Tehachapi site of North America’s largest energy storage project

TEHACHAPI

September 25, 2014 9:01pm

•  Massive arrays of batteries store clean energy

•  “A significant amount of insight into the operational capabilities of large-scale, lithium-ion battery storage”

The Kern County city of Tehachapi has a new claim to fame: It’s the site of the largest battery-based energy storage system in North America.

The claim is made by its owner, Southern California Edison.

The demonstration project is funded by SCE and federal stimulus money awarded by the Department of Energy as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The 32 megawatt-hours battery energy storage system features lithium-ion batteries housed inside a 6,300 square-foot facility at SCE’s Monolith substation in Tehachapi.

The project is in the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area that is projected to generate up to 4,500 MW of wind energy by 2016.

“This installation will allow us to take a serious look at the technological capabilities of energy storage on the electric grid,” says Imre Gyuk, energy storage program manager in the energy department’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. “It will also help us to gain a better understanding of the value and benefit of battery energy storage.”

The project costs about $50 million with matching funds from SCE and the energy department. Over a two-year period, the project will demonstrate the performance of lithium-ion batteries in actual system conditions and the capability to automate the operations of the battery energy storage system and integrate its use into the utility grid.

“The Tehachapi Energy Storage Project is a significant milestone for SCE and for energy storage in California” says Doug Kim, director of advanced technology at SCE. “Grid-scale energy storage is an integral part of our company’s storage portfolio development framework that will contribute to optimizing grid performance and integrating more renewable energy resources. This demonstration project will give us a significant amount of insight into the operational capabilities of large-scale, lithium-ion battery storage.”

Primary goals of the project are to demonstrate the effectiveness of lithium-on battery and smart inverter technologies for improved grid performance and to assist in the integration of variable renewable energy resources like wind and solar power.

The battery system supplied by South Korea’s LG Chem is comprised of 604 battery racks, 10,872 battery modules and 608,832 individual battery cells – the same lithium-ion cells installed in battery packs for General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt.

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