SCPPA & Ice Energy To Develop 53-MW of Energy Storage

California, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com] The Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA) and Ice Energy this week announced an agreement to develop one of the first utility-scale energy storage projects in the U.S. The 53 megawatt (MW) project, to be implemented by SCPPA member utilities throughout Southern California is expected to shift as much as 64 gigawatt-hours of on-peak electrical consumption to off-peak periods every year, reducing exposure to costly peak power and improving the reliability of the electrical grid.

Installation of the Ice Energy storage systems will begin in the first half of 2010, with deployment scheduled over two years. The company said that its energy storage system generates and transmits power off-peak, by storing it at thousands of distributed locations, and employing smart grid technologies to dispatch the energy during times of peak demand.

Ice's Ice Bear unit can be incorporated into a building’s standard AC system and is designed to absorb off-peak load and dispatch it on-peak, while consuming an equal or lesser amount of energy on each building.

"Ice Energy's solution is a convenient and cost-effective solution for managing peak demand, and aligns perfectly with our Smart Grid initiatives - enabling our member utilities to deliver reliable, competitively priced electric service to their customers in a sustainable, environmentally-sensitive manner," said Bill Carnahan, executive director of SCPPA. "By using storage to change how – and more importantly when – energy is consumed by air conditioning, we can offset enough peak demand in the region to serve the equivalent of 10,000 homes."