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Weekly to Seasonal Energy Storage

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John Benson's picture
Senior Consultant, Microgrid Labs

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Microgrid Labs, Inc. Advisor: 2014 to Present Developed product plans, conceptual and preliminary designs for projects, performed industry surveys and developed...

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  • May 19, 2022
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Various electrochemical battery energy storage technologies will work to mitigate renewable variability, up to a point. Where that point is depends on the climate when the mitigation is needed, and the amount of mitigation (MWh) required in a given event. A large majority of large BESS procured by investor-owned utilities in California are lithium-ion batteries with a 4-hour run-time at their rated output.

Without going into gory details about this, where I live (Northern California), these battery energy storage systems (BESS) work well to mitigate most of the daily variability that comes with photovoltaic arrays. However wind-power has variability that is much less predictable and sometimes has low-output durations of several days to over a week. Currently this does not cause a major problem because there is still enough gas-fired generation to offset the wind-variability, but as this is retired in the future years, it would be good to have more long-term storage options.

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Thank John for the Post!
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