Florida Power & Light, the utility owned by NextEra Energy, said it plans to build a 409-megawatt energy storage project to be powered by utility-scale solar, among the largest battery systems announced to date in the U.S.
Expected to be up and running by late 2021, the FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center will be a landmark project for the storage sector, four times the size of the world’s largest battery system currently in operation, FPL said in a statement.
It's the largest battery project unveiled so far in the U.S. on a megawatt-basis, and among the largest on a megawatt-hour basis, said Wood Mackenzie senior storage analyst Dan Finn-Foley.
The Manatee Energy Storage Center will have the ability to distribute 900 megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 329,000 homes for 2 hours. The facility will be charged by an existing FPL solar plant in Manatee County, Southwest Florida, and will help the utility accelerate the retirement of two 1970s-era natural gas-fired plants.
The project underscores FPL's recent embrace of large-scale solar and storage in the Sunshine State — following the aggressive lead of its sister company NextEra Energy Resources, which is active across the continent as North America’s leading renewables developer.
The Manatee project is part of a wider modernization plan for FPL as it looks to leverage NextEra's experience with large-scale renewables and storage in other parts of the country to decarbonize its generation fleet in Florida. Replacing the two gas-fired plants with a combination solar arrays, battery installations and upgrades to combustion turbines at other power plants will save consumers $100 million over time, the utility said.
Gigawatt-scale solar-plus-storage facilities are quickly becoming the "new norm," following similar announcements out of Arizona and Puerto Rico this year, Finn-Foley said.
"Based on what we are seeing out of Arizona, Florida, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, you can draw a line across the sunniest parts of the US and find where solar-plus-storage has begun to outcompete natural gas peakers," he said. "As battery costs continue to drop, and incentives are rolled out, expect that line to creep farther and farther north."
FPL's plan amounts to “replacing a large, aging fossil fuel plant with a mega battery that’s adjacent to a large solar plant,” said Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, Florida's largest utility.
While Florida has been something of a laggard in renewables despite its rich solar resource, FPL has set out at a brisk pace of late to change that. Earlier this year, the utility announced it will install 30 million solar panels by 2030 — a target that could amount to more than 10 gigawatts of capacity, or roughly five times the state’s installed solar base today.
A year ago, parent company NextEra announced a four-year supply deal with Chinese solar manufacturer JinkoSolar for nearly 3 gigawatts of modules, to be made at Jinko’s new factory in Jacksonville, Florida.
A number of U.S. investor-owned utility groups own unregulated power-generation arms active in various renewables markets across the country, among them Duke Energy and Avangrid. But none compares to NextEra’s Energy Resources unit — by far the largest owner of wind capacity in North America, and now a major player in solar as well.
NextEra Energy Resources’ near-term investment plans call for building nearly 7 gigawatts of renewables capacity in 2019-2020 timeframe, including more than 5 gigawatts of wind, as it takes advantage of fading federal subsidies.
More than 40 percent of the solar projects Energy Resources added to its project backlog in 2018 included a battery component, with NextEra Energy chief executive James Robo trumpeting “the next phase of renewables development” is pairing low-cost wind and solar with storage in the company's most recent earnings call.
from GTM Solar https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/florida-power-light-to-build-409-megawatt-solar-powered-battery-system
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