Duke Energy Plans To Invest $500 Million In Energy Storage

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

It may not seem like much. After all, it only works out to 37.5 MWh per year. But Duke Energy’s decision to invest $500 million for energy storage in conjunction with its solar portfolio in the Carolinas is still big, given the utility’s ongoing love/hate relationship with solar energy.

The investment will take place over 15 years and will increase battery capacity in North Carolina from its current 15 MW capacity and in South Carolina, well – right now you need a microscope to see its battery storage, so any increase would be immense.

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“Duke Energy is at the forefront of battery energy storage, and our investment could increase as we identify projects that deliver benefits to our customers,” said Rob Caldwell, president, Duke Energy Renewables and Distributed Energy Technology. “Utility-owned and operated projects in North Carolina and South Carolina will include a variety of system benefits that will help improve reliability for our customers and provide significant energy grid support for the region.”

This week, the company filed for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity with the North Carolina Utilities Commission for a solar facility in the Hot Springs community of Madison County as part of a microgrid project.

The Hot Springs Microgrid project will consist of a 2-megawatt (AC) solar facility and a 4-megawatt lithium-based battery storage facility. The microgrid will provide a safe, cost-effective and reliable grid solution for serving the Hot Springs area, and provide energy and grid support to all customers. The project will defer ongoing maintenance of an existing distribution power line that serves the remote town.

The Hot Springs project is part Duke Energy’s Western Carolinas Modernization Project, which involves on-going conversations with community partners to help advance a cleaner energy future for the region. It includes closing a half-century-old, coal-fired power plant in Asheville in 2019. The plant will be replaced with a cleaner natural gas-fired plant and distributed energy resources like solar power and battery storage.

Duke Energy’s long-term solar strategy has traditionally been a “solar for me but not for thee” formulation, building large-scale utility solar farms it controls while both subtly (and not-so-subtly) undermining rooftop solar in the Carolinas.

DoE Grants Aim To Find Longer-Duration Batteries

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Utility Dive (UD) had an interesting piece on the recent Department of Energy (DoE) grants that are aimed at finding longer-duration batteries, which are important as more renewables join the grid.

Right now, according to UD, lithium ion batteries don’t provide enough storage capacity (typically four hours) to really be a sufficient for the widespread battery storage that is necessary as renewables increase their penetration throughout the country.

As they should, the DoE is now investing government funds in research-and-development (R&D) to find alternatives.

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UD reports:

Last month, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) awarded just over $28 million to 10 projects that aim to push the limits of energy storage duration. ARPA-E’s Duration Addition to electricitY Storage (DAYS) program aims to push the duration of energy storage systems out to 100 hours.

One hundred hours, just a little more than four days, is an exponential leap from current durations but the role of ARPA-E is to focus on early stage technologies that are not yet commercial or quite ready for the private sector.

“Wind and solar will clearly be the cheapest forms of electric energy in the future,” Paul Albertus, the director of the DAYS program, told Utility Dive. So, “it is pretty clear that over the next 10 years or so” the need for longer duration energy storage is going to grow, he said.

What’s most interesting, however, is a point made later in the article about the grid. People tend to forget that until battery storage catches up, the grid is still the “storage device” of choice for most renewable energy users. As Alex Eller, senior research analyst at Navigant Research, told Utility Dive:

“It comes back to the fact that grid is built on plants that can run forever, given enough fuel. Until they are not there anymore, that is your long term storage,” Eller said.

More:

DOE energy storage grants look to the day when renewables rule the grid

Nice Headline, Doctor – But That Doesn’t Make It True

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened:Ah, ya gotta love drive-by hit pieces led by tricky, click-bait headlines, don’t you (you don’t, and you SHOULDN’T)?

Vox ran an article (which you no doubt saw, given how many of you clicked on it) that implied somehow battery storage was bad for the electrical grid, headlined “Batteries have a dirty secret.”

Then, in the subhead, David Roberts, aka “Dr. Vox,” asserts that the actual deployment of batteries increases carbon emissions.

OMG, if true, right? Well, as you probably have already guessed, that’s not what the story says at all. Quelle surprise.

SolarWakeup’s View: There are times when I kinda hate my profession. And articles like that by David Roberts, who implies he’s a doctor on Twitter (and may well be), this morning in Vox are some of those times.

Under a headline “Batteries have a dirty secret,” Roberts implies that somehow, battery storage is bad for the environment. I’m sure he knows better, but he’s hoping you won’t (and there are a lot of average Americans out there who won’t).

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Of course, once he’s got you sucked in by the click-bait headline, he can say whatever he wants. And what he wants to tell you is that in a fossil-fuel based electricity-generation system, battery storage can increase carbon emissions because the energy they’re storing is from fossil-fuel based electricity generation.

Oh. Is this really…debatable? Is this…an argument we have to have? Isn’t it a pretty well-accepted maxim that if you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out? (Yes. Yes it is.)

He bases his entire premise on a study of current battery storage installations, which does find that to an extent – in places where solar and other renewables aren’t prevalent – battery storage stores energy from dirty fuel plants and therefore doesn’t do anything to cut back on fossil fuels and, in some cases, increases them.

But to make the argument that battery storage is dirty (a premise, I should note, Roberts himself debunks in the article with a wink and a nod as if to say, “See what I did there?” Yeah, I see you, David, and I thumb my nose in your general direction), you have to accept another idea: Electricity generation is forever preserved in amber as it is today. In other words, we will never have enough renewables on the grid to change the unvirtuous cycle he describes.

Which is, of course, nonsense at its core.

I’m not going to lie: Toward the end of the article, Roberts makes some good points about how battery-storage policy needs to change and actually offers some useful ideas. Most people, however, won’t read past the headline, subhead and maybe the first three paragraphs. And if they do that in this piece, then they’re going to walk away thinking battery storage is bad for the environment – a false narrative that could hurt the industry in the long run.

More:

Dave Roberts Lies About A Thing To Get You To Click On A Story (But I’m Not Going To Enable Him)