CAMBRIDGE, Mass.- Utility company American Electric Power plans this year to place equipment in residential areas capable of storing a few hours of electricity, one of the first tests of distributed storage on the power grid.
Ali Nourai, AEP’s manager of distributed energy resources, calls the storage program a potential “game changer” for the utility industry. Nourai spoke during a panel on grid energy storage at the MIT Energy Conference, CNET News. Com reported.
“The key for distributed energy is not because it’s cheaper. The key is national security – we don’t have a huge storage (device) that can be blown up,” Nourai said.
The storage units would be the size of a relatively small “backyard transformer,” each wired to provide enough electricity for four to six houses, he said. Together, those storage units could provide back-up power to neighborhoods during outages and potentially for other applications, Nourai said.
“Aggregated, hundreds of these units controlled (by AEP)…effectively do the same as one big storage unit,” he said. “It’s closer to the load, and it has the potential to (create) competition on price.”
AEP is one of the few electric utilities in the U.S. that has already deployed storage on the electricity grid, which is very expensive. The utility, which operates in Midwestern and Southern states, started three years ago with a one megawatt sodium sulfur battery. It now has six megawatts worth of storage in three locations using this technology, Nourai said.
In these cases, AEP can do “peak shaving” in which it draws on the stored electricity during peak times, such as the middle of hot summer day when air conditioning loads are high. Because the stored energy supplies electricity to the grid, the utility doesn’t need to pay for electricity at high peak-time rates.
Although this has proved to be a viable application, speakers on the energy storage panel said that the high cost of batteries and other storage technologies makes it difficult for utilities to justify investments in the technology.
Because of the high cost, energy storage devices need to be used for a number of applications to generate sufficient revenue, the speakers said. For example, a large battery could provide back-up power, do peak shaving, and be used to stabilize dips in grid signal frequency.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be cost that drives acceptance of storage on the grid,” said Gary Colello, CEO of Premium Power, which makes a zinc bromide fuel cell that provides short-term storage to utilities in the U.S. and Canada.
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