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Duke Energy announced this week that it will receive and intends to match a US $22 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to design, build and install large-scale batteries to store wind energy at one of its wind farms in Texas.
"Through this project, Duke Energy intends to show that renewables can play an even bigger role in our country's energy future."
-- Wouter van Kampen, President, Duke Energy Generation Services
The batteries at Duke Energy's Notrees Windpower Project in Ector and Winkler counties, Texas, will store excess wind energy and discharge it whenever demand for electricity is highest.
This project represents one of the first demonstrations of energy storage at a utility-scale wind farm. The 95 wind turbines in operation at Duke Energy's Notrees site have an installed capacity of 151 megawatts. In April 2009, Walmart began purchasing energy directly from the Notrees project to power up to 15 percent of its stores and facilities in Texas.
The total value of the 20-MW energy storage project at Duke Energy's Notrees site is US $43.6 million. The DOE grant was made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Duke Energy and DOE must negotiate the terms and conditions of the grant before any funds are released.
"Energy storage truly has the potential to serve as a 'game-changer' when it comes to renewable power," said Wouter van Kempen, president of Duke Energy Generation Services, a Duke Energy unit that owns and develops renewable energy assets. "Through this project, Duke Energy intends to show that renewables can play an even bigger role in our country's energy future."
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The levelized costs of delivered energy from the leading technologies for grid-scale energy storage are calculated using a model that considers likely number of cycles per year, expected lifetime, discount rate, duty cycle, and trends in the markets. The expected capital costs of the various options evaluated – pumped hydrostorage, underground pumped hydrostorage (UPHS), hydrogen fuel cells, carbon-lead-acid batteries, advanced adiabatic compressed air energy storage (AA-CAES), lead-acid batteries, lithium-ion batteries, flywheels, sodium sulfur batteries, ultra capacitors, and superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) – are based on recent cost data to the extent possible. The marginal value of the delivered stored energy is analyzed using recent grid energy prices from regions of high wind-energy penetration. The above list is in order from most competitive to least competitive.
A lesser-known energy storage option, Windfuels, is also briefly reviewed. Here, excess off-peak electrical energy is used to synthesize standard liquid fuels, such as gasoline and jet fuel, from CO2 and H2O. Simulations have shown that innovations should make it practical to reduce CO2 to CO at 90% of theoretical efficiency limits. When combined with other process advances, it should then be possible to synthesize hydrocarbons and alcohols from point-source CO2 and off-peak clean grid energy (wind or nuclear) at system efficiencies in the range of 52-61%. The cost of the tanks for storing energy in jet fuel, ethanol, and diesel is only $0.02/kWhr. The cost of storing vast amounts of energy in batteries, compressed air, or flywheels would be several thousand times greater.
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