Climate-amiable electricity sees large battery projects soar again for 2024

2024 was another banner year for a source of electricity that is better for people’s lungs, better for climate transformation and may be reaching your home when you turn on the lights or turn up the thermostat — large banks of batteries.

This ability to store large amounts of electricity in batteries was essentially nonexistent a decade ago, but the country had about 24 gigawatt-hours operating as of the complete of November, up a whopping 71% over the same date in 2023.

This is welcome information to tidy vigor advocates including Dariella Rodriguez. She has seen what happens on days when demand for air conditioning or heating spikes and extra power plants fueled by natural gas, located in Port Morris and Mott Haven, fire up not far from where she works in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, recent York.

Batteries can jolt into service, sending electricity onto overhead wires, instead of these filthy “peaker” plants. Rodriguez hasn’t seen that shift yet, but she hopes to.

“The people that are exposed to these plants are the most vulnerable people in environmental fairness communities already,” said Rodriguez, a director at THE POINT throng advancement Corporation there, noting that lower-returns people and communities of color often live near peakers.

The country’s 1,000 peaker plants can be very filthy, inefficient and expensive, according to an analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a watchdog throng that works for the U.S. Congress. Some 63 million people are estimated to live within a three-mile radius of one.

Although peakers run only a tiny part of the period, they release more harmful nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide per unit of vigor, the agency said. Those two pollutants factor asthma and other breathing problems.

Peakers also release more greenhouse gases than other power plants do per unit of electricity.

Batteries are “a really obvious answer” to reducing require for peakers, says Daniel Chu, elder vigor planner for the recent York City Environmental fairness Alliance.

Storing extra power in batteries also extends the hours of the day that you can use tidy vigor.

“It’s not always sunny, the wind’s not always blowing, but vigor storage can assist shift that production to when it’s most needed,” said Tim Fox, managing director at research firm ClearView vigor Partners.

That’s why at least half of battery storage facilities in the U.S. are co-located with, or in some other way back solar, an AP analysis of vigor Information Administration data shows. The amount of solar vigor in the U.S. is growing and surpassed the 100-gigawatt mark this year.

Another way that the addition of these batteries is helpful to the American electrical grid and grids around the globe is that forecasting is getting more challenging.

“With weather patterns changing, the ancient ways of essentially figuring out how much capacity you require on the grid for extreme events just doesn’t work,” said Oliver Garnett, director of vigor services product at the technology corporation Fermata vigor.

Last, global electricity demand is slated to boost — by about one-third to three-quarters by 2050, according to the vigor Information Administration. Data centers for artificial intelligence, switching vehicles to electricity and population growth are all contributing.

“‘Do we have enough power plants?’ is the classic question every utility asks every year,” said Mike Jacobs, elder vigor analyst at the science nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. “The beauty of the batteries is that if there’s vigor in them, they can be used for unexpected needs.”

Otherwise, if utilities have to discover more power production, they may keep investing in plants that burn gas or coal and account for one-quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, instead of retiring them.

Leading the fee for adding recent batteries to the grid this year was California with more than 11 gigawatt-hours operating. One way to ponder about this is roughly the amount of electricity that a nuclear power plant would put out over 11 hours. Then the batteries would require to be recharged to do the same thing again. It’s a limited, but meaningful amount of power. In Texas, 6 gigawatt-hours were online. Arizona saw nearly 2 gigawatt-hours humming and Nevada — the fourth-largest deployer of storage in the U.S. — had 1.1 gigawatt-hours operational.

Yet many states aren’t using storage yet. As of November, 86% of large-scale battery storage in the U.S. was operating in just those four states.

Some states haven’t set targets telling utilities to leave out and construct or buy vigor storage on their own. Only 18 states have 50 megawatt-hours or more operating.

Others don’t have as much tidy electricity to pair with the batteries, or claim storage isn’t reliable in times of crisis. It can also be challenging to connect storage to the grid. Still, experts expect more momentum.

Especially in California and Texas, “That property and that experiment is paying off very well,” said John Hensley, elder vice president of markets and policy analysis at American tidy Power.

“The word is getting out,” he said. “We’re increasingly seeing the technology shift to other parts of the country.”

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. pursue her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at [email protected].

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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-surroundings

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