EL CENTRO — After work began in January, the new Battery Energy Storage System facility from the Imperial Irrigation District is getting closer to become fully operational.
The $38 million facility will have the capacity to store 30 megawatts of electricity when completed by the end of September.
Although the facility itself is completed there is still work to be done inside where electrical equipment and battery installation are still in progress.
“As of now we are working on some final details in the control room, finishing up details with batteries,” said IID Generation Plant Superintendent Bruce Townsend. “GE (General Electric) contractors are running final checks on their PCS (Power Conversion Systems) to ensure the systems are communicating with each other.”
The battery storage project is part of the settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission after an investigation into the Sept. 8, 2011, outage.
Townsend said that after a series of engineering studies it was determined that the best location for the facility would be adjacent to the El Centro Generation Station.
“That’s why we chose this location because next door on the other side of the steam plant we got the El Centro switching station. It’s a good central location to put it in and we have people here 24 hours a day to monitor it,” Townsend said. “We decided to put it in the place where it can do the most work and get the most bang for the buck.”
The most important attribute of the storage facility is spinning reserve. It will help IID with the integration of solar energy and other renewables as the state of California moves into 30 percent renewable energy by 2020 and 50 percent by 2030.
Since solar and wind energy generation can vary due to weather conditions the batteries will give the utility the ability to add electricity to the system on short notice to ensure they have enough electricity in its system to meet the demand and preserving its reliability and the integrity of its system.
Townsend said that the batteries are capable of putting electricity in the system in less than one second, whereas the power plant can only increase its output a few megawatts every minute.
The other benefits the project will bring include Area Control Error and black start.
Although IID already has black start capabilities, Townsend said that the batteries will provide the ability to start up the plant in case of a major outage.
“What we would do is take the power from the battery and instead of putting it on the grid, inject it into the plant here to start the system here,” Townsend said. “It takes electricity to make electricity.”
The facility is expecting to be able to have an 80 to 85 percent efficiency, meaning less than 20 percent of the power to charge the batteries will be lost after it is injected back into the system.
Although the batteries will need to be recharged on an ongoing basis, Townsend said that there will be ample opportunity to do so as the batteries can be charged when there is too much renewable energy being generated or at night when demand is low.
The facility is 8,400 square feet, but the total footprint of the project is 20,000 square feet. In order to keep the batteries at 75 degrees, a total of 220 tons of HVAC equipment will be used. The lithium-ion batteries in the facility are placed on 5,760 individual modules. The batteries are expected to last for about 20 years.
“I’m very proud of it, this project is a great opportunity for IID to further expand its renewable energy portfolio,” Townsend said. “It’s a great addition for us and will give us many years of reliability.”
By Edwin Delgado
Imperial Valley Press
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