The city of Portland is located in the state of Oregon. The first utility-scale plant of its kind in North America, the renewable energy plant in Oregon combines solar power, wind power and massive batteries to store the energy generated there.
The project addresses a key challenge facing the utility industry as the US transitions away from fossil fuels and increasingly turns to solar and wind farms for power. When the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, utilities have been forced to fill in gaps when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining
The huge batteries at the Oregon plant store up to 120 megawatt-hours of power from the wind farms and solar farms so they can be released to the electric grid on demand. The facility can produce more than half of the power that was generated by the last coal plant.
In the U.S., interest in solar-plus-battery projects has soared in recent years due to robust tax credits and incentives. The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility is the first in the US to combine wind, solar, and battery storage in a single location, giving it more flexibility to generate continuous output.
The project is getting closer and closer to having something with a very stable output profile that we traditionally think of as a fuel-based generation power plant.
The battery can kick in and make sure the output is not disrupted if the solar is chugging along. As the sun goes down and the wind comes on, the battery can make sure that it looks normal to the grid operator.
One of the most ambitious climate laws in the nation was passed in Oregon last year, requiring Portland General Electric to reduce carbon emissions by 100% by 2040.
The Wheatridge project is important to PGE's decarbonization strategy as nearly a quarter million customers receive only renewable energy.
PGE buys all of the facility's power for its renewable energy portfolio. Two-thirds of the wind output and all of the solar output are owned by NextEra.
David Lawlor is NextEra's director of business development for the Pacific Northwest. The battery storage in the back is important to customers.
Americans can expect to see similar projects across the country as the U.S. shifts to more variable power sources. Climate change experts say even a fivefold increase in US storage capacity won't be enough to stop it.
The clean energy industry is experimenting with other solutions. Some people are experimenting with forcing water underground and holding it there before releasing it to power a turbine in order to generate power from pumped storage.
At the same time that the cost of batteries is falling and the technology itself is improving, interest in hybrid plants has increased.
By the end of last year, there were nearly 8,000megawatts of wind or solar generation connected to storage, according to the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The majority of such projects are solar power with battery storage, but at least nine facilities like the one in Oregon that will combine solar, wind and storage are in the works. There are projects in Washington, California, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois and Oregon.
Many researchers and pilots are working on alternatives to lithium ion batteries due to the fact that their chemistry limits them to four hours of storage and a longer duration is more useful.
There is no panacea. There is no model or prototype that will meet that need, but wind and solar will definitely be in the mix.
The whole country is driving toward very ambitious climate reduction goals and this model can be used to decarbonize.
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