Duke Energy has promised major investment in energy storage for its Carolina territory. It took another step toward substantiating that promise by designing a battery project to back up a South Carolina community center.
The 5-megawatt/5-megawatt-hour project, announced Monday, does not stand out among the much larger projects underway elsewhere in the country. Its significance lies instead in illustrating how a regulated utility builds up proficiency in battery storage. Many utilities now acknowledge storage will provide great value to the grid, but few have built it at scale.
The first step is accepting the body of evidence that quantifies the usefulness of storage for things like renewables integration, deferring wires infrastructure upgrades, delivering peak capacity and rapidly modulating frequency and power quality.
Duke took that step in a big way, deciding in its 15-year resource plan that 300 megawatts of storage, and possibly even more, would benefit customers. The public has little recognition of megawatt capacity, but the company helpfully translated that into a rough estimate of cold, hard cash: $500 million.
That would be quite a jump from the kilowatt-scale test projects Duke has actually completed in its Carolina service territory. But the utility has been pushing forward incrementally, winning regulatory approval for a 4-megawatt battery to power a solar microgrid in the remote western mountains of North Carolina and a 9-megawatt system to improve grid reliability in Asheville.
“We are also strategically making energy storage investments where they can deliver value for grid operations and as backup power for critical services provided in our communities,” Duke Energy spokesperson Ryan Mosier said in an email Monday.
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