Calpine's California Battery Plant Is Among World's Largest (reuters.com) 29
Calpine's billion-dolllar Nova Power Bank near Los Angeles will be among the largest in the world when it comes online later this year. According to Reuters, the plant is built on the site of a failed gas-fired power plant and "will be able to power about 680,000 homes for up to four hours when charged." From the report: The 680-megawatt lithium-ion battery bank is big even for California, which boasts about 55% of the nation's power storage capacity, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Calpine will bring online 620 MW of the bank in two phases this year starting in the summer and open the remaining 60 MW in 2025. [...] Calpine, best known in the state for its fleet of gas plants, has about 2,000 MW of battery capacity under development. California was a pioneer in mandating that its utilities begin procuring energy storage more than a decade ago. The state is expected to need about 50 gigawatts of battery storage to meet its 2045 goal of getting all of its power from carbon-free sources, up from about 7 GW today.
MW is not MWh (Score:2)
From what I can find 4 hours x (110MW + 60MW) = 680 MWh
Batteries and Gas Turbines (Remote Sites) (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a interesting quirk of gas turbines is that they burn roughly a third of the full load gas rate just to be spinning at line frequency speed.
For remote sites (isolated power grids) this generally means that a minimum of one gas turbine (equivalent) of load needs to be available at all times should a gas turbine trips. By adding a battery system that can supply the load of one gas turbine for a period of 45 minutes allows the site to shut down one of the gas turbines and improve the overall efficiency.
This is how a battery can reduce CO2 emissions but most of the time do absolutely nothing, it is there for a couple times a year to provide enough time to start the standby gas turbine.
Re:MW is not MWh (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.canarymedia.com/ar... [canarymedia.com]
Re: (Score:2)
By careful research, I have determined that 90% of "journalists" confuse MW with MWh 90% of the time. I especially like when they note the number of "megawatts per hour".
Capacity for understanding capacity (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Capacity for understanding capacity (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure that storage is actually *more* important than power output for these systems though. Storage implies that the sole purpose of these systems is to act as a backup for when power is unavailable, but often they're used for other things, like black starts (see ZombieEngineer's comment above), load management, power quality, peaking capacity, upgrade deferrrals, arbitrage, frequency response, etc. For several of these, what matters is being able to deliver a large amount of power in a very short space of time, so both storage and power output are important.
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For several of these, what matters is being able to deliver a large amount of power in a very short space of time, so both storage and power output are important.
One second of storage vs two days at 100MW are such different things it makes no sense to leave out such an important detail.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and by the same token 10GWh of energy that can only be delivered at a rate of 1kW is a completely different thing to 10GWh that can be delivered at 100MW
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Re: Capacity for understanding capacity (Score:1)
It says 680,000 homes for 4 hours, presuming that this is generally going to be used during solar downtime, I would say they need to store about 3 kW/h/house or 12kW * 680,000 or ~8GW. Which not sure why they would start with a pilot project of 620MW and 60MW, they need 16x as much.
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it called a plant if it doesn't produce anything?
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it called a plant if it doesn't produce anything?
When I saw "battery plant" in the headline, I thought it was a factory that made batteries.
I thought that was odd because building a battery factory in California makes no sense at all.
Then I read TFA and realized it's a battery bank for storage. California needs those.
Re: (Score:1)
"When I saw "battery plant" in the headline, I thought it was a factory that made batteries."
Same.
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Re: (Score:2)
Entropy is produced.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Why is it called a plant if it doesn't produce anything?
When you look at what Californians will pay per kilowatt-minute after the liars get done selling a carbon-free future, they’ll more wonder why it was called a project instead of a felony.
But sadly... (Score:3)
Re: But sadly... (Score:3)
Not with the cost of electricity in California.
Re: (Score:1)
I paid more than 3x per unit of power in California than my new state.
My new house is 2x the size, run AC 24x7, have pool, yet my bills are still smaller here.
Also, here they maintain the power grid as opposed to PG&E which both starts major fires and has killed people with equipment exploding.
8 dead, 6 felony convictions for the company, no one went to jail.
https://abc7news.com/pge-fine-... [abc7news.com]
Re: But sadly... (Score:2)
I'm aware. PG&E are scams. A number of cities in CA have municipal electric utilities. Their rates are 1/4th of PG&E. I used to live in one of them.
Re: But sadly... (Score:1)
1/4 is still about average for the rest of the US. Places near nuke and water energy are significantly cheaper.
Re: But sadly... (Score:2)
I am aware. Still, paying average electricity costs in a high cost area is a good deal. SF is trying to evict PG&E under eminent domain to take over the distribution.
Why so few comments? (Score:2)
I'd think a story about a new grid scale energy storage project would get more people excited and drive more comments but this story has been posted for some time now an the comment count appears low. Are people not excited? Is batteries on the grid got to be mundane by now?
As big as this project is made out to be I have to wonder just how much impact it will have for California's energy problems. The fine article says the battery can supply power to over 600,000 homes for four hours, but there's somethi
Re: (Score:2)
Solar and wind can make meaningful contributions to a power grid, but there are limitations. However, until those limitations are met, people are going to focus on increasing solar and wind. After that, they may start looking at nuclear as a solution for the rest of the problem. But not until solar and wind hit their limitations.
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California just wrote up a very sweet loan to Diablo Canyon to keep their nuclear power reactors running so it would appear they hit the limits on solar and wind already. By needing to add so much battery capacity to the grid shows they hit some limits.
I keep reading how solar PV with energy storage is cheaper than nuclear fission, and I suspect there is some truth to that. What appears to be ignored is that we can add energy storage to nuclear fission to lower costs. With nuclear fission producing high
Impact on the grid when charging ? (Score:2)