A new battery storage plant near Los Angeles will be among the largest in the world when it begins operations later this year, Reuters reported.
The Nova Power Bank, developed by electric utility company Calpine, will boast enough clean energy storage capacity to power 680,000 homes for four hours. It will feature a whopping 680 megawatts of lithium-ion batteries.
More storage solutions are a pressing need for the clean energy industry. While new solar and wind projects are being built at an increasing rate, both of those energy sources have limitations in terms of being able to provide continuous sources of power.
Solar panels can only harvest energy while the sun is shining (i.e., not at night or when it's cloudy), and wind turbines only work when the wind is blowing. Therefore, we need large-scale energy storage facilities such as the Nova Power Bank to use harvested clean energy at all times of day and night.
"[Nova Power Bank] will help stabilize the grid, especially for reliability purposes," Emily Precht, Calpine strategic origination manager, said at a news conference. "When people get home from work and they plug in their electric cars, turn on their dishwashers and air conditioners, there is a high demand for power, [but] not as much solar production. Having something that saves the power from the middle of the day [and] moves it to a higher demand period will help make the grid more resilient."
Better yet, Nova Power Bank is being constructed on the site of a failed gas combustion power plant. Natural gas, consisting primarily of methane, is a dirty energy source with heat-trapping properties 28 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
While lithium-ion batteries including the ones that will be used at Nova Power Bank also have environmental drawbacks, they are not nearly as severe as those that come with dirty energy sources such as gas and oil.
A similar large-scale battery storage plant is also under construction in Texas.
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