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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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @03:34PM (1 child)
*sigh* didnt get my drift.
its not just that the 3 pronge nuclear disaster poster children are radioactif in nature but rather that they are centralised.
solar doesnt have the requirment of having to be centralized ... at all.
now florida is pretty exposed to natural wind disasters so solar is perfect: wind disaster isnt localized and solar doesnt have to localised. one would reason that dispersing the energy production over a wide area is natural ... like hand in glove. with various installation versions and evolution(tm) one installation would survive and make many future baby installations totally adapted to floridas climate.
it would be a nuclear engineers wet dream if they could make 1000 fukushima nuclear powerplants and see which one survives ... errr ... is safest. doable with solar not so with nuclear.
of course the mentality of a monster central solar powerplant is the same as with any central powerplant: centralized profits and ... centralized disaster: the same welding, same foundation same screw a thousand times over. cheap to order, purchase and install but the same failure mode can be repeated a thousand times over for one "monoculture like" solar ... godzilla.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 31 2019, @06:02PM
The future will probably have lots of centralized solar plants and home panels.
The home panels will get cheaper and better to the point where everyone will want them. Home owners could get the solar roof tiles that look more stylish, or small, very efficient, and lightweight panels. Add in subsidies and the panels will be paid off very quickly. Some homeowners will get scammed by their power company into accepting cheap or free solar panels but getting none of the returns. Nevertheless, the percentage of homes with panels will increase.
With centralized you can do stuff like heat a tower of molten salt to store energy. You could also use mirrors in space to concentrate extra sunlight onto the solar plant, running it for more hours per day and at a greater intensity.
If hurricanes are an issue, move the stuff another 100 miles inland.
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