A plant that was to be commissioned in Oregon yesterday that combines solar power, wind power and massive batteries to store the energy generated there is the first utility-scale plant of its kind in North America.
The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility, which is rated to generate enough electricity to power a small city at maximum output, addresses a key challenge facing the utility industry.
Wind and solar are clean sources of power, but utilities have been forced to fill in gaps when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining with coal or natural gas.
At the Oregon plant, massive lithium batteries are to store up to 120 megawatt-hours of power generated by the 300 megawatt wind farms and 50 megawatt solar farm so it can be released to the electric grid on demand.
At maximum output, the facility would produce more than half of the power that was generated by Oregon’s last coal plant, which was demolished earlier this month.
On-site battery storage is not new, and interest in solar-plus-battery projects in particular has soared in the US in due to tax credits and incentives, and the falling price of batteries.
However, the Wheatridge facility is the first in the US to combine integrated wind, solar and battery storage at such a large scale in one location, giving it even more flexibility to generate continuous output.
The project is “getting closer and closer to having something with a very stable output profile that we traditionally think of being what’s capable with a fuel-based generation power plant,” said Jason Burwen, vice president of energy storage at the American Clean Power Association, an advocacy group for the clean power industry. “If the solar is chugging along and cloud cover comes over, the battery can kick in and make sure that the output is uninterrupted. As the sun goes down and the wind comes online, the battery can make sure that that’s very smooth so that it doesn’t, to the grid operator, look like anything unusual.”
The plant, which is in a remote expanse three hours east of Portland, is a partnership between NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric, a public utility required to reduce carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2040 under an Oregon climate law passed last year.
NextEra, which developed the site and operates it, owns two-thirds of the wind output and all of the solar output and storage.
“The mere fact that many other customers are looking at these types of facilities gives you a hint at what we think could be possible,” said David Lawlor, NextEra’s director of business development for the Pacific Northwest. “Definitely customers want firmer generation, starting with the battery storage in the back.”
Many researchers and pilots are working on alternatives to lithium ion batteries, largely because their intrinsic chemistry limits them to around four hours of storage and a longer duration would be more useful.
“There is no silver bullet. There’s no model or prototype that’s going to meet that entire need ... but wind and solar will certainly be in the mix,” said Kristen Sheeran, Portland General Electric’s director of sustainability strategy and resource planning. “This model can become a tool for decarbonization ... as the whole country is driving toward very ambitious climate reduction goals.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
RSS