In addition to requesting proposals today for 500 MW of new solar in Virginia, Dominion Energy Virginia has announced four energy storage pilot projects to explore the technology in order to support the utility’s increased desire for renewable energy on the grid.
Four utility-scale battery projects totaling 16 MW were filed with the State Corporation Commission (SCC) for approval last Friday and are enabled by the Grid Transformation & Security Act of 2018, which allows Dominion Energy to invest in up to 30 MW of energy storage pilot projects.
“Energy storage is critical to providing continued reliability for our customers as we expand our renewable portfolio,” said Mark D. Mitchell, vice president of generation construction for Dominion Energy Virginia. “Battery storage has made significant strides in recent years, in both efficiency and cost. These pilot projects will enable Dominion Energy to better understand how best to deploy batteries to help overcome the inherent fluctuation of wind and solar generation sources.”
The four proposed Central Virginia-based lithium-ion projects will cost approximately $33 million to construct and will provide key information on distinct use cases for batteries on the energy grid. Pending SCC approval, the pilots would be evaluated over a five-year period once operational as currently expected in December 2020.
- Two battery systems totaling 12 MW at the Scott Solar facility in Powhatan County will demonstrate how batteries can store energy generated from solar panels during periods of high production and release energy during periods when load is high or solar generation is low. It would also help optimize the power produced by the solar facility.
- A 2-MW battery at a substation in Ashland will explore how batteries can improve reliability and save money on equipment replacement by serving as an alternative to traditional grid management investments such as transformer upgrades, necessary to serve customers during times of high energy demand.
- A 2-MW battery at a substation in New Kent County serving a 20-MW solar facility will show how batteries can help manage voltage and loading issues caused by reverse energy flow, to maintain grid stability.
News item from Dominion Energy
Bonnie Burns says
The solar farm in Powhatan is in my backyard. initially we were told there would be no problems with the solar panels. We invited Dominion to come and see the damage from run off at the back of our property. This has been several months ago and still no response. Now you are going to place two battery systems totaling 12 MW at the Scott Solar facility in Powhatan County. Interestingly enough no mention of battery storage was made when the Solar facility came to Powhatan. The safety of energy storage technology is under scrutiny. Safety is a concern, there is well known risk of thermal runaway. Do the folks in Powhatan have a say about this? I think not.
Solarman says
Interesting pundit: “In addition to requesting proposals today for 500 MW of new solar in Virginia, Dominion Energy Virginia has announced four energy storage pilot projects to explore the technology in order to support the utility’s increased desire for renewable energy on the grid.”
Yeah, “…explore the technology..”, like Dominion Energy is a ‘front runner’ in the adoption of utility energy storage. IF Dominion was really exploring energy storage, they would have proposed redox flow batteries and explore that technology for grid energy storage. Molten salt batteries could be a very good fit for cycling power on the grid. They talk of batteries and lithium ion and several electric utilities World wide have adopted the technology and see the grid stackable revenues functionality is far superior than Peaker plants. What needs to be done now is one of these utilities to make the bet and install the much less energy dense redox flow battery on their grid and see how actual O&M costs over the lifetime of the energy storage unit relates to the power demanding lithium battery storage containers. Air conditioning to keep the battery packs cool, BMS to control the charge/discharge currents in the battery packs to keep them out of thermal runaway, fire control systems built into the containers just in case the BMS fails. A best of a 10 year warranty on the lithium ion battery product and a 20 year plus life expectancy for redox flow batteries. Unfortunately here, no one has had a lithium ion energy storage system online for 10 years, so 10 years use may not be true for all energy storage systems. Several of these lithium ion systems have failed in some catastrophic way as in the incident on 4/19/19 at the McMicklen Switching station in Surprise Az.
FrankM says
Your argument – if they’re “serious” – is to go with a far less commercial-scale technology that has lower energy density and worse RTE? Not with much more proven and energy-dense lithium-ion, which is being deployed at 100 MW scale as peaker replacements, which is the main application Dominion should be looking at?
And not “no one” – AES (supported by its spinoff with Siemens, Fluence) has had one of its earliest systems operating in Chile for a decade, which first came online in 2009 and has been operating continuously without issue.