Switching From Coal To Batteries At Power Plant In Maryland

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wemay

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I am no expert but I do wonder how a solar field in a state like MD can replace any coal fired plant. I could see it being able to provide short term power for high usage times but its not like they get the sun like AZ or NM. Its not unusual to get 3 or 4 overcast days in a row in the summer and its almost the norm in the winter. I guess its good its an experiment and not a mandate that would drive the price of power through the roof. I wonder how those big wind turbines are doing off the coast of Ocean City.
 
Thanks for the post. The writer is a bit off his rocker, however. He is comparing an energy source to a storage source. He didn’t talk about what the source was to charge the batteries (likely wind and or solar). He made it sound like this battery somehow generates power on its own. Anyway, we know what he was trying to say. Batteries can smooth out fluctuations in alternate power sources, but now the cost of the batteries has to be paid for by the consumers.
 
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Snagglefoot said:
Thanks for the post. The writer is a bit off his rocker, however. He is comparing an energy source to a storage source. He didn’t talk about what the source was to charge the batteries (likely wind and or solar). He made it sound like this battery somehow generates power on its own. Anyway, we know what he was trying to say. Batteries can smooth out fluctuations in alternate power sources, but now the cost of the batteries has to be paid for by the consumers.
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Right. And until the time at which unconventional power sources have the capacity to create excess power without base load production sources like gas, coal or nuclear, there is no point in battery storage.
 
wemay said:
Experiment...
CleanTechnica: Switching From Coal To Batteries At Power Plant In Maryland.

Switching From Coal To Batteries At Power Plant In Maryland - CleanTechnica

Talen Energy is installing a 20 MW battery at the site of a retired coal-fired generating station. It's an experiment that could lead to a total of 1 GW of batteries at other locations.
cleantechnica.com cleantechnica.com
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As with most "clean technica" and "reneweconomy" pieces, the headline is complete nonsense. You aren't replacing a 1GW generator with a 20MW battery (or even the "up to" 115MW figure). Batteries don't generate electricity for starters, so something needs to produce that electricity, and then there are round-trip losses on the charge/discharge cycle.

They also make no mention of output (see my recent thread on terminology and introduction to this topic) so that battery could be 40MWh, so would then have the ability to provide nameplate (20MW) for a whopping 2 hours and would, depending on the local generation mix, likely be no cleaner than what it replaced.

We did a similar virtue signal here in Ontario. Nanticoke, one of the world's largest coal generating stations, which had 8 units and an installed capacity of 4,000MW. It was "replaced" by a 44MW solar farm, which, using the average 16% capacity factor for solar in Ontario, will produce 0.18% of the potential power generated by the former coal plant (61,670MWh vs 35,050,000MWh).
 
I see this as a way to be able to use non-peak power during peak times. Some power companies use pumped storage hydroelectric plants to supplement their output. During peak times, water from the upper reservoir spins the turbines to generate electricity. The water ends up in the lower reservoir and during periods of low power use, they pump the water back up to the upper reservoir to repeat the process. Using batteries to help during peak loads and charging them during non peak hours would be another way to help handle the loads with the existing power plants. Batteries are an added expense, but should be less expensive than a new generating plant.
 
55hambone said:
I see this as a way to be able to use non-peak power during peak times. Some power companies use pumped storage hydroelectric plants to supplement their output. During peak times, water from the upper reservoir spins the turbines to generate electricity. The water ends up in the lower reservoir and during periods of low power use, they pump the water back up to the upper reservoir to repeat the process. Using batteries to help during peak loads and charging them during non peak hours would be another way to help handle the loads with the existing power plants. Batteries are an added expense, but should be less expensive than a new generating plant.
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20MW isn't doing peaking. What batteries are mostly used for is FCAS. They are very fast responding, so when you have a loss of inertia from the retirement of large thermal plants and more reliance on entities with little to no intertial contribution like wind an solar, that don't regulate frequency well, you can use batteries to quickly make "corrections" to frequency. That's the primarily use of the Tesla battery in SA (Hornsdale).
 
55hambone said:
I see this as a way to be able to use non-peak power during peak times. Some power companies use pumped storage hydroelectric plants to supplement their output. During peak times, water from the upper reservoir spins the turbines to generate electricity. The water ends up in the lower reservoir and during periods of low power use, they pump the water back up to the upper reservoir to repeat the process. Using batteries to help during peak loads and charging them during non peak hours would be another way to help handle the loads with the existing power plants. Batteries are an added expense, but should be less expensive than a new generating plant.
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Yup, although the article was annoying ("unnatural gas"), I think what the writer was trying to say was that the utility planned to retire one coal-fired unit, used primarily for peaking, and use stored electricity from batteries instead.

Presumably the batteries would be charged by the coal-fired units during low-demand times, as some of the off-peak capacity is wasted anyway.

Regarding the relatively low capacity of the batteries, perhaps the designers figure that the batteries' responsiveness compensates for the relatively long time it takes for a thermal unit to ramp up.

But I'm inferring most of this; it wasn't at all clear from the article.
 
Snagglefoot said:
Thanks for the post. The writer is a bit off his rocker, however. He is comparing an energy source to a storage source. He didn’t talk about what the source was to charge the batteries (likely wind and or solar). He made it sound like this battery somehow generates power on its own. Anyway, we know what he was trying to say. Batteries can smooth out fluctuations in alternate power sources, but now the cost of the batteries has to be paid for by the consumers.
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I agree, but it isn't always "paid for by the consumers". Typically they would charge when prices is low and sometimes negative, then they sell it to the market during the peak price. This is likely going to make everyone profit a little and the grid more stable, without consumers paying for it.

This isn't necessarily a solar thing, grid usage varies by nature. What are you using your electricity for at 3am? What can you move from 7pm to 3am? Not much other than laundry drying, or EV charging (assuming you set your thermostat right you won't need much HVAC).
 
PandaBear said:
I agree, but it isn't always "paid for by the consumers". Typically they would charge when prices is low and sometimes negative, then they sell it to the market during the peak price. This is likely going to make everyone profit a little and the grid more stable, without consumers paying for it.

This isn't necessarily a solar thing, grid usage varies by nature. What are you using your electricity for at 3am? What can you move from 7pm to 3am? Not much other than laundry drying, or EV charging (assuming you set your thermostat right you won't need much HVAC).
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For sure, but let’s assume the owner of the battery is independent of the power company. The owner pays X to the power company at night and sells it back to the power company for Y during the day. The power company says “wait a minute, we sold you cheap power at night so you could sell it to us at a higher price during the day? The power was cheap at night because of lack of demand but now you just added to the night demand , so we are going to up the price for the night power.” Of course this could be tempered by government regulation.

Same with charging E cars at night. It’s cheap at first but as the demand for night power goes up, the price will go up until the demand and the price are the same for day power and night power. If a huge number of these batteries get built, the price of night power will go up, and that price will eventually be paid by the consumers. The investors in the battery take on the risk.
 
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A variation of this could be a factory that purchases power at night to use during the day shift but holy cow the difference between night power and day power would be have to be HUGE to make it worthwhile. Now if the power company owned the batteries, they would end up with more usable power during the hours of peak demand, but they would have to recover the costs of the battery ( as if they built a new power plant), and charge the consumers for it.
 
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Snagglefoot said:
For sure, but let’s assume the owner of the battery is independent of the power company. The owner pays X to the power company at night and sells it back to the power company for Y during the day. The power company says “wait a minute, we sold you cheap power at night so you could sell it to us at a higher price during the day? The power was cheap at night because of lack of demand but now you just added to the night demand , so we are going to up the price for the night power.” Of course this could be tempered by government regulation.

Same with charging E cars at night. It’s cheap at first but as the demand for night power goes up, the price will go up until the demand and the price are the same for day power and night power. If a huge number of these batteries get built, the price of night power will go up, and that price will eventually be paid by the consumers. The investors in the battery take on the risk.
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Are you assuming these batteries, EVs, etc are not doing anything with the power they "used up"?

One is to replace other fuel (gasoline, which is still more expensive) in transportation, the other is to shift the load, averaging out the high and low pricing. If you consider that bad I don't know what is good.

What they did is good, just expensive.
 
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