New York’s Enormous Battery Storage Plant

From GreenTech Media:

New York’s utility regulator approved construction of a 316-megawatt battery storage plant that would replace fossil-fueled capacity in New York City.

The Ravenswood project, if built, will be the largest battery plant in the state, providing emissions-free power to the New York City region during the hours of greatest demand. It also marks the first major use of energy storage for peaking power in the Northeast. California and Arizona have tapped energy storage for this role, but East Coast batteries have been smaller and generally geared toward fast-response grid services. The new plant could have enough capacity to discharge for up to eight hours.

This is big. The dam is breaking.  Large-scale energy storage is in the process of replacing gas peaker plants, thus enabling the integration of far more than intermittent power coming from solar and wind.

Interestingly, the pro-nuke (anti-renewables) people I’ve mentioned numerous times often point out that adding more wind means building gas plants to deal with the variability, and that gas leakages are causing a huge rise in greenhouse gases.  The extent to which this is true is debatable, but it will soon become a moot point.