Black & Veatch (Overland Park, Kan.; www.bv.vom) has been selected by Rocky Mountain Power, a division of PacifiCorp, to engineer and construct a battery energy storage project that will support reliable and sustainable electricity to residents in the Utah town of Panguitch.
This battery energy storage system, or BESS, is intended to help Rocky Mountain Power integrate renewable energy and electricity storage on the grid by storing and delivering power even when the sun isn’t shining. The energy storage system will be designed to react to peak consumption demands and level out demands on the local grid, enabling PacifiCorp to employ batteries instead of upgrading traditional grid poles-and-wires infrastructure.
Panguitch, with 1,500 residents living between the Dixie National Forest and Bryce Canyon National Park, benefits from more than 250 days of sunshine annually. Because of the ample sunshine, Rocky Mountain Power has contracted with Black & Veatch to install a 650-kilowatt array of solar panels, with a ground-mounted single-axis tracking system, which will capture that sunshine and route it to a 1-MW, 5 MWh energy storage system.
“Projects like the one in Panguitch are chipping away at old notions of the intermittency of renewable energy. Battery energy storage systems help deliver on the promise of solar PV by harnessing the time-varying and geographically distributed energy supply and increasing the availability and resilience of the electricity supply,” says Dave Leligdon, senior vice president and director of Renewable Energy for Black & Veatch’s power business. “As the capacity of batteries rise and the costs of solar and battery equipment fall, we expect more utilities to join PacifiCorp in exploring these innovative solutions for their customers.”