Utah developer quadruples battery storage to meet new electricity demand

[Think. Again.]

By Julian Spector, 18 March 2024
Full Article: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/utah-developer-quadruples-battery-storage-to-meet-new-electricity-demand

As data centers and electrification increase power use across the country, it’s a move that will likely become more common.

Here’s one way to accelerate the clean energy transition: quadruple the energy storage projects you’re already building. Salt Lake City–based rPlus Energies made this move with its Green River Energy Center in eastern Utah. Utility Rocky Mountain Power had awarded a contract from a 2020 proposal for 400 megawatts of solar paired with 200 megawatts/​400 megawatt-hours of energy storage — a substantial battery, to be sure.

But since then, electricity demand has switched into major growth mode to supply data centers, AI and electrification of vehicles and buildings. To deal with that, the utility asked for more from the Green River project. RPlus complied, and earlier this month, it announced it had amended its contract to include 1,600 megawatt-hours of storage capacity, four times the previously agreed-upon amount. It’s an unprecedented leap for a large-scale grid storage project, and it says a lot about the crucial storage market’s propulsive new era.

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Storage plays an essential role in taking the ups and downs of renewable power production and turning it into a dependable, on-demand power flow. For years, though, the promising climate solution languished as a sideshow to wind and solar. That has changed: In 2024, the U.S. will install more battery capacity than gas and wind plants combined. Texas will singlehandedly install as much battery capacity as the whole country did last year.

This sudden battery surge results from new players entering the market and seasoned developers building bigger than they have before. RPlus falls into the latter category. The company, which also develops pumped-hydro storage, first applied for grid interconnection for the Green River project in 2016, seeking to inject up to 400 megawatts of clean power onto a 345-kilovolt transmission line in eastern Utah. At the time, the idea was to fill in where generation from aging coal plants was expected to decline, Resta said.

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Full Article: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/utah-developer-quadruples-battery-storage-to-meet-new-electricity-demand

My personal opinion on this is that we are heading in the wrong direction by only trying to chase and satisfy our absurd gluttony for increased energy usage.

Yes, we should be building out as much storage as we can so we can transition to non-CO2 emitting generation plants, but we must also begin working toward decreasing our energy usage in ALL areas of our society and start moving away from the idea that generated energy can be taken for granted.