Texas Law Could Short-Circuit Battery Breakthrough
Texas’ largest power line company says it has found a way to quickly revolutionize the state’s electrical grid, making it more reliable and friendlier to renewable energy without driving up consumer costs.
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The company, Oncor, which has 119,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines delivering power to more than three million homes and businesses, surprised the energy world last month when it announced that it was willing to spend billions of dollars by 2018 to install some 25,000 batteries across Texas that would store electricity to be discharged when needed.
The affordability of such a plan was thought to be decades away, but battery costs are fast declining as suppliers like Tesla ramp up production. The Brattle Group, in a study Oncor commissioned, estimated that Texas could add up to five gigawatts of storage capacity to its grid without increasing long-term costs for consumers. Those batteries could store enough electricity to power 1.5 million Texas homes on a hot summer day.
Experts have long considered large-scale energy storage a holy grail, particularly in Texas, where demands wildly fluctuate. Power plants sit idle for long stretches, especially when Texans turn off their lights at night. And some plants, including inefficient, high-polluting coal plants, are used only on the hottest or coldest days. Meanwhile, wind turbines typically churn out more power at night, when winds blow the strongest.
Read more: http://www.texastribune.org/2014/12/15/state-law-could-short-circuit-battery-breakthrough/
Cross-posted in the Environment & Energy Group.
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