September 25
TVA to Install First Grid-Scale Battery System
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
The Tennessee Valley Authority announced this week that it will build its first owned and operated grid-scale battery storage system near an industrial complex in Vonore, Tennessee. Built around lithium-ion batteries, the Vonore Battery Energy Storage System will be capable of storing 40 MW hours of energy, which is enough to power more than 10,600 homes for three hours. It is not expected to reach operational status until 2022.
Colorado Springs Utilities has signed a 17-year power purchase agreement for all the output of a 175 MW solar power project coupled with a 25 MW, four-hour battery energy storage system being developed by juwi. The Pike Solar and Storage project is sited in El Paso County and is slated to begin construction in early 2022 and be completed in 2023. When built, it will be the largest solar facility and first contracted storage system on Colorado Springs Utilities’ system.
This summer, we partnered with See Change Institute to ask 1,000 customers in the U.S. how they engaged with their utility, about their communication preferences and their expectations for utilities. And since COVID-19 is impacting us all, we also asked questions on any changes in energy use and the utility-customer relationship due to the pandemic. Overall, the research found that personalization isn’t optional as customers of all demographics indicated a desire for more relevant recommendations and messages.
Duke Energy is looking to roll out a new program in the Carolinas called Solar Choice Net Metering, which credits small customers with rooftop solar arrays for excess electricity they generate and provide to Duke Energy via the grid. The program is designed to provide pricing and incentive options for customers in North Carolina and South Carolina while allowing the company to address increasing electric demand periods in the winter.
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Industry News
Californians buy more electric cars than any other Americans, though plug-ins still only make up a small fraction of new car sales. But the state now plans to accelerate that trend by making it mandatory: By 2035, under a new executive order from the governor, all new passenger vehicles will have to be zero-emissions. People will still be able to drive the gas cars that they already own, but they won’t be able to buy new ones.
The world’s largest planned offshore wind farm will use the world’s largest installed offshore wind turbines when it starts spinning in British waters. SSE Renewables and Equinor are developing the 3.6 GW Dogger Bank project in U.K. waters, to be built in three 1.2 GW phases. Dogger Bank will provide five percent of the U.K.’s electricity once complete in 2026. The developers confirmed this week that the first two phases will use a 13 MW version of GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X platform.
Tesla on Tuesday unveiled a new EV battery design featuring improvements to density, cost per kilowatt-hour and manufacturing efficiency, but the company also cautioned that at-scale production of the new batteries is still two to three years away. Experts say the new design could drop battery prices from about $127/kWh in 2019 to as low as $56/kWh. According to Elon Musk, this will enable the company to produce a $25,000 electric car in the next three years.
California’s distributed energy resources add up to gigawatts’ worth of capacity that could be used to prevent future rolling blackouts and balance the state’s increasingly clean-powered grid — if the state can compensate them for those services. Wood Mackenzie’s latest report finds that California already has 4.7 GW of flexible distributed energy capacity, or about one-tenth of the state’s peak grid demand.
