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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: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday March 31 2019, @10:25PM
From almost the moment I was born -- passive Income. And my children "work" for me. I mean, can we call it work? I'm sending them all over the World, to Saudi Arabia, to Israel, to China -- many places. And they're doing a great job making so many deals, it's great for our Country and they're making some money for themselves too.
And I loved "working" with Macaulay Culkin, great young guy and that was really my big break into acting -- which I love. It's known as Child Labor and so much of our economy depends on it. But we have very strict regulations about that. We did Home Alone 2 with Macaulay, very big movie. No problems with the Child Labor Law on that one. But, if we decided to do it as a porno? Big problems, we'd have to wait until Macaulay turned 18 -- or use somebody older. I'm a very big supporter of Child Labor Law.
But in Nambia that one's VERY WEAK & INEFFECTIVE. You hear about Amnesty International, also known as Amnesty. So Liberal, right? And they're saying, Battery for Electric Car is not enviromental. And it's very bad for children. Because the Battery is made from Cobolt. They call it Lithium Battery, it's actually made from Cobolt. And there are all these Nambian kids mining the Cobolt for that one. Which in my opinion, I think mining is a great profession. But let's leave it to the grown-ups. Not the precious precious children.
Florida, they're buying this Battery, one of the biggest. But, what about the children? All these children getting very sick, possibly dieing. And we don't see it, so we don't think about it. Amnesty is thinking about it. Very hard. They want us to feel very ashamed because of the little bit of Cobolt in our iPhones. While Florida is getting this huge & horrible Battery. That's going to have more Cobolt than you can shake a stick at. Thank you, Amnesty!
And by the way, Puerto Rico had a HUGE Battery. One of the first and this was before the Lithium was discovered. Also before solar was discovered. And it let them turn on their Generator at certain times, and other times they could turn it off, they'd be O.K. Because they had Battery. But look what happened in Puerto Rico. The hurricanes came. Maria and the other. And they had a big big blackout even before the hurricanes got there. Something that lasted for MONTHS. Until Whitefish Energy, of Montana fixed that for them. They had Battery, it did NOTHING for them when they needed electric so desperately. ZERO!!!