Tag Archive for: solarandbatteries

Con Edison and First Student see bus-charging depots equipped with solar & batteries as a win-win that supports the power grid.

New York City tests a solar-powered electric-school-bus microgrid

New York City utility Con Edison will need to be able to charge about 10,000 electric school buses on its constrained power grid within the next 10 years or so. A $9 million pilot project in Brooklyn could help it figure out how to do that.

The project is starting small. Four battery-electric school buses are onsite today, with 12 more expected by the start of next school year. They’ll be bolstered by a 500-kilowatt solar array and a 2-megawatt-hour battery onsite, as well as by solar panels on some of the buses themselves.

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Source: Canary Media

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1.9 million solar panels and 120,000 batteries at a California facility helped the state surpass 10,000 MW of photovoltaic storage in April.

Green energy from storage batteries are replacing fossil fuels in California and Texas

Mark Rothleder, the vice president of the independent grid operator, California ISO (CAISO), said earlier this year that they will add another 1,134 megawatts in the first eight months of 2024. This is growth on top of the leap made last year. “In 2023 alone, the ISO successfully onboarded 5,660 megawatts of new power to the grid,” Rothleder said at a conference in San Diego…

Renewable production was enough to supply the grid on 40 out of 48 days this spring, compared to seven days in the whole of last year. Lithium batteries appear to be undercutting the use of fossil fuels. Gas accounts for 40% of California’s grid. However, its use in April registered its lowest proportion in seven years. “The data clearly shows that batteries are displacing natural gas when solar generation is ramping up and down each day in CAISO,” notes an analysis by Grid Status, a firm specializing in energy issues. Natural gas was king on the grid in April 2021, 2022 and 2023. CAISO was sending between 9,000 and 10,000 megawatts produced from gas to the grid once solar ran out. Last April, however, it amounted to only 5,000 megawatts… [California’s goal: run on 100% renewable energy by 2045.]

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Source: Slashdot

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Utilities tend to treat solar & batteries as threats to their power grids. CA’s policy will now tap their flexible power to benefit the grid.

California’s new rules allow solar and batteries to help out the grid

For years, utilities have grappled with how to handle the ever-growing number of solar and battery systems trying to connect to the lower-voltage grids that deliver power to customers. That’s especially true for midsize projects like, say, a solar array that might adorn the roof of a multiunit apartment complex or a community-solar project that generates power shared by hundreds of dispersed customers.

On the one hand, utilities have eyed such projects warily, fearing that if the solar panels or batteries inject too much power onto local circuits at moments when electricity demand is low, it might cause grid instability or safety problems. As a result, utilities have thrown up barriers that have delayed or halted grid connections.

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Source: Canary Media

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The Edwards Sanborn Solar & Energy Storage project incorporates the highest capacity solar farm in the US with the largest battery storage system in the world.

Solar and batteries go big in the desert

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Discussions of solar energy can be quick to point out its intermittent nature: the Sun does not always shine in any one place all the time. It does, however, shine quite a bit in the Mojave Desert in California. And as it happens, the Mojave is the location of a large new solar power plant integrated with battery storage. The Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage project incorporates the highest capacity solar farm in the United States with the largest battery storage system in the world.

The facility came online in February 2023 and became fully operational in January 2024. The OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 captured this image of the project and its nearly 2 million solar panels on January 12, 2024. The site lies approximately 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, in an area of the U.S. with some of the largest amounts of solar energy reaching the ground.

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Source: Earth Observatory

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