CARROLL, N.H. — Energy storage technology is still moving faster than state regulators and the markets can accommodate, speakers told the 70th Annual Symposium of the New England Conference of Public Utilities Commissioners (NECPUC) on Tuesday.
“Markets are moving at the pace of entrepreneurs, while states are moving at the pace of bureaucracy,” said Richard Fioravanti of energy consultancy Exponent.
The technology is changing so fast that CAISO recently had trouble qualifying a new lithium-ion battery storage project for California’s ancillary services market.
“You may think of some complicated reason why, but it was actually very simple,” said Jason Allen, vice president of operations and power for AltaGas Services U.S. The company’s 20-MW, 80-MWh facility in Pomona, Calif., holds 12,240 lithium-ion batteries. “We were ramping so fast they couldn’t” get an accurate data reading.
CAISO needs three data points to qualify a project during an ancillary services test: a starting point, one point on the ramp portion of the curve and an end-point.
“I can go from 20-MW charge and 20-MW discharge every 100 milliseconds, or 10 times a second,” said Allen. “It took [almost] two months working with them to get that simple issue worked out. And instead of the 10,000-MW/minute ramp rate, we actually detuned the system to 100 MW/minute and qualified for 36 MW [per minute], which is physically where we’re sitting right now in the market.”
Allen emphasized that his dealings with CAISO were not adversarial. “They have worked very closely with us to resolve the issues,” he said.
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