California Grid Operator Seeks Energy Storage For Power Market

[Fledermaus]

California's grid operator said Thursday that it will actively start soliciting bids for energy-storage services as part of the state's wholesale power market.

The board of the California Independent System Operator said that the operator will seek storage services from companies with batteries and flywheels, among other technologies, to provide reserve power for the grid. The organization said it views storage as well as conservation services, called demand response, as "key components" that will make it easier to add more wind and solar power facilities, which tend to generate electricity intermittently, to California's electric grid.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110203-719957.html

[Nihil]

1. Wise move. K&R. (n/t)

:thumbsup:

[phantom power]

2. This will be very interesing.

Rubber hitting the road.

[Gregorian]

3. Finally. The next step before anything else happens is this.

And thank you for posting this. I've had arguments on this forum that had me so frustrated. People don't understand that we cannot utilize renewable resources until we have sufficient storage to fill the gaps. As in no wind, or night time for solar.

[kristopher]

4. You are frustrated because you aren't correct.

"The next step before anything else happens is this", you wrote.
It has been explained to you before that your understanding of how our energy delivery system works is fundamentally incorrect. You are trying to project the characteristics of a single energy generating unit onto the entire grid when they are distinctly different critters.

"Does Wind Need Storage?
The fact that “the wind doesn’t always blow” is often used to suggest the need for dedicated energy storage to handle fluctuations in the generation of wind power. Such viewpoints, however, ignore the realities of both grid operation and the performance of a large, spatially diverse wind-generation resource. Historically, all other variation (for example, that due to system loads, generation-commitment and dis- patch changes, and network topol- ogy changes) has been handled systemically. This is because the diversity of need leads to much lower costs when variability is aggregated before being balanced. Storage is almost never “coupled” with any single energy source—it is most economic when operated to maximize the economic benefit to an entire system. Storage is nearly always beneficial to the grid, but this benefit must be weighed against its cost. With more than 26 GW of wind power currently operating in the United States and more than 65 GW of wind energy operating in Europe (as of the date of this writing), no additional storage has been added to the systems to balance wind. Storage has value in a system without wind, which is the reason why about 20 GW of pumped hydro storage was built in the United States and 100 GW was built worldwide, decades before wind and solar energy were considered as viable electricity generation technologies. Additional wind could increase the value of energy storage in the grid as a whole, but storage would continue to provide its services to the grid—storing energy from a mix of sources and responding to variations in the net demand, not just wind....

Some other questions that are addressed:

Can Grid Operators Deal with the Continually Changing Output of Wind Generation?

Does Wind Have Capacity Credit?

How Often Does the Wind Stop Blowing Everywhere at the Same Time?

Isn’t It Very Difficult to Predict Wind Power?

Isn’t It Very Expensive to Integrate Wind?

Doesn’t Wind Power Need New Transmission, and Won’t That Make Wind Expensive?

Doesn’t Wind Power Need Backup Generation? Isn’t More Fossil Fuel Burned with Wind Than Without, Due to Backup Requirements?

Does Wind Need Storage?

Isn’t All the Existing Flexibility Already Used Up?

Is Wind Power as Good as Coal or Nuclear Even Though the Capacity Factor of Wind Power Is So Much Less?

Isn’t There a Limit to How Much Wind Can Be Accommodated by the Grid?



Download here:
http://www.ieee-pes.org/images/pdf/open-access-milligan.pdf

-Wind Power Myths Debunked
By Michael Milligan, Kevin Porter, Edgar DeMeo, Paul Denholm, Hannele Holttinen, Brendan Kirby, Nicholas Miller, Andrew Mills, Mark O’Malley, Matthew Schuerger, and Lennart Soder

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2009.934268 november/december 2009 1540-7977/09/©2009 IEEE Power and Energy Magazine Master Series

[Gregorian]

5. There is a need for storage. And the grid alone does not store energy.

If one confines their observations to only one form of generation, then they can make an argument against storing energy. I don't know about wind power generation. There may be enough that it supplies the down time of solar.

But there is another issue here. Not everyone is tied to the grid. There is a percentage of this country that is not grid tied. They will need storage. Cars will need storage.

Hydroelectric dams are a form of storage. So we do have storage already.