Viewing posts tagged "Aep"

$3.4B in Smart Grid Grants Coming Tomorrow?

The Department of Energy is set to announce winners of $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

There are hundreds of applications in to DOE's $3.4 billion smart grid investment grant program, which makes up the lion's share of $3.9 billion the department has set aside for bringing two-way communications and information technology to the nation's electricity grids (see DOE Issues Rules for $3.9B in Smart Grid Stimulus Grants). DOE representatives had said winners wouldn't be announced until next week at the earliest, making this a bit of a surprise announcement (see Green Light post).

Add up all the requests to the program, and they come to several times more than the amount available, so there are sure to be some disappointed losers — as well as happy winners — among the smart grid set tomorrow. But with utilities generally picking lots of partners from a relatively small pool of smart grid companies, there may well be enough wealth to go around (see Green Light post).

The GridWise Alliance, a trade group of smart grid companies, is already praising the effect the stimulus will have on business. In fact, waiting for stimulus has kept many utilities from doing much smart grid business at all, according to the industry. That's created a lull that looks likely to break tomorrow.

One interesting question is how closely the DOE will stick to its promise to award about 40 percent of the $3.4 billion in individual grants of $20 million or less — a move to support smaller utilities in their bids for projects. On the other hand, many large utilities have made the maximum $200 million requests to the remaining 60 percent of the program's funding.

Beacon Power Lands $2M Flywheel Deal With New York

Beacon Power Corp. (NSDQ: BCON) has landed a $2 million contract with the New York State Research and Development Authority to deliver a 1-megawatt flywheel energy storage system to help regulate the frequency of the state's power grid, with the hope of 20 megawatts of storage to come.

The project calls for Beacon to provide a 1-megawatt flywheel energy storage system for utility NYSEG, but the company hopes to see the project eventually expand to 20 megawatts of storage for utility National Grid,

Beacon's flywheels are used for frequency regulation, which is the task of keeping grid power at a constant 60 hertz, or cycles per second, to ensure its stability. That takes up as much as 1 percent of all the power produced in North America, which mostly comes from fossil fuel-fired power plants.

Beacon has similar frequency regulation deals with grid operator ISO New England and utility American Electric Power (see Green Light post). The Tyngsboro, Mass.-based company is hoping to see those projects scaled up from their current size as well, although ISO New England in November scaled back its plans from 5 megawatts to 3 megawatts (see Beacon Power Seeks to Raise $4.1M).

Other flywheel developers include Active Power Inc. and Pentadyne Power Corp., which are targeting the broader energy storage market. Beacon has said it also intends to target that market eventually.

Giving Distributed Grid Storage the Brains to Do the Job

Putting lots of batteries in people's backyards to manage the storage needs of the electricity grid may seem like a no-brainer.

But according to Sunil Cherian, CEO of Spirae, it's all about brains – brains on the grid, that is.

That's because thousands of batteries serving backup power purposes will have to be integrated in a way that keeps them from being more disruptive than helpful, Cherian said Thursday at the Smart Grid Innovation Symposium sponsored by Innovation Center Denmark in Menlo Park, Calif.

Cherian has experience with the conundrum, given that Spirae's business is in integrating distributed energy generation and storage projects, including a Department of Energy funded project called FortZED (for Fort Collins, Co. Zero Energy District) and another with Danish transmission system operator Energinet.dk.

"When you add ore and more of these distributed resources into the distribution network, you're changing the operating model" of the grid, he said. "As penetration increase, you really have to worry about how do you manage the system in such a way that these things don't interact with one another."

Take one of the first purposes to which such a storage network could be applied, and which utility experts at Thursday's symposium said was likely to be one of the first that makes commercial sense – frequency regulation (see GE Gives its Energy Storage Outline).

That's the job of keeping grid electricity flowing at a constant 60 hertz, or cycles per second. Such frequency regulation takes up as much as 1 percent of North America's power production, today almost entirely provided by fossil fuel-fired power plants kept running to respond to infrequent signals from grid operators – not the most efficient way to do it.

Flywheel maker Beacon Power Corp. (NSDQ: BCON) is doing projects with utility American Electric Power and grid operator ISO New England to provide those services (see Green Light post).

American Electric Power is discussing the potential for distributed storage to fit some of those needs, Cherian noted (see Utility to Try Backyard Storage).

While AEP hasn't specified what kind of storage devices it's looking at, several observers at Thursday's conference suggested depleted electric vehicle batteries – too worn down to stay in cars, but with enough oomph for grid storage – could be one solution.

Lithium-ion automotive battery maker A123 Systems is looking at the potential for such a shift, working in partnership with investor General Electric to develop grid storage systems for utilities (see A123 Batteries to Help Stabilize Electric Grid).

The trick with frequency regulation, however, is that it needs to be dispatchable in less than a second, Cherian said.

Now, that requirement in itself doesn't necessarily need communications systems with equal speed and reliability to serve the purpose, he noted. Storage devices could be designed to sense frequency fluctuations and respond accordingly.

The problem with that, of course, is that if all of them respond automatically at once, that will lead to a fluctuation in the opposite direction – thus making the problem worse, not better.

"That is the big problem that I don't think is fully appreciated today," he said.

Designing a workable distributed frequency regulation system will likely require a lot of clever combinations of communications, along with onboard controls that incorporate information about how many other batteries are on the grid, statistical models for how they will likely respond, and other hard-to-calculate variables, he said.

The same questions are sure to arise as more and more rooftop solar and other distributed generation systems come online, or as electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles present new demands – and new opportunities – for utilities and grid operators, he said.