The Southern California Edison (SCE) Tehachapi Wind Energy Storage project, to be carried out in partnership with A123 Systems, will test the capabilities of an 8-megawatt, 32-megawatt-hour lithium-ion battery at SCE’s Monolith substation in the wind-rich Tehachapi Mountains, according to Mark Irwin, a director in SCE’s advanced technology department.
To fund the $53.5 million test, DOE will supply nearly $25 million and other partners, including the California Public Utilities Commission and A123 Systems, will supply over $29.9 million.
The battery storage system is now being installed and is scheduled to go operational late in 2012. Testing will run for a minimum of 24 months. The lithium-ion phosphate battery system will take four hours to charge and will discharge over four hours. It will occupy an unmanned 6,300-square-foot building at Monolith. Monitoring will be done remotely.
“It’s a fairly big system with a lot of pieces,” Irwin noted. “We had a lead acid battery storage device at our Chino substation that we deployed in the mid-'90s,” he remembered, “that was a little bit larger, about 20 percent larger, in terms of its capabilities. And the footprint was about 10 times larger.”
The A123 Systems ...
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