California Picks Energy Storage Over Some New Power Plant Bids

In an unusual competition in California, proposals for energy storage systems beat out hundreds of bids to construct new power plants as a way to meet peak power needs.

Southern California Edison has retired its San Onofre nuclear reactors and is planning to retire natural gas units with environmentally troublesome cooling systems. So it invited proposals for storage — including conventional batteries and giant ice packs — and new gas-fired power plants.

To the surprise of the utility and even the storage companies, in many cases storage won. Demand response, or agreements with customers who volunteer to be unplugged at certain times, also did well.

Looking for 2,221 megawatts of capacity, about the size of two big nuclear plants, the utility selected 264 megawatts of storage, a huge amount for what is still viewed as a fledgling technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/business/energy-environment/california-picks-energy-storage-over-some-new-power-plant-bids.html?_r=0