Batteries included: New wind turbines and solar panels come with built-in storage

[madokie]

GE’s 2.5-120 wind turbineGeneral ElectricA new GE wind turbine comes with battery included.

If you want to use solar power at night or wind power on calm days, you need batteries that can store energy after it’s produced. But why bother with two pieces of equipment when you could have one?

Engineers are now beginning to build batteries directly into wind and solar systems.

Combined renewable generation-storage systems are just starting to be deployed in the wind sector. From a report last month in Quartz:

[W]hat if every wind turbine became a node in an energy internet, communicating with the grid and each other to adjust electricity production while storing and releasing electricity as needed? That’s the idea behind General Electric’s new “brilliant” turbine, the first three of which the company said … will be installed at a Texas wind farm operated by Invenergy.

More: http://grist.org/news/batteries-included-new-wind-turbines-and-solar-panels-come-with-built-in-storage/

[oldhippie]

1. That's an interesting, and seemingly obvious concept ......

... but I would like to see their justification for having relatively small batteries in each turbine rather than a bigger battery for a group of turbines in a wind farm. I can see certain advantages to having the battery in the tower itself. There is a lot of room available, it is close to the charging source, and is relatively accessible for maintenance.

But, as noted in the comments to the article, the 50kWr battery is pretty small, capable of releasing only about 80 seconds worth of the turbines rated power. (Even less if you want the battery to last very long.) So I have to think this is a proof of concept demo for testing the smart grid software and things would be scaled up for practical use.

So why not, using the same principle, have a much larger battery in the middle of the wind farm, performing the same function of stabilizing the grid voltage during lulls in the wind? It would seem that one could get some economies of scale with, say, a 500 KWHr battery pack in a small building serving 10 turbines in the area rather than spreading them out into the 10 turbines.

There must be some reason the engineers decided to spread the batteries out in the individual turbines rather than centralizing within a group of turbines. I'd sure like to see that rationale and analysis.

[caraher]

2. Might the function be mainly to help match production to demand?

That's true, it's not a lot of energy per battery. But if the idea is to damp out fluctuations in the output power from individual turbines than both the size and placement with individual turbines make a lot more sense. It also seems like the whole process would be rather lossy (since you'd have to rectify some of the turbine output to charge the battery and convert the current from the battery to AC when drawing energy back from it).

I agree that for significant storage you're probably better off with a more centralized system, one per wind farm (e.g. pumped storage).