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posted by chromas on Sunday March 31 2019, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the reduced-pollution-keeps-the-biters-away dept.

Florida Utility to Close Natural gas Plants, Build Massive Solar-Powered Battery:

On Thursday, Florida Power and Light (FPL) announced that it would retire two natural gas plants and replace those plants with what is likely to be the world's largest solar-powered battery bank when it's completed in 2021.

FPL, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, serves approximately 10 million customers in Florida. The utility says its plan, including additional efficiency upgrades and smaller battery installations throughout its service area, will save customers more than $100 million in aggregate through avoided fuel costs. FPL also says its battery and upgrade plan will help avoid 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The plan calls for the construction of a 409 megawatt (MW) / 900 megawatt-hour battery installation at what will be called the FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center. For context, the largest battery installation in the world was built by Tesla at a Hornsdale wind farm in South Australia; that has a capacity and power rating of 100 MW / 129 MWh.

The batteries will be charged by an existing solar plant in Manatee County, FPL said. Being able to store solar power in batteries is a huge advantage to the utility. Solar photovoltaic panels are intermittent sources of energy, because they only produce power when the sun is shining. Generally, that happens in the morning and toward the middle of the day, when power demand tends to be low. If a utility can store excess power in a bank of batteries, it can deploy that electricity later in the afternoon when people return home from work and turn on their air conditioners, running up electricity demand.

FPL made no announcement as to the supplier, price, or even the battery chemistry. Maybe they can arrange to have one of these patrolling the grounds?


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 31 2019, @12:29PM (4 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Sunday March 31 2019, @12:29PM (#822699)

    I think you've misunderstood how the power is generated, the storage center stores energy obtained by burning manatees to drive turbines, a thousand pounds of blubber burns really well. So there won't be any manatees left to police things. That job will be done by the gators.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:52PM (#822723)

    This is simply misleading. Before the manatees are converted into direct energy they are propelled down a shaft containing turbine blades by gravity. This is a hybrid hydro-aquatic-mammal system that not only converts their kinetic energy into electricity, it stuns the manatees so they do not suffer (as much) when converted to energy via a heat-related process.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:56PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:56PM (#822727) Journal

    A battery energy storage plant should be augmented by a "clean coal" plant to generate the energy which the batteries store. The existing natural gas plants should not be dismantled, but instead should be used to burn the clean coal. That way we create the mostest number of jobs in FL. Conveniently locate the whole affair such that a tour of it can become another Disney attraction to show how efficiently we can burn natural gas to burn clean coal to charge batteries.

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    • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:52PM (1 child)

      by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:52PM (#822777) Homepage Journal

      Replace natural gas with coal? Tell me, Mister Troll, what coal company you have stock in? Coal is the filthiest fuel on the planet.

      If you were fishing for a "funny" mod, you missed it by a mile.

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