Just a few months ago, Florida Power & Light announced its plans to install 30 million solar panels between now and 2030 to provide clean, renewable energy to its 10 million customers. Lately, the nation’s chief executive has been mocking renewable energy and suggesting people won’t be able to to watch television at night if the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

Florida Power & Light has the answer to those concerns. By the end of 2021, it will have the largest energy storage battery in the world installed near its Manatee County solar power plants. The 409 megawatt/900 megawatt-hour behemoth will store power from those installations during the day and export it back to the grid on an as-needed, dispatchable basis.

The new battery will allow FP&L to retire two natural gas-fired generating facilities constructed in the 1970s. Were it not for the rapidly declining cost of renewable energy technology, those gas-fired plants would have been replaced with new gas facilities which would have continued spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere for the next 50 years.

As it is, the company says its new storage battery will keep more than a million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In recent years, the company has closed two coal fired generating stations in Florida, eliminating 7 million tons of CO2 . It plans to shut down its last remaining coal plant shortly as it transitions to more renewable energy resources.

“This is a monumental milestone in realizing the full benefits of solar power and yet another example of how FPL is working hard to position Florida as the global gold standard for clean energy,” Eric Silagy, president and chief executive officer of FPL, said in a statement. The battery will save FP&L customers over $100 million in avoided fuel costs.

According to ArsTechnica, the company has offered no details about the storage technology that will be used or what company will supply the components for the new battery storage installation. It also has not released any information about how much it will cost.

A materials science lab at Rice University has developed a relatively green lithium ion battery recycling process that allows for the retention and subsequent reuse of valuable component elements such as cobalt.

The method involves a so-called deep eutectic solvent—a compound that freezes at much lower temperatures than its constituent compounds—that can dissolve a variety of metal oxides, and the researchers reported that it had successfully extracted a substantial portion of the cobalt used in lithium batteries.

“It’s important to recover strategic metals like cobalt that are limited in supply and are critical for the performance of these energy-storage devices,” the head of the materials lab, Pulickel Ajayan, said. “Something to learn from our present situation with plastics is that it is the right time to have a comprehensive strategy for recycling the growing volume of battery waste.”

The strategic importance of cobalt in the battery industry has seen prices for the otherwise abundant metal soar over the last couple of years, but over the past six months it has slumped as stockpiles built up. The problem is, more than half the world’s supply of cobalt is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where artisanal mining—a dangerous practice—and child labor add to an unstable political situation that make miners and investors nervous enough to fuel excessive price volatility.

The overall problem of battery recycling, however, is more serious, and it is likely to spur a lot more innovation in the recycling technology space. The number of electronic devices with lithium ion batteries is growing, and there are no signs that this growth will subside anytime soon in the gadget age. Then there are also more and more EVs on the roads, and these have a lot bigger batteries to be recycled or reused after their productive life ends.

Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL) announced plans to build the world’s largest solar-powered battery system, which will have four times the capacity of the largest battery system in operation.

FPL, the utility owned by NextEra Energy, plans to build a 409-megawatt energy storage project – the equivalent of approximately 100 million iPhone batteries. The future FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center should be operational in late 2021.

Wood Mackenzie senior storage analyst Dan Finn-Foley said the project is the largest to be unveiled in the U.S. to date and will be four times the size of the world’s largest on a megawatt basis, according to Green Tech Media.

Manatee will be able to distribute 900 megawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 329,000 homes for 2 hours, and will be charged using an existing FPL solar power plant in Manatee County. By using stored energy when there is a higher demand for power, this will reduce the demand for running other power plants, thus reducing emissions even further.

“Replacing a large, aging fossil fuel plant with a mega battery that’s adjacent to a large solar plant is another world-first accomplishment and while I’m very pleased with that fact, what I’m most proud of is that our team remained committed to developing this clean energy breakthrough while saving customers money and keeping their bills among the lowest in the nation,” Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, said.

Silagy is referring to two aging natural gas-fired power plants, built in the 1970s. Besides the Manatee storage center, FPL is also planning on installing a number of smaller battery units across the state, as well as more solar power plants. The project will save customers more than $100 million and eliminate more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Blood is in the water, and coal is the chum.

On March 26, 2019, Illinois State Representative Luis Arroyo filed an amendment to House Bill 2713, the Coal to Solar and Energy Storage Act. The legislation aims to create a financial structure to keep at-risk coal plants online through 2024, while funding a build-out of solar+storage, energy efficiency, and transmission to replace the lost capacity. The legislation is strongly supported by Vistra Energy.

Just last year, a study sponsored by NRDC and Sierra Club finds that these specific old coal plants can be retired and safely replaced by solar and other resources. The study was written specifically to counter a push by Vistra Energy to gain subsidies for its old plants.

Vistra Energy and its subsidiaries own 5.5 GW of coal resources within the region noted in the legislation (MISO Zone 4), which represents 40% of the summer capacity within that region. The company is seemingly a (the?) major backer, as noted by their website and press releases supporting the document.

The power company is also a developer of some of the largest solar+storage projects in various markets – for instance, a 300 MW / 1,200 MWh energy storage facility for California, and first Texas’ largest solar facility, then its largest battery – at said solar facility.

The Vistra press release notes that the legislation will help make use of the already existing infrastructure and land at Vistra’s existing facilities. 500 MW of solar power, with no specific notes on the storage size, is suggested at the available land currently occupied by coal plants. Facilities without land for solar are to be offered a 10-year grant to install 40 to 80 MW of energy storage, taking advantage of already existing interconnection and transmission hardware.

In addition to the repurposing of existing locations, the legislation also aims to increase electricity generation from renewable sources to 800 to 1,000 GWh a year, via statewide procurement from system sizes between 20 and 80 MWac. These generation procurements will be required to include energy storage “having a storage capacity in megawatt-hours equal to or greater than the product of the electric generating capacity of the new renewable energy resource in megawatts times 0.5”. In other words, 10 MW of storage as the minimum for a 20 MW solar plant.

The Intertubes are ablaze with news that the Earth holds 530,000 potential sites for pumped hydro energy storage in its hot little hands. If that sounds too good to be true, well, maybe. The devil is in the details. On the other hand, the number-crunching does indicate that a massive amount of energy storage capacity is already close at hand, even without fancy new breakthroughs in battery technology.

What’s The Big Deal With Pumped Hydro Energy Storage?
The new pumped hydro numbers come from a study by researchers at Australian National University. It follows a 2017 ANU study that found the potential for 22,000 pumped hydro sites in Australia alone.

For those of you new to the topic, pumped hydro energy storage refers to pumping water uphill to a reservoir. After that, gravity does all the work. The stored energy — in the form of water — is let loose on turbines to generate electricity on demand.

Pumped hydro has limited utility when fossil fuels do the pumping. It is mainly used for load balancing, meaning the reservoir typically refreshes once a day.

With renewables on the scene it’s a whole new kettle of fish. In a mixed grid, pumped hydro facilities respond to shifts in wind and solar production as well as demand.

If that sounds pretty simple, it is. For all the hoopla over the latest battery technology, pumped hydro “water batteries” still account for more than 90% of global energy storage, and they are still the lowest cost, scaled-up form of energy storage.

Italy must more than double its capacity to store electricity if it wants to slash pollution from burning fossil fuels, the head of the nation’s power transmission network said.

Terna SpA Chief Executive Officer Luigi Ferraris said Italy may need as many as 6 gigawatts of storage by 2030 to balance a boom in renewables. Storage is one of the ways the grid can balance intermittent flows of electricity from wind and solar farms, which generate only when it’s breezy or sunny.

The comments show how Terna’s plan to invest a record 6.2 billion euros ($7 billion) will shape Italy’s power grid. Most of the country’s 4.8 gigawatts of storage capacity currently comes from pumped hydro plants, where water is stored in a reservoir and then allowed to flow over a generation turbine during times of peak power demand, according to BloombergNEF.

“This is an opportunity not only for the energy sector but also for agriculture,” Ferraris said. “We need sites to store water for agriculture. There could be multiple uses for these sites.’’

Italy’s Power Generation
Pumped storage is currently a small portion of Italy’s 115 gigawatts of capacity but may grow 6 GW by 2030.

His remarks add to the case for pumped hydro plants that other utilities including Iberdrola SA are making. While investors are abuzz about the prospects for deploying batteries on a big enough scale to balance power flows, Ferraris says “electrochemical” technologies aren’t yet advanced enough to act as a buffer at the scale utilities need.

Italy estimates it will add 40 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2030, three-quarters of which will be solar photovoltaics. That will help compensate for closing 7.2 gigawatts of coal plants.

One of the biggest criticisms of renewables is that they don’t always provide power since the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun isn’t always shining. Because renewable electricity generation can be intermittent, it’s at a disadvantage to coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants that produce steady power.

Many utilities work around these intermittence issues by also building cleaner gas-fired plants, which can provide power on demand and is a cheaper alternative to battery storage. However, NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE) is leading the way in developing next-generation energy facilities that include battery storage so that they produce a steady stream of clean power. The company recently announced two groundbreaking projects that could serve as a blueprint for renewable development in the future.

Leading the way
Last month, NextEra Energy unveiled plans to build a first-of-its-kind energy facility in Oregon. The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility will combine 300 MW of wind, 50 MW of solar, and 30 MW of battery storage, marking the first time in North America that all three technologies will be co-located and integrated into one energy generating facility. It will also be one of the largest solar farms in that state as well as one of the biggest battery storage projects in the country. NextEra is building the project with utility Portland General Electric (NYSE: POR) , which will own 100 MW of the wind farm while buying the power produced under a 30-year purchase agreement. Portland General Electric’s CEO, Maria Pope, sees the project serving as a “model for integrating renewable generation and storage to cost-effectively reduce emissions while maintaining a reliable grid.”

Meanwhile, NextEra’s utility, Florida Power & Light, recently detailed plans to build the world’s largest solar-powered battery system. The Manatee Energy Storage Center will have 409 MW of capacity, which is four times the size of the largest battery system currently in operation. The company is co-locating this facility at an existing solar power plant, which will charge the batteries during the day, allowing them to supply electricity during periods of peak demand. The project will increase the predictability of solar, enabling the company to provide clean power even when the sun isn’t shining. The battery storage system will replace an aging fossil fuel plant that had been helping bridge that gap.