The Answer to Our Energy Problems: A Big Box of Batteries

May 14, 2006 – Vol.11 No.8

THE ANSWER TO OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS: A BIG BOX OF BATTERIES.

Baseload power plants operate 24/7. Electricity is generated, fuel is consumed and pollution emitted for electricity that’s made but not consumed when people are snug in their beds and business is at a standstill. Utility companies offer lower overnight rates to encourage people and industry to adjust their schedules to buy some of this power. It’s better to sell it at discounted rate than not sell it at all.

It could be that unused power from baseload powerplants could go a long way toward solving the energy shortage that’s slowly arriving. Stored overnight energy, too, can reduce demand on peakload powerplants in the daytime, particularly saving natural gas that is being sucked up by peak-period power plants at an alarming rate.

The New York Power Authority has awarded ABB a $3.2 million contract to build a 1.2-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS) for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA)

Using 6400 sodium sulfur battery cells (320 in each of 20 modules) supplied by Japan-based NGK, the BESS will be built at the Long Island Bus Depot in Garden City, New York. The facility services 220 natural gas fueled buses.

The BESS will be charged at night when rates are low and power stored will be used in daytime, working hours. The low-cost, saved power will save MTA so much money that it will allow MTA’s maintenance crew to work in daylight hours instead of at night.

The BESS in New York won’t be the largest in the world. That honor goes to a football field-sized BESS built in Alaska in 2003.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to build batteries the size of a Walmart - that use available but unused power - than to build more power plants?

The MTA BESS will also serve as backup power and deliver reliability to the local power grid.

The NY BESS project is being funded by research organizations including the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the New York Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

Visit ABB at http://www.abb.com/ , NGK at http://www.ngk.co.jp/