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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, @07:46PM
I'm very rich. But, not everybody is rich like me. "People" want to save money, right? So when they go to work, nobody's in their apartment, they turn Air Conditioner off. And their apartment becomes very hot. Very hot. And they have a wonderful day at work, they come home, they want to be nice and cool, they turn Air Conditioner on again. And Air Conditioner has to run for a long time, very late in the afternoon -- or early in the evening. People don't know this, the solar, even when the sun is shining beautifully, can be making ZERO electricity. Or, very little. The thing the solar is good for -- electric in the middle of the day. Not early in the morning. And, not late in the afternoon. Just the middle. So many folks are working in the middle of the day, the Air Conditioner at work cools down their Office -- or Factory -- with solar, that's fine. Coffee Machine, running fine on the solar. But when they come home, where's the solar? There is none, or there's very little. When so many people are running Air Conditioner at full blast. This is known as Duck Curve. Very famous and it's killing them in California. They went all in on Solar Wind and now they're hurting BIG TIME. So foolish. We need ALL FORMS of energy, but that MUST INCLUDE Coal & Nuclear!!!!