Texas Law Could Short-Circuit Battery Breakthrough

[TexasTowelie]

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.

-snip-

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 Texas Group.

[hunter]

1. Um, does the newspaper's headline writer know a short-circuit is a bad thing???

But modern power control systems, yes, including batteries, are a good thing for renewable energy.

[kentauros]

2. It's an appropriate term due to the nature of the law.

That is, transmission companies cannot generate electricity, and vice versa. Batteries are seemingly classified as generators (I guess because they put electricity into the transmission lines, even if it's originally just stored energy.) The company proposing this is a transmission company.

[dumbcat]

3. I really wish they could get their terms straight

"... estimated that Texas could add up to five gigawatts of storage capacity to its grid"

I wish they would get power and energy and watts and watt-hrs straight. Five gigawatts is power capacity, not energy storage capacity. Yes, power capacity is an important measure in this context, but it is not the whole story. But so is the energy storage capacity in gigawatt-hours. How long can that storage capacity provide that five gigawatts? Five minutes? An hour? Four hours? It makes a difference in both utility and economics.

"Those batteries could store enough electricity to power 1.5 million Texas homes on a hot summer day."

Again, for how long? One minute? Ten minutes? An hour? It makes a difference.

Yeah, it's just a pet peeve of mine.

[hunter]

4. Yep. In any case these batteries are not really about energy storage...

... they are about network stability, matching the less predictable output of wind and solar generation to the more predictable load.

[dumbcat]

5. The stored energy is used

to help provide the network stability. So what part of the batteries are not about energy storage?

[hunter]

6. Mathematically, yes.

As a percentage of daily power production across the entire network, the amount of energy stored is very small.

This is not like a huge pumped storage plant, or the batteries of a home solar system that's not connected to a larger power grid.

I'm sure we're on the same page. Popular press reporting on alternative or new power technologies is notoriously awful; often deliberately so in the case of marketing and investment schemes. Many laws have been written by lobbyists and passed by legislators to obfuscate the actual physical realities of network operations.

It's as if the sellers are actively seeking buyers who have no idea that a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour are not the same thing, and it's also seems to be the reason for the bizarre and frequently used "number of homes" measure.

The math and physics of power grid operations is clear, popular press accounts, press releases, and marketing brochures are not.