Another battery use12 Mar 2019 10:31
https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/peak-time-to-take-action
Storage-plus…. gas?
One technical alternative that always elicits controversy is batteries-plus-natural gas. An existing gas peaker can be hybridised with a battery to improve its efficiency and drastically reduce the number of times it has to start or ramp up and similarly the reduce the time it takes when it does.
In light of global warming in particular, the smartest solution for the transformation of the electric grid’s fleet of generation capacity would be as aggressive in its pursuit of renewables goals as possible, Alex Morris argues. In practical reality, that’s not what we would expect to see. Some of the existing plants are tied not only to already sunken costs borne by ratepayers, others have a kind of protected ‘must run’ status due to their accepted role in keeping the lights on.
“A lot of money has been spent to build the grid and the fleet that we currently have. It’s prudent to consider how best to evolve that fleet and grid,” Morris says.
In some cases this will mean the retirement of ageing peakers and replacing them with solar-plus-storage peakers, which can also provide energy capacity to the grid at other times and provide ancillary services too. In other cases where it is too expensive to retire an ageing peaker, hybridisation may be a better option than business-as-usual.
“I don’t think there’s a single general rule about it. You generally want to be aggressive but also cost-conscious as you pursue this grid transformation,” Morris says.
Yet even switching on a gas turbine comes at a price every time from an O&M perspective, and, as Tom Buttgenbach points out, “folks in the gas peaker business are not in the natural gas business, they’re in the business of servicing peaks”.
A battery might even enable peaker plant operators to catch the very short but higher value peaks that gas cannot. Solar prices continue to tumble even in lower irradiance markets of the world and battery prices – including longer duration solutions such as flow batteries – are coming down in price too on a continual basis.
“At some point you’re going to have the question of why do you have the gas peaker, sitting there,” Buttgenbach says.
“The [short-term] reality is you already have the interconnection and all of the permits so it makes it a lot easier to participate in the market with the battery. But in the long term I wouldn’t think of them as gas peakers, I would think of them as a gas peaker converted to a battery.”
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