January 27
Xcel Energy to Add Storage at Two Retiring Coal Plants
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Xcel Energy entered into an agreement with Form Energy to deploy the latter’s iron-air battery systems at two of the utility’s retiring coal plants. Xcel will deploy a 10 MW/1,000 MWh multi-day storage system at the Sherburne County Generating Station in Becker, Minnesota. Xcel Energy Colorado will deploy a 10 MW/1,000 MWh multi-day storage system at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo, Colorado.
California community choice aggregator Peninsula Clean Energy said that it has signed contracts for energy storage, geothermal, wind and small hydropower projects. Nova III will be Peninsula Clean Energy’s first standalone storage project and will provide up to 50 MW of four-hour lithium-ion battery storage over 15 years beginning in August 2024.
Imagine, for a moment, that it’s the year 2050 and the energy transition is essentially complete. You live in a suburban cul-de-sac, and every vehicle you and your neighbors own is electric. Each house has rooftop solar panels and a battery in the garage. Electricity flows in both directions – to customers and from customers.
A battery energy storage project meant to improve grid reliability in southern Anne Arundel County and parts of Calvert County, Maryland was completed last week, allowing Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) additional energy to meet increased demand during colder months. The Chesapeake Beach, Maryland facility exists in a constrained electric distribution system area and has a 1 MW/2 MWh battery charging capability.
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Industry News
Farrukh Malik, CEO of Amperage Capital, sees a major roadblock on the path to getting Americans to replace their gasoline-fueled cars with electric vehicles: the lack of convenient and cost-effective EV charging for the one-third of U.S. households that rent their homes. Renters make up about 44 million of the country’s 131 million households, Malik said. Those renters “need to be driving EVs for mass adoption to happen.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) anticipates increased U.S. power generation from new renewables like wind and solar in 2023 and 2024 and less from coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook, EIA forecasts that wind and solar will account for 16 percent of total generation in 2023, up from 14 percent in 2022.
Work to build tomorrow’s distribution system will accelerate in 2023 and bring three new insights about distributed energy resources, or DERs, despite challenges, analysts say. Uncertainties remain about customer DER adoption and the need for distribution system control technologies, power system stakeholders agreed.
At this point, Cal Couillard thought he would be well on his way to spending down the philanthropic fund he created as the inventor of precision rollers. Instead, Couillard Solar Foundation is growing as its unique model helps Wisconsin schools and nonprofits benefit from solar despite policy barriers. The Wisconsin business leader created the solar foundation in 2017.
