New Battery Might Make Wind Power More Reliable

Xcel Energy, Inc., has become one of the first utilities in the U.S. to install a giant battery system in an attempt to store some of that wind power for later. “Energy storage might help us get to the point where we can integrate wind better,” says Frank Novachek, director of corporate planning for the Minneapolis-based utility with customers in Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin. “The overall cost of electricity might be lower by using energy storage.”
The energy storage in question—a series of sodium–sulfur batteries from Japan’s NGK Insulators, Ltd.—can store roughly seven megawatt-hours of power, meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously, enough to power 500 average American homes for seven hours. “Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world,” Novachek says. The batteries “store wind at night and they contract with their utility to put out a straight line output from that wind farm every day.”

That removes one of the big hurdles to even broader adoption of wind power: so-called intermittency. In other words, the wind doesn’t always blow when you want it to, a problem Texas faced earlier this year when a drop in wind generation forced cuts in electricity delivery. But with battery backup, the 11-megawatt wind farm outside Luverne, Minn., can deliver a set amount of electricity at all times, making it more reliable or, in industry terms, base-load generation. Plus, the battery effectively doubles the wind farm’s output at any given moment—both the megawatt being produced by the wind farm itself (that would otherwise have gone to charging the battery) and the megawatt delivered by the battery.

But it is expensive, costing roughly $3 million per megawatt plus millions for start-up and testing. “Right now, they’re a little too expensive,” Novachek says. But “it’s getting in the ballpark where it looks like the economics might be there. Testing will help us understand the value.”

Scientific American