Florida Utility To Close Two Natural Gas Plants, Build World's Largest Solar Battery System (electrek.co)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Florida Power & Light has joined the race to build the world's largest solar battery storage system, announcing plans for its massive Manatee Energy Storage Center. The utility plans to build a 409 MW/900 MWh battery, to be powered by an existing FPL solar plant in Manatee County, Florida. It will begin serving customers in 2021. FPL says the battery system will be able to power 329,000 homes for two hours. For comparison, FPL notes the battery system is equivalent to 100 million iPhone batteries, or 300 million AA batteries. The system will be used in periods of high demand. The utility company also said that it will accelerate the retirement of two natural gas facilities at a nearby power plant. "FPL says the project will save customers more than $100 million while eliminating more than 1 million tons of carbon emissions, though no cost estimates for the project were disclosed," reports Electrek.

And while the Manatee Energy Storage Center is projected to be the "world's largest solar-powered battery storage system," it will have some competition from Texas where there are plans to build a 495 MW battery storage system that would be paired with an equivalent 495 MW solar farm in Borden County, Texas. It too is due to come online in 2021.

Comments

Energy conservation off the table?

[Latent Heat]

What if a combination of a reflective roof, improved sealing and insulation of attic ducts, and a higher-efficiency A/C unit is more cost effective than a solar photovoltaic panel?

The reflective roof is more than covering your house in tin -- there are coatings that reflect sunlight with better combined ability to reflect incoming radiation along with emit heat that gets in as infrared. Florida houses typically lack basements, so the A/C ductwork is in the hot attic -- sealing air leaks and insulating the ducts helps a lot. Newer A/C units are much more efficient.

"Uh, why not do both solar electric and A/C efficiency?" Indeed, why not, but all of the resources and press attention is going into the production side over the demand side. Low-hanging fruit, baby!

Re:Energy conservation off the table?

[Maury Markowitz]

"What if a combination of a reflective roof, improved sealing and insulation of attic ducts, and a higher-efficiency A/C unit is more cost effective than a solar photovoltaic panel?"

Then do that too.

I think you're missing the point that this is not a rooftop system. That's important. For argument's sake, let's say this system is 1GW peak. To deploy that on homes you'd need to install 200,000 average 5k rooftop systems. Or, as you suggest, you could improve existing systems to lower the energy use. If that's 1kW per home, then you need 1,000,000 homes to be upgraded.

Current pricing on utility-scale solar is about 80 cents/W. So installing one 1 GW plant will cost you about 800 million dollars. In contrast, installing on the rooftop costs about $3.25/W, so that option would be 3.25 billion dollars. Re-doing the homes as you suggest will cost thousands per home, so I would not be surprised if it was tens of billions.

So the end result is the same, 1GW offset. One solution costs many times less than the others. Done like dinner.

iPhones? AA batteries?

[DontBeAMoran]

For comparison, FPL notes the battery system is equivalent to 100 million iPhone batteries, or 300 million AA batteries.

First of all, is it true there's only the equivalent of three AA batteries in an iPhone?

Secondly, 100 million iPhone batteries or 300 million AA batteries may sound like a lot, but when divided by the power required by houses, it doesn't seem like much. Can someone convert that in a how-many-tesla-car-batteries-can-fit-in-a-stadium number?