Duke Energy Renewables has completed North America’s largest energy storage project at the company’s Notrees windfarm in west Texas. The 36MW Dynamic Power Resource was designed and installed by Xtreme Power based in Austin who will continue to operate the system. The project will help to mitigate wind power variability as well as storing excess wind energy ready for release onto the grid at times of high demand.
“Battery storage is an important innovation to address the variability of wind and solar energy generation” said Greg Wolf, Duke Energy Renewables President. “Developing an expertise in this advanced technology will enable us to expand the use of renewable energy, better integrate it into the power grid and become even more efficient at serving our customers.”
The company announced plans to install large-scale energy storage systems to service its wind farm at Notrees in late 2009, matching a $22 million grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE). As well as helping to meet power demand the system will also help to stabilize the frequency of electricity travelling through the power grid. Duke Energy is currently working closely with the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which will indicate whether the system should dispatch stored energy to increase frequency or absorb energy to decrease it. Performance data will be collected from the battery storage system by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to help assess the broader potential for deployment of storage solutions throughout the sector. Sandia National Laboratory will meanwhile analyze technical and economic data. The results will shared publically through the DOE Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse.
Duke Energy helps to develop innovative wind and solar energy generation projects throughout the US and its current portfolio to date includes 15 wind farms and 14 solar farms across nine states with a total of more than 1,700MW capacity. Currently the DOE Office of Electricity Distribution and Energy Reliability (OE) is taking on the responsibility of modernizing the electricity grid while enhancing security and reliability of the infrastructure. The OE has awarded 16 grants for energy storage projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) worth a total of $185 million. These projects include diverse technologies such as compressed air energy storage, flywheels and advanced batteries and applications include frequency regulation, smoothing of PV installation and ramping for wind. These are an integral part of the OE’s Energy Storage Programme and are being project managed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).
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Perhaps the headline should be qualified as "..largest *battery* energy storage system", since there are already CAES and pumped hydro systems with much larger energy and power capacity than this.
