The island state of Hawaii has clearly taken the lead in the global pursuit of long duration battery storage, after its main electric utility revealed this week the details of 16 winning battery storage tenders in a second round of auctions that feature up to eight hours of battery storage.
The results are quite stunning for an industry used to being told that batteries are not a reasonable proposition for more than two or four hours of storage, and are normally best in shorter periods where their fast, accurate and flexible response make them ideal to provide essential grid services such as frequency control and more recently inertia.
However, storage lengths of two to four hours have become more common as the owners of large scale wind and solar farms look to store more output to ensure they can be put into the grid when needed most, and when prices are higher. Four hour battery storage proposals have become common in states like California, where batteries are increasingly preferred to peaking gas generators.
Now, Hawaii has pushed the barriers even further back. All but two of the battery storage proposals announced for the islands of Oahu, Maui and Hawaii feature at least four hours storage, while one 30MW project put forward by leading US developer AES proposes eight hours storage (240MWh) on the island of Oahu.
The deep storage proposed for Hawaii is likely a matter of need: It has fewer options for pumped hydro or other non-fossil dispatchable generation, and not so many possibilities for wind energy, which might have offered some balance to the solar plans.
The proposals were detailed by Hawaiian Electric, which is at the forefront of the local government’s law to reach 100 per cent renewables by 2045 – largely to replace the huge bill for imported oil and gas, and the last remaining coal fired generator on the island of Oahu which is due to close in 2022.
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