robust solar market in California’s multifamily housing sector could lead to significant utility bill savings for building owners and tenants, new findings from the Clean Energy Group and partner organizations show.

In a new 50-page analysis released last week, CEG, along with the California Housing Partnership Corp. and Center for Sustainable Energy, found that lower-income apartments provide a ripe opportunity for developers to improve the economics of solar by adding battery storage to such apartment buildings. “It essentially creates a new pool of savings, so if you were only doing efficiency and only doing solar, you’d get some savings. But if you add storage, you get significantly more,” said Lewis Milford, CEG’s president and a co-author of the report, “Closing the California Clean Energy Divide.”

The authors say the findings are especially relevant in light of California’s recent passage into law of the Multifamily Affordable Housing Solar Roofs Program, a $1 billion investment program to deploy solar technologies in affordable multifamily rental housing that is expected to extend the benefits of solar power to hundreds of thousands of lower-income Californians.

But solar access by itself isn’t enough, the report says. In fact, shifting policies around rooftop solar in some states, including California, could place owners and tenants of low-income housing at greater risk because the benefits of solar are highly dependent on strong net-metering programs. A number of states have reformed net metering in ways that sharply curtail the benefits of solar, resulting in higher, not lower, electricity bills.

Battery storage effectively reduces that risk, the authors say, by eliminating most of the demand-related charges that utilities pass along to owners of distributed energy systems like rooftop solar.

“Because batteries empower owners of solar PV systems to take control of the energy they produce and when they consume it, storage can deliver deeper cost reductions that can be shared among affordable housing owners, developers, and tenants,” the report states. And unlike stand-alone solar projects, which do little to offset demand-related charges, a properly sized solar system with storage can eliminate nearly all electricity expenses, resulting in an annual electric utility bill of less than a few hundred dollars in some cases.

Read full article from E&E

Related Article: Energy Storage Could Break Low Income Rooftop Solar Bottleneck (CleanTechnica)

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California Has Too Much Solar Power — And That’s a Good Thing

May 1, 2016 10:00 am ,

By Travis Hoium, The Motley Fool

No business wants to create a solution in search of a problem, particularly in the slow-changing energy industry. Instead, businesses want to find solutions for problems that exist and create ways to make money off their solutions.

Enter the exigent problem California is facing: it has too much solar energy. First, who thought that would be a problem in the country’s largest state? Second, why isn’t there a solution if utilities and regulators knew this problem was coming? The short answer is that energy innovators weren’t going to create and install solutions for solar energy’s variability until they knew the utilities and regulators had recognized the problem.

California has made a big push into renewable energy in an effort to meet a 50% renewable energy goal by 2030. It’s built wind and solar plants rapidly over the past decade, which combines with hydropower to provide clean energy to the state. The problem is that solar energy, in particular, isn’t created evenly throughout the day or year and that’s a challenge for the grid.

In March, before peak air conditioner season in the state, there was so much solar energy on the grid that the California Independent System Operator had to tell some solar farms to shut down because there was too much energy for the grid to handle. And that could lead to a blackout.

Read full article from The Motley Fool

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Aquion installs storage for microgrid at California winery and farm

April 29, 2016 4:55 pm ,

By Peter Maloney, Utility Dive

Aquion Energy and Ideal Power have teamed up to provide storage capability to a microgrid that enables a California winery and farm to be energy self-sufficient.

Aquion supplied its aqueous hybrid ion batteries for the project, connecting them with Ideal Power’s grid resilient 30-kW multi-port power conversion system as part of a microgrid at Stone Edge Farm, a 16-acre organic winery and farm in Sonoma County. The energy storage installation provides the farm and winery the capability for solar self-consumption, peak shaving and load shifting services.

The solar + storage installation is designed to provide energy for a number of buildings on the site, including the primary residence, offices and workshops. The grid-tied microgrid, developed by Wooster Engineering Specialties, is capable of islanding and operating autonomously and of generating enough energy that Stone Edge Farm is able to sell some of the energy back to Pacific Gas and Electric.  During daylight hours, solar PV provides energy for the buildings and charges the batteries. During nighttime hours and periods of cloud cover, the batteries provide energy for building loads.

Read full article from Utility Dive

Related: Aquion Energy’s AHI batteries and Ideal Power’s power conversion system bring energy independence and resiliency to Sonoma Winery (Press Release) – April 26, 2016

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