Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has scored $2 million in funding from the California Energy Commission to finance a portion of a $20 million energy storage project that’s expected to start operating at the end of the year. PG&E will pay the balance of the project.
The large-scale sodium sulfur battery to be used as part of this project is a four megawatts system with a 28-megawatt-hour storage capacity that is manufactured by Japan’s NGK. Once installed and operating, the NGK battery will be the largest stationary battery energy storage system in California, according to the CEC.
The NGK battery will likely be located in Silicon Valley, PG&E tells us.
California utilities, like PG&E, have been signing a record number of PPAs with solar and wind farm operators to meet state standards requiring them to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2020.
This rush for renewables by California utilites has created its own set of issues. One is reliability. Unlike gas-fired or coal-fired plants, wind and solar generation are not constant. One way to ensure that green power is piped through the grid on sunny or rainy days or windless days is by deploying large batteries that can store the electricity and offload it when need it.
“This demonstration project is one of the steps we are taking to ensure more reliability as our generation portfolio continues to use more renewables,” a PG&E spokesman told GER.
Separately, PG&E is also looking to build a $300 million underground storage facility that will use compressed air to store enough wind-based energy to generate some 300 megawatts worth of electricity. The utility has applied for a $25 million federal grant to fund initial research in view of developing this project.