Solar Panels 500W and Higher & Storage

Introduction

The solar industry continues advancing panel technology, with module wattages increasing dramatically in efficiency over the past decade. Many manufacturers now offer panels rated 500W and up. Let’s explore the latest trends and benefits of utilizing higher wattage solar panels.

Key Takeaways

• Panels now routinely hit 400-500+ watts compared to ~250W a decade ago
• Higher watts produce more kilowatt-hours (kWh) from same physical space
• Ideal for constrained roof areas needing maximum energy density
• Lower installed cost per watt compared to lower efficiency panels
• Require robust roof, electrical systems to handle greater output

Steadily Increasing Efficiency and Power

Thanks to advances in monocrystalline cell technology, panel wattage has climbed steadily year after year. 500-540W panels are common among tier 1 brands today, when 400W was cutting edge just a short time ago. Some manufacturers now produce 600W+ modules.

Packing More Power Into Less Space

Higher wattage panels generate substantially more kilowatt-hours from the same roof footprint vs older standardized 250W sized panels. This allows fitting more production capacity even on constrained roof areas.

As solar panel technology continues advancing, newer high efficiency modules can generate substantially more power from the same roof area compared to older panels. By packing more watts into less physical space, higher wattage solar panels can maximize your home’s energy production.

• 500W+ panels produce 30-50% more kWh than older 250W models
• Ideal for residences with constrained roof space
• Allows increased system size without needing more roof space
• Higher income potential from surplus energy sold back to utility
• Ensures adequate power production even if panels are shaded

Greater Watts Mean More Kilowatt-Hours

On average, newer 500 watt solar panels can generate 30-50% more kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually than a 250 watt panel occupying the same amount of roof space. This adds up to thousands more kWh from your system over time without increasing the system’s physical footprint.

Perfect for Smaller Roof Areas

For homes with roof space limitations, higher wattage panels allow fitting more production capacity since each panel contributes more kWh. This prevents leaving energy generation potential untapped.

Increase System Size Without Added Space

If your electrical panel can handle more capacity but roof space is maxed out, higher wattage panels let you increase total system size and energy output without needing additional roof real estate.

Maximize Income from Solar Credits and Net Metering

For grid-tied systems, excess solar energy feeds back into the grid for credit or payments. More kilowatt-hours means greater income opportunity from net metering and solar credits.

Maintain Output Even With Partial Shading

Higher watt panels are less susceptible to energy production losses when partially shaded. Their greater individual efficiency ensures continued output despite minor shadowing.

Upgrading to more powerful high wattage solar panels enables homeowners to maximize solar electricity generation from existing roof space. If your home’s physical footprint or electrical constraints limit system size, higher efficiency modules can lift your solar energy potential.

• Don’t confuse panel price with overall value – $/watt often lower with 500W+ models.
• Partial shade impacting older 250W panels could mean zero output – 500W+ still produces energy.
• Higher income potential from utility net metering programs and solar credits.
• Ensure roof structure and electrical system can handle 500W+ capacity before upgrading.

Ideal for Residential Installations

While commercial systems utilize larger FORMAT panels, 500-540W MODULES in 60 and 72 cell configurations strike an ideal balance for residential roof installations. Lower weight and manageable size while still packing power.

Lower Per-Watt Installed Cost

Despite higher nominal pricing for 500W+ panels, install cost per watt is lower thanks to greater efficiency. You recoup the premium quickly through higher energy production.

Requires Robust Roof and Electrical

Before upgrading to more powerful panels, ensure your roof structure and electrical system can handle the increased output without issues. Higher wattage capacity requires appropriately sized components.

Conclusion

With continual solar technology improvements, high efficiency 500 watt and above panels offer homeowners substantially greater energy production. Leveraging higher wattage modules allows fitting more power generation capacity into constrained residential spaces.

Hot Take

• Don’t let standalone panel price distract from better $/watt value of more efficient models.
• Ensure your roof and electrical system can handle 500W+ capacity before sizing up.
• Be aware of panel weight load on roof structures – higher watts often mean heavier modules.
• Don’t oversize your inverter just for higher wattage – right-sized equipment maximizes savings.

well again good morning and thanks for joining us today i’m dorothy barnett executive director

0:08of the climate and energy project which is the founder of the clean energy business council and i’m your host for

0:15today and this afternoon we’re going to be discussing utility scale solar

0:21development and battery energy storage with two industry professionals

0:26robert wright renewable energy development manager at burns and mcdonald

0:32and frank jacob energy storage technology manager at black veatch

0:37our moderator will be ce cep board member and former solar project manager bill rausch

0:45i know that conversations about solar energy development can be an emotional topic for some and during the webinar we

0:51may have those who are ardently support solar as well as those who may be ardently opposed

0:58we use a simple set of rules to guide our interactions in this virtual space and beyond and we ask for your help with

1:05them today the most effective use of our time together is to ask questions in the q a

1:11box rather than add commentary so before we get started i want to

1:17introduce you to the climate and energy project and the clean energy business council

1:23when kansans will have questions about renewable energy they turn to the climate and energy project

1:29for 14 years cep has been a trusted leader focusing on renewable energy as a

1:35productive long-term solution with economic environmental and climate benefits

1:41our mission is to build resilience in kansas through equitable clean energy solutions

1:46and climate action our programs address clean energy climate resilience climate and energy

1:54policy and civic participation we do some of this work through the clean energy business council or cebc

2:02which is a membership organization made up of industry leaders focused on creating a policy environment

2:08that will hasten the transition to clean energy through advocacy and regulatory

2:13frameworks cebc provides a place for thought leaders to gather and share information

2:20while networking with like-minded professionals so it’s now my pleasure to introduce you

2:26to our moderator for the webinar bill rausch bill is retired from the black beach

2:32renewables group while at black beach he was a project manager assisting solar developers with

2:38interconnection applications he was also the utility scale solar plant warranty manager

2:45bill has an undergraduate degree in urban affairs and an mba from umkc

2:50he has also worked as an aide to the city council of kansas city missouri bill is currently a board member for the

2:57climate and energy project and it’s my pleasure now to introduce bill

3:02it’s my pleasure to be a part of this program today i think it’ll be a very informativePanelist Introduction

3:16um i i’ll um be moderating today and our first uh

3:21panelist is uh mr robert wright and he is the renewable energy development manager for the technical development

3:28and implementation of new renewable generation for burns and mcdonald’s energy division

3:35his duties include technology comparisons cost estimating performance

3:40optimization economic analysis conceptual design citing studies and project coordination

3:48additionally mr wright helps clients determine overarching project strategies to go from conception

3:56through the regulatory approval process focusing on competitive and winning

4:01approaches mr wright incorporates current market conditions policies

4:07tax benefits into his analysis he has his professional engineering

4:12license and mechanical engineering as well as a master’s degree in engineering management and a bachelor’s degree in

4:19engineering physics from both from the colorado school of mines

4:28thanks bill let’s get my uh presentation going here

4:36all right appreciate everybody taking some time and giving me a little bit of your day here so

4:42like bill hit i’m with burns mcdonald burns mcdonald’s spent [Music]

4:49over a decade doing renewables across technology types so solar which i’ll be

4:54focused on here today and then storage which frank from black and beech

5:00will be covering as well as wind and so as you can see here we’ve looked at this coast to coast but i worked a lot here

5:06in the midwest in our backyard in the kansas city metro area as well as throughout kansas with some of the

5:12utility and developer players in the area

5:18so quite a bit to get through huge huge topic and i think i’ve got 20 to 25 minutes so i’m not gonna hit

5:24everything i’m gonna kind of gloss over a few items but uh please submit your questions and we’ll

5:30try to leave some time here throughout the presentation to get as many of those as possible but at a high level i want

5:36to go through some of the overarching technology trends that we’re seeing and how that

5:41incorporates and influences the way we are constructing these projects move into how we are looking at the the

5:48use of land and how we are efficient with the space needed for solar

5:55all of that combines to provide a good economic position for solar in today’s

6:00market and what that really means for the country the region and kansas in particular here moving forward over the

6:06next few years so right off the bat let’s start startSolar Modules

6:13with the solar modules the the photovoltaic modules here shown

6:18this is a huge piece of the conversation this is by far the largest chunk of of

6:24cost for these solar projects so it gets a lot of attention and really we’ve seen a couple

6:31dominant trends here over the last several years with modules the first one is that they have become

6:37more efficient and so the power that each individual panel is producing has rapidly increased

6:44and so in addition to efficiency benefits the the panels themselves are just getting larger

6:50so a couple of years ago we were looking at you know 350 380 watt panels um you know a year

6:58and a half ago a lot of our analysis was i’ll say 420 watt uh

7:04panels today most of the installations i’m seeing are mid 500 watts 540 550 watt and a lot of

7:12the leading suppliers are already looking at 600 watt series to be available here in the short term so

7:19a very rapid increase in the size and output per panel

7:25this leads to some efficiencies on construction the larger each individual panel is the fewer you need to install

7:32per megawatt as you get through your construction piece a little bit quicker

7:38the other other interesting thing that came up here in the last couple years is bifacial technology so in addition to

7:45getting your typical solar production from the side of the panel that’s actually facing the sun

7:52what’s shown here is you now have that same capability on the backside allowing you to capture some of the

7:58sunlight that’s getting reflected up off the ground giving you another little bit of an efficiency bump to the overall module

8:05for a pretty nominal price increase and so that’s what’s shown there for just a little graphic on on some of

8:12the performance with the bifacial gain so two important trends there for the modules themselves

8:21another piece that has been changing is how the module interfaces with the actual steel support so

8:28there’s been a lot of focus on how do you clip each of these in you know a little bit quicker and when we’re

8:33thinking about solar the name of the game is is shaving seconds off of every individual task

8:41you’re going to do as you look at installing one panel when you go through a field you’re going

8:46to be doing the same item tens of thousands of times so making those connections a little bit

8:51easier again just making everything a little bit more streamlined when you’re out there installing them

8:57for the actual racking itself the main trend in the industry has been away from

9:02fixed felt which is there on the left and more towards what’s on the right which is single axis tracking and

9:10when i’m talking about this and some of the future topics here it’s generalizations for a large scale

9:16utility scale greenfield construction of solar so certainly applications where one or the

9:23other makes better sense but traditionally we had fixed felt shown there on the left

9:29those were long east-west rows with the the panels just stationary at a tilt

9:35facing south facing the sun and they just stayed there throughout the day throughout the season

9:40throughout the years uh what we’re moving towards is single axis tracking shown on the right you can

9:46see that kind of fan gear shape that’s going to rotate that torque tube and so

9:52we’re looking down to the south on this picture you can see the sun peeking up in the east and so the panels now are

10:00long north south rows and they face the east in the morning come parallel with

10:05the ground by noon and then rotate all the way around to track the sun as it sets so they actually tracks the sun on

10:12a daily basis and again just provides us a little bit more efficiency gives us a little bit more bang for our buck for

10:18every panel that we’re installing so just trying to get the most production out of each of these as possible a

10:25little bit more up front logistics but worth it in the end for overall production and

10:31economics and then just kind of continuing withInverters

10:38the theme to wrap in a few kind of final items everything’s getting larger

10:43what i’m showing on the bottom left is a inverter so this takes our direct current power

10:50dc power being produced by the solar modules themselves and

10:56converts that to ac power that we can use on our grid and our homes and it used to be we had a lot of small

11:03inverters throughout the solar field now in the same vein of let’s get bigger

11:09items and do fewer fewer touch points the is going to these large central

11:14inverters three to five megawatts per unit and so you’ll have roughly uh 20 acres of solar

11:22modules all coming to a single skid like this to convert to ac power

11:29similarly uh what i’m showing in the top right rather than running a bunch of custom

11:34cut to length cable that you’re cutting in the field that you’re terminating in the field

11:40the industry’s really moved towards standardizing uh those lengths and so doing your design up front and getting

11:47prefabricated cable harnesses like like that shown that can be installed quicker take the

11:53time out of the field and really trying to make everything as close to plug and play as possible

11:58just to get through this more quickly and more efficiently

12:06so as we’re talking about the overall trends and the technology uh the components getting bigger the scale

12:12getting bigger i wanted to hit on what that looks like for the actual land that

12:18we’re using so this is a picture

12:23actually just on the missouri side out out of out of kansas a bit but southwest

12:28missouri it was a site that was a epa super fund so some kind of pretty nasty old mining

12:36site um had been reclaimed nothing was growing on there when we got out there

12:41we did a pretty aggressive seed mix and as you can see it definitely took off

12:47the left hand side has been mowed right hand side needs to be mowed but really the

12:53the main thing i’m focusing on here is less about the maintenance needed to

12:58keep them from overgrowing the panels and more about just the consideration of what do you do with the land when you’re

13:04using quite a bit of acreage to make sure that whatever you are disturbing

13:11goes back to as close to the original environment as possible so a lot of discussion on what type of ground cover

13:17to plant making sure that that takes after you’re done with construction and that you’re getting good ground cover

13:24providing ecological benefits and a lot of discussion about pollinator habitat

13:31on a lot of sites that’ll be planted and seeded around the perimeter where we

13:36can let it grow up a little bit further and not get in the way of the solar panels themselves so a lot of focus

13:43there on hey we’re disturbing a lot of land how do we get it back to the state

13:50that it started out and by the time we’re wrapping upSpace Optimization

13:56along that same line of thought looking at just overall space optimization

14:02when we’re talking about solar just to throw out a few numbers here it’s about six acres for every megawatt

14:08that we are installing when we’re using that single axis tracking system so a fairly good size utility scale

14:16project these days is around 100 megawatt so that’s a 600 acre site

14:22so that’s quite a bit of land the industry is moving towards larger

14:27and larger installations the bigger the installation the better economies of scale the

14:33higher the efficiencies are the more streamlined the procurement process becomes and so to get the lowest cost

14:41energy from solar we are tending to see larger and larger sites so

14:4650 megawatts 100 megawatts for sure pushing up to two three four hundred megawatt sites

14:52so for this 100 megawatt example you need 600 acres of usable space what we’re showing here is

14:59several splotches that kind of look red and yellow here those are some wetlands and other avoided features that we don’t

15:06want to disturb don’t want to mess with some environmentally sensitive areas and so if you have a mixed use kind of set

15:13of land you may have a thousand acres needed to get a hundred and hundred megawatts

15:19into a concise layout like this but one of the points i wanted to show here is it really becomes a bit of a game of

15:26tetris we’re laying out these blocks trying to be as compact as possible get them to fit

15:31together so that we aren’t using any more land or disturbing more land than we need to

15:36trying to be respectful given how much space this does take to produce power

15:46so talking about the the trends in technology the scale of solar increasing

15:53the the magnitude of the projects and the construction efficiencies really all that is building to

16:00the topic of the economics for solarCost of Energy

16:06so this is from uh lazard’s public report um came out a few months ago uh

16:12their their levelized cost of energy comparison i think this is their 14th

16:17version but what this shows is the ranges of costs for

16:22different types of generation for new installations on a dollar per megawatt hour so for

16:28every megawatt hour of energy coming out to the grid how much are you paying for

16:35that over the lifetime of the project and so what i’ve highlighted here are the two categories that are photovoltaic

16:42solar technologies and what you can see is this is on the the low end of the

16:48spectrum it’s it’s as low as cost as as there is out there um outside of you

16:53know wind and in certain instances now the one thing to keep in mind this is a generic study for the technology in

17:01general right this does not consider a specific site or any specific challenges

17:06associated with a specific region so obviously there’s always

17:11considerations around that regard but in general what we’re seeing is solar on a energy

17:18basis is about as low cost of energy as we can get here in the u.s and this is

17:25unsubsidized so it does not include any sort of tax benefits or other subsidies there that we’ll discuss here

17:32in just a couple slides briefly so how did we get thereCost of Solar

17:38again looking at the same report from lazard they had a great graphic here showing

17:44the historical cost of solar and if we just go back 12 years solar was roughly

17:5010 times the cost that it is today right so we’ve had a dramatic reduction in pricing

17:55what you can see with this curve is we have that big decline we’re starting to level out a little bit so

18:01most projections still have solar decreasing on a levelized cost of energy basis into the

18:08future however we’re not expecting the the large drill drops that we’ve seen in the past

18:14so leveling out a little bit but those rapid advancements in particular around module technology

18:22their efficiency and their size as well as some of those construction efficiencies have really helped drive

18:27this cost down to the range that we’re seeing today

18:33again this chart is the unsubsidized cost of solarInvestment Tax Credits

18:38so let’s just spend a little bit you could spend a whole day getting into the tax implications around renewables

18:45but let’s just hit it with one slide because it is a big part of the equation right now so on top of relatively low

18:53and low cost energy in general we still have investment tax credits associated

18:59with solar so through the end of next year we have a 26 investment tax credit which i’ll

19:06oversimplify a little bit but really means that if you are putting in a hundred dollars worth of solar you can

19:14get 26 dollars back dollar for dollar as a tax credit at the end of the year um

19:20offsetting your tax liability so big advantages uh helping helping move

19:26the industry forward it will be going to remain to be seen how this shapes up with some of the current

19:32legislation being proposed if this gets extended and if so in what manner but right now this is

19:39providing some some benefit to the industry moving forward as well

19:47so with that with the the advancements that we’re looking at and the economic kind of positioning of

19:53solar that’s making it attractive for utilities and for developers to consider

20:00the real question is what does that mean for for the nation what does that mean for our

20:05region what does that mean for kansas soInterconnection Queue

20:11shouldn’t it come as a huge surprise but if we look at the interconnection queue so all of the projects that are

20:17currently applying to connect into our transmission grid throughout the united states

20:25the majority of the projects are spoiler projects right now that’s that nice

20:30yellow chunk there 36 over a third of the projects in the queue today to be

20:36built over i’ll say the next three to five years for the vast majority of them are solar that’s over 215 000 megawatts

20:43215 gigawatts of solar in the queue today not all of those will end up being built

20:49but those are sites that have some form of site control and

20:55are interested enough to at least submit an application to evaluate their projects connecting into our

21:00transmission grid so that’s across the whole whole us but let’s take a little closer look to our region

21:09so our independent service operator spp covers all of kansas midwest kind of

21:15goes up through to the north but throughout this region that we’re showing here

21:21a lot of projects in the queue for spp and that’s 48 000 megawatts

21:27there as a point of reference this region has approximately 700 megawatts of solar

21:34currently installed so it’s a decent chunk but really a pretty small portion compared to how

21:41much is in the queue today so just to provide uh we’re here now and

21:46what people are hoping to do is orders of magnitude greater throughout this region

21:53and just to zoom in a little further if we look at kansas specifically i think kansas has probably less than 50

21:59megawatts of solar installed today but over 11 000 megawatts in the queue

22:06throughout kansas so similar to what we’re seeing in the region just a little bit some some

22:13starts here and there but um looking to to ramp up as we move forward in the futureKansas

22:21and one way that that’s you know a little bit more visible a little bit more public is to look at what the regulated utilities are doing

22:28so a couple of the ones here in my backyard evergy

22:33released their integrated resource plan they are planning 700 megawatts of solar by 2025 another

22:402500 megawatts of solar by 2032 i believe

22:46they’re currently installing their first community solar at in kansas city that’s on the missouri

22:52side just a little bit but that’s a 10 megawatt installation there and then also

22:58liberty utilities the empire district down out of joplin missouri they’re looking for you know roughly 100

23:04megawatts by 2025 that could either be southwest missouri or southeast kansas

23:11so regulated utilities looking at solar plus developers

23:17looking to install solar throughout the state so the economics are there

23:23the projects are already lining up in the queue uh the plan and the forecasts have been

23:28laid out to ask for this so it’s a a coming attraction to kansas at a much

23:33larger scale than what we’ve seen to date

23:40and then just to wrap up and kind of tie into my co-presenter frank’s

23:45topic i’ll hit a little bit on the natural pairing of solar plus storage

23:50right in the short term you know we’ll see a lot of solar going in i think in the mid

23:56to long term it makes a lot of sense to have our solar facilities paired with batteries and so

24:03let’s just take a look at one again a little bit overly simplistic graphic but illustrates the point here

24:09so in a particular region a hypothetical scenario you’ve got a certain load

24:16that that region needs a certain amount of energy that they need throughout the day and that’s represented by the thick black line

24:23now as you start installing solar in a place like kansas that doesn’t have very much of it it’s not really you know

24:31an issue it’s nice low-cost energy there’s not much solar in there currently so whatever it produces

24:37whenever the sun shines the grid can can absorb and everybody’s happy

24:42what we’re looking at here is what if you get a specific region where you have enough solar that you

24:48start stacking it up it’s all uh generating at the same time when the sun’s out and you end up with

24:54more production than you need during those daylight hours there in the middle of the day this is similar to what we’re

25:00seeing out in california so what we’re showing here is that over production that kind of nice bell shaped

25:07curve there and light blue gets goes to charging a battery during that

25:14time you don’t need it to serve your customers so charge a battery with that and then discharge a battery in the darker blue

25:21there to help smooth out and provide some additional generation uh when the

25:26sun’s not shining in the evening or the early morning or overnight so some natural natural pairing there to

25:33be able to benefit and complement one another as a resource mix again this is overly

25:40simplistic you know the the real solution is a fairly complex mix of

25:46generation types but i think the the solar and storage combination is is

25:51definitely worth keeping an eye on so uh with that umQuestions

25:57a lot of different topics a little bit on the technical a little bit on the construction some on the economics even

26:04touching the policy but i went through a ton there quickly hopefully at least some of it was was relevant to what you

26:10were wanting to get at but um bill hopefully we’ve got some some good questions coming in that we can take a

26:16look at for a little bit here we do and thank you very much robert that was a very good uh

26:22explanation of the basics of of what a utility scale solar plant is uh lisa asked a question about uh

26:30expanding on the vegetation types that are planted around the

26:36modules and what kind of maintenance is needed yeah now great question and so what we

26:43found is there’s not really a one size fits all um unlike some of those other trends where it’s you know very

26:49consistent i could probably walk into you know a number of different solar developments and see very similar items

26:57in terms of racking and modules and how it’s being wired together the vegetation seems to really be a

27:03owner preference a lot of it has to do with what was there before right and trying to match that natural habitat

27:10that was there or even improve upon it so there’s quite a bit of leeway on on

27:15the exact seed mixes that an owner or off taker will end up requesting

27:22then the maintenance piece does get a little bit tricky right you have this trade-off between you can

27:28have some some great seed mixes but sometimes it’ll grow up a little bit too tall

27:33so for the most part it’s regular mowing making sure you’ve got a piece of equipment that can get in between those

27:39steel posts and go through that efficiently in certain instances people

27:45take a little bit more natural approach and and you can even hire or own sheep to maintain vegetation

27:52control there at a solar facility well that’s good there was another

27:58question about the sheep grazing i’m seeing more and more of that from around the country there’s even a an american

28:05uh grazing associate solar grazing association now so they have regular uh

28:10discussions about that they seem to be the preferred animal uh

28:16the the fun thing that i always remember is uh you know goats are less picky where it which can be beneficial for

28:22grabbing you know weeds and stuff like that but the problem is goats jump up on things so you’ll end up with goats on

28:28top of your panels but sheep just stay on the ground and munch away that’s right

28:35um there’s some more questions sierra one

28:42is about the inverters and the

28:49um problems that there have there’s a kansas installation that apparently has

28:55had some inverter problems i know as the warranty manager for utility scale solar

29:00plants you know panels just don’t usually go bad but inverters can

29:06although in my experience is actually very rare there was one model that

29:12that did have kind of repeated problems those got fixed by the manufacturer and the you know plant

29:19continued to operate but uh fine but uh what’s in your experience

29:26yeah from from what i’ve heard from the team um you know i think there were some some issues with certain uh manufacturers uh

29:34probably i’ll say five years ago uh there was a lot of different entries in the market a

29:41lot of different manufacturers that are no longer in business and that creates problems if you have a manufacturer that

29:47went out of business and potentially they went out of business because their product wasn’t great so not only do you have a somewhat

29:54inferior product but now you’ve got somebody that’s not there to maintain it so i have heard of issues with that with

29:59some of our older solar installations in the us the good news is that

30:05today with the industry being much more mature we’ve really consolidated down to a

30:11smaller list of a very high quality and reputable and large they’re going to

30:18be around for a while inverter manufacturers so i think um you know vast majority of anything that

30:24we see now we feel very confident that they’re going to stand behind their warranty uh that the inverters are going

30:29to hold up you know throughout the expected lifetime if that if there are any issues you’ll be able to get

30:36components or replacements to swap those out so i don’t think that will be a continued problem in the industry to the

30:42extent that it has been in the past speaking of some of these lifetime

30:47issues and and you know equipment uh issues uh

30:53what about the idea but or it’s more than an idea but the reality of

30:58decommissioning plants and how it’s handled the

31:03you know these are expected to last 30 years but at some point that 30 years is up so

31:09what is the normal practice for [Music]

31:14plants like this on decommissioning sure yeah and that’ll be very interesting to

31:20see how it evolves right because we’re still a fairly young industry and like you mentioned bill with 25 to 30-year

31:27lifetimes we don’t have a ton of retirements happening today and those

31:32that are much smaller scale than what we will have tomorrow right so

31:37that will be in a segment of solar that definitely evolves here over the next

31:42few decades today a lot of it gets landfilled and there’s a lot of studies on how that can

31:47be done safely um depending on the technology if we’re looking at polycrystalline versus thin

31:53film there’s you know different items to keep in mind and potential

32:00hazardous waste and different ways to go about recycling but there are already a number of startups looking at the

32:08angle of let’s recycle as much as we can from panels right and so the glass for

32:14example is is pretty straightforward to recycle a large percentage of that using the plastic that’s in there

32:20recycling the metal for the the frame and then getting down to the actual cells themselves and looking at either

32:27reusing the cells or breaking them down and repurposing a lot of that material so i

32:33it’s an emerging market but i fully expect that in the next couple decades somebody or a couple different companies

32:39will probably crack that and we’ll see the vast majority of of the materials getting recycled from

32:45solar panels okay um getting to the trying to think like a

32:51planner and what the community will see and in one of these installations a

32:57couple of things come up uh height for instance um you know there’s still

33:03old pictures of power towers i don’t know i mean

33:08what what’s your thought on uh the likelihood of those being in this midwestern region and

33:15and then the other aspect is uh substations are part of this too in one way or another how do

33:22substations fit in and and what do those look likeVisual

33:28sure i’ll flip back to the slide of the visual um so in general uh we’re seeing

33:34photovoltaic solar as the solution we really have not seen

33:40much in the way of concentrated solar that’s got the the large tower that a bunch of mirrors are reflecting up to so

33:46i don’t expect that to be a a technology being installed throughout

33:52kansas what we’ll see is a lot of installations that look like this uh roughly speaking the steel post there

33:58coming up for the torque tube is going to be somewhere in the order of four to five feet above ground

34:04so you’re looking at something that’s you know overall slightly taller than a person would be

34:10standing out there so very low profile in general for all of the acreage that you’re

34:16looking at bill you brought up the substation that’s really the only structure that’d be a little bit taller

34:23and so there you’re looking at some transmission distribution type pulls and

34:29dead ends and so that’s maybe 20 to 30 foot high but the good news is when people are

34:35looking at and then i’ll jump to the next slide when people are trying to find a site and they’re trying to figure out where to build a large scale solarSite Location

34:42they want to be close to existing infrastructure they want to tie into the existing transmission lines and

34:48substations that are already in place and so any new installations new new substation

34:54equipment is likely to either be adjacent to existing equipment or

35:00modifications to that and any new transmission lines typically developers and utilities are trying to

35:06minimize those so hopefully not a ton with with well-placed and well-cited projects

35:13okay mary asked about stray voltage and the

35:20do do you test for stray voltages what they said my initial response is warranty manager is

35:27the equipment will tell you quickly if there’s something wrong and

35:33needs to be looked into yeah there’s there’s a um

35:39a number of qaqc steps quality assurance quality control steps for the actual installation

35:45a fairly robust performance testing standards when you’re commissioning a plant to make sure you’re getting what

35:50you’re wanting and i may be getting a tangential question here because mechanical

35:56background not electrical but uh one one thing that comes up with solar is unlike big spinning turbines

36:04that we have in coal or gas plants there’s no there’s no kind of natural

36:11reactive power there’s no uh inertia to the the power generation and

36:16so one of the things that the independent service operators the the

36:22transmission operators look at when you put an interconnect application in is do you have enough reactive power

36:28capabilities either through your inverters and the way those are designed and over built or through capacitor banks at the

36:36substation to provide the reactive power frequency control

36:42to get a stable output from your your solar field

36:49so this one is from an anonymous person but um

36:55they ask about the guidance for firefighters managing grass fires or other inverter fires

37:01again as a warranty manager you know i have had experience with inverter fire

37:07and then they the ones that i have experience with you know it didn’t expand beyond the inverter itself

37:14so there’s no expansion of that to any other area

37:20i don’t know if i i’ve not read in the industry press much about any kind of grassland type fires or anything like

37:26that i haven’t seen anything actually and related to that have you

37:32i’m i’m not aware it’s a great question i i am not aware of any instances where that’s happened but i can see where the

37:39question’s coming from if you had a fire that was spreading through grass over a large fenced-in area what do you do for

37:45access so that’s interesting i’ll have to go ask some of my teammates if they’ve heard about that after this

37:54i think we’ll try uh one more question and um

38:04any uh differences between the uh approval processes that are significant

38:11for um planning purposes and then those sorts of things

38:19and this gets into the battery a little bit but i know sometimes the it’s a solar only sometimes it’s a solar

38:26and a battery and there’s maybe a slightly different process but that’s usually what the regional transmission

38:32group or the utility uh the impact of that sort of thing

38:37rather than for planners i guess yeah

38:42and right when we’re looking at planning and approvals there’s there’s multiple tracks that you just

38:48have to keep in mind with solar and that is a little bit different by state you know here we’re focused on kansas but

38:54it’s different state to state with what the public utility commission will approve in terms of a plan it’s

39:00different for what that regional transmission operator will approve and what they want to see for the

39:05transmission interconnect application a city or township or county

39:11will have different permitting requirements that you have to fall follow so we

39:16go through a lot of that as a mix between our civil design and our environmental scientists

39:22there’s quite a bit in the way of approvals for when you’re looking at a layout you want to make sure that you’re

39:27not building over a bunch of jurisdictional wetlands and delineated streams so

39:32the environmental studies that you go through that need to be approved by the army corps of engineers uh your

39:38certificate of convenience and necessity there’s a number of different approvals and making sure that you’re keeping line

39:44of sight on best practices for each of those and getting them done in an orderly fashion to where none of them

39:50are the final hang up delaying your project is important

39:55well i think that’s uh the time we have for questions uh right now and uh we’reEnergy Storage

40:02ready to uh move on to take a look at energy storage

40:09thank you very good and uh with that i’ll introduce mr frank jacob

40:16he’s a professional engineer and a pmp and the energy storage uh and he’s the energy

40:22storage manager at black veatch technology manager at black veatch

40:27he leads the design of energy storage systems that improve and enhance renewable and conventional energy

40:34generation he has over 30 years of experience with developing new applications for products

40:40and now its focus is on the electrochemical devices which are batteries and fuel cells and bulk

40:47storage technology like pumped hydro compressed air sensible and latent thermal heat storage

40:54technologies that are used in short mid and long term energy storage applications for

41:01renewable energy which basically means solar and wind and but also for conventional generation

41:09which involve turbines engines hydroelectric generation thermal power plants

41:15you can benefit those as well frank adds energy storage to improve operations extend life

41:21increase responsiveness and decrease emissions including emissions including

41:26carbon footprints and greenhouse gases most recently frank has been growing

41:31black veatch’s energy storage engineering procurement and construction

41:37practice and uh is their owner engineering services that they provide to clients

41:43so with that i’ll turn it over to frank to present on storage

41:49[Music] good afternoon everyone it’s great to be here let me get the sharing started

41:57and let me get the slide decks started

42:05can my slide be seen

42:12yes frank all right um uh frank jacob

42:17technology manager for energy storage and that’s energy storage writ large so thermal mechanical

42:23different ways to store energy as well as store electricity

42:29i i neglected to put my uh collegiate pedigree uh i’ve got my

42:35master’s uh degree in mechanical engineering um in thermodynamics heat transfer fluke

42:41mechanics you know the the primitive way we used to make electricity and now it’s all solid state

42:47with photovoltaic panels and and uh wind-driven turbines so um uh at black veatch we’re an

42:54infrastructure firm so power is infrastructure telecommunications is infrastructure water clean water

43:02water treatment as well as the water division that deals with pumped hydroelectric facilities that have been

43:09load leveling the load on on colon nuclear plants for over a century and so we’ve been in for energy storage

43:16a long time and today specifically i’m going to talk about battery energy storage uh that’s

43:22uh robert two years ago there weren’t any solar plants with battery energy storage and now there’s

43:28many and and those interconnection cues you talked about are are going to be 80

43:35solar and storage going forward and that’s because as we’ll see on the next slide the cost of storage has broken through

43:42the floor below which it is now economical not only on the east and west coast

43:48where um energy prices are high and and higher cost equipment made

43:53economic sense but here in the midwest where energy prices are low but these battery energy storage systems are able

44:00to to compete with the next best technology but um

44:06first uh storage is not new to this region in 2010 uh then kansas city power and

44:13light was one of the 20 awardees from the department of energy infrastructure

44:18grants there was the need for an infrastructure bill 10 years ago after a downturn in the economy

44:25uh now we have the downturn in the pandemic and we’re trying to recover from that but um that was a big smart grid project

44:33many elements to that but one of them was a battery component and there you see the battery that was downtown

44:39uh kansas city it was part of what was then called the cream zone and um

44:45basically what that means is is in 2010 one hour of storage costs well over a

44:51thousand dollars per kilowatt of power you get out five years later it was half that

44:58five years later again last year it was again half that today it’s less than 175

45:04dollars per kilowatt for one hour of storage and and it’s getting lower in 2025 and

45:112030 so uh just like that curve robert showed of solar panels coming down storage is

45:17still on that steep decline because there’s a lot of costs that can be rung out of the

45:24manufacturing of of batteries as the volume of production increases

45:30and a simple economic analysis might show that uh it would add two cents per kilowatt hour of

45:37electricity produced say on top of the three cent a kilowatt hour that solar may produce energy for a

45:44net five but um where that makes economic sense it’s going in today

45:50if you search for smart grid and kansas city powered light you’ll you’ll find a replete array of reports that that covers that

45:59department of energy financially supported project that a number of participants um

46:05uh here in town and and other suppliers provided the technology for it’s where

46:10the lessons learned to wring out some of those early stage problems were learned

46:15that have have caused batteries to become a an essential element of the grid todayBattery Storage

46:22so let’s talk about battery energy storage and and go through some fundamentals where it fits and then go to some

46:29interesting tidbits about it so what’s all this buzz you hear and read

46:35about energy storage well it’s as inexpensive as ever like i just said it it’s well less than

46:42twenty percent of the cost ten years ago and as the cost goes down you see that little chart on the right uh the volume

46:49the that goes up you know five years ago in a flat screen tv cost five thousand dollars

46:56maybe one in the city was bought today they cost five hundred dollars and so it’s

47:01that price decline that then drives up the uh inventory that gets sold

47:09i say inexpensive for a reason because it’s not cheap it’s still about two hundred dollars uh uh for one hour of of

47:17storage and then there’s you’ve gotta buy inverters you gotta do some civil works you gotta do other things so

47:23it’s not cheap it isn’t expensive and so sizing and optimizing are still going to be

47:29important and that’s part of the engineering that companies like black beach and burns mcdonald do for our

47:36clients why is this well those lithium ion battery cells the ones used in your

47:42mobile devices your phones and pads and laptops they’re the same cells

47:48the same chemistry is being used in stationary energy storage on the grid

47:53and so those economies of scale making batteries for mobile devices making batteries for electric vehicles

48:00is driving down the cost for those of us that want to use energy storage on the grid

48:07and there are issues of course there’s safety there’s lifetime there’s decommissioning there’s repurposing

48:14of batteries once they can no longer say survive provide the driving distance in

48:20the electric vehicle but they can be repurposed on the grid and that may even lower the

48:26cost of battery energy storage storage used to be a solution they could

48:32do a lot of things looking for a problem and today because of its uh being inexpensive it’s it’s more of a

48:38solution to many problems uh one such problem is smoothing solar and and that’s what robert talked about

48:44i’ll touch on that but also other places where storage can be usedWhere Does Energy Storage Fit

48:51so where does energy storage fit on this power grid of ours think about it generation

48:57transforms energy into electricity it transforms solar transformed wind it

49:03transforms coal fossil fuels into electricity what happens next

49:08is the transmission system moves that electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s used from here through there

49:15it’s like a uh it moves electricity through space

49:20energy storage moves electricity from now until later

49:26that’s a key element it saves energy not only saves energy now it saves

49:31electricity now to be used later we’ve never been able to save electricity like that before

49:36it’s almost like a time machine for electricity and then equipment in your businesses and your

49:44home transform that electricity into the services we value uh really i don’t want to buy

49:49electricity i want to buy my lights on my water cold my beer cold my internet

49:55fast my phone’s charged these are the services that we look to buy electricity to to serve our our

50:03comfort needs so energy storage is this new grid asset it’s been

50:09it enables the growth of renewable variable variable renewable energy generation and it cut its compounds what

50:16used to be variable loads you know it used to be power production was steady the power plant would run at steady

50:22state and the loads would vary and there’d be other equipment on the grid that would track those loads well

50:28now generation is varying we want to generate all the solar power we can in the middle of the day we want to

50:35generate all the wind power we can after midnight when the wind resource is usually the highest

50:41and so energy storage is the solution for the grid to help maintain stability

50:46it balances variable renewable energy generation andWhat Does Energy Storage Do

50:53what is it that it does specifically well i’ll describe it and then i’ll talk

50:59about the application something called peak shaving this happens mostly in in commercial and

51:05industrial facilities this is when they start ramping up and using a lot of electricity

51:11uh air conditioning for instance is a perfect application in the in the summer we’re using more air conditioning than

51:17at other times of the year and on a hot summer day we’re using a lot more air conditioning than other days of the

51:24summer and so a battery would be located at that site would be able to provide the

51:30electricity for that peak air conditioning without having to build

51:36new distribution circuits to bring that power through the through the transmission system

51:42time shifting is a new description of between the time that electricity is generated to the

51:49time it’s needed and in solar that that’s noon to evening when we want to make that change shift a

51:55couple of hours for wind it’s usually overnight because the wind resource is highest

52:01after midnight when the load is the lowest so we’d rather than curtail that generation we’d

52:06like to store that generation and use it later in the day

52:11here’s a technical term a term of art non-wires alternatives this is how can you accomplish

52:18delivering electricity without building new transmission and distribution circuits

52:24and for instance uh here in the midwest that might be a long rural distribution line

52:29uh out to a little town out to a facility and it might cost a million dollars a mile

52:36to build a distribution line if it’s 20 miles long that’s 20 million dollars

52:42you could put a battery there for 5 million dollars that could serve that excess load during the middle of

52:49the summer without having to invest so it it’s it’s sometimes called um tnd

52:55deferral transmission and distribution investment deferral that is we for a lower price we could

53:01solve that problem for enough time that we could then either solve it in other ways or build

53:06those distribution circuits and finally there’s renewables smoothing we know solar varies dramatically

53:13minute by minute wind varies dramatically and this will stabilize make predictable

53:20the generation that we get from our renewable i call it firm dispatchable generation

53:26from our renewable resources energy storage is this new grid asset

53:32it it serves a low it looks like a load it you could store electricity it looks like it’s consuming electricity but it’s

53:38not consuming it it’s going to deliver it later on and and look like a generator

53:44and so it has this multi-function capacity for doing things like that on the grid

53:50and here’s a picture of the grid left to right uh we’ve got uh bulk storage forHybrid Generation

53:57generation conventional generation solar generation uh all these green dots are different

54:03forms of generation you see them on the gener bulk side on the left and

54:08distributed generation on the right uh solar rooftop community solar uh commercial solar

54:15and then um you see the distribution and transmission system the blue dots that are in here taking that

54:22electricity from where it’s generated to delivering and where it’s used and then in orange is every place that storage

54:28can be used and you see orange dots all over the place it can be used on the bulk generation scale it can be used in

54:35the mid scale at substations and sub transmission lines and then it could

54:40be used wherever energy is is being consumed electricity

54:46is being consumed for delivering those services that i talked about and what solar and storage is is a form

54:53of hybrid generation it’s a new term of art that’s developed nationally from the federal energy

55:00regulatory commission sometimes called ferc by its initials um hybridization is adding storage to

55:06generators so that they become more functional you know when the model t ford was rolling off

55:12the line you know how you had to start it you had to run out in front of the car and turn the crank and then run back in the car and drive it well uh battery

55:20starter came along and that’s a form of hybrid generation the battery starts the car but the motor runs the car

55:27and now we’re doing that with the grid and all the generation on the grid we’re doing it with buildings we’re doing it

55:33with solar we’re doing it with wind uh run of river conventional hydroelectric uh with turbines and power

55:39plants we’re even putting putting it at substations where there might not be enough

55:46elements in the substation to transmit all the electricity that’s being supplied to that substation so it can be

55:52stored and then transmitted later without having to curtail that energy and not produce it

56:01energy storage is bottom line equipment that enables flexible and increased benefits for the grid

56:09and there are lots of benefits and i’m not going to go through the details on this slide but you can see renewables is

56:16what we’re talking about today but it it can provide backup it can provide resiliency boy new orleans would

56:23have loved some resiliency on their grid earlier in september when their grid went down for many many

56:30weeks uh texas as well this summer when they experienced their cold way and their

56:36generation went down so uh resiliency is a new term that you’ll be hearing about and and in the lower

56:42left of this diagram some call a a battery like a swiss army knife for the grid it could do many

56:48things you could design a single facility to do several of those things

56:54and it can add benefit as the price gets lower and lower

57:00here’s an example of a facility that black beach has built um in terms ofStorage Example

57:06size this is about a quarter acre site and you’ll see that there’s a uh five of

57:11these um each uh two and a half kilowatt uh hour inverters for a little over 10 megawatts

57:18um uh two and a half megawatt inverters along with the containers that have the

57:24batteries inside of them uh and and this facility that’s nominally

57:29uh 10 megawatts and and four hours of storage takes up about a quarter of an

57:34acre uh robert talked about a 100 acre megawatt solar plant that takes 600

57:40acres well if you wanted to put one hour of storage at 100 megawatts on that site it

57:45would take up one more of those acres one out of 600 so it it’s not very

57:51aggressive at land use it does look a lot like power equipment so it would be put where substations

57:57transformers and other things would normally be located

58:02uh here’s two pictures on the left is what those containers that that have the batteries inside them

58:09look like these are individual modules in racks

58:15each module is just like the module that might be in the electric vehicle if you have one

58:21nominally each one has 20 or 30 kilowatt hours uh you need 10 of them to get up to 200 to 300

58:28kilowatt hours in iraq and you might have 10 of those racks to put 2 megawatt

58:33hours inside a container and so it’s very repeatable uh like the modules in in the solar

58:40fields and so learning how to load these racks effectively and put them on the field is

58:46is an important part of the balance of system cost engineering that uh engineering

58:51firms like black beach do on the right is is the new thing that’s been out

58:57um this is a factory built container it’s got the battery racks in

59:03it it has its controls in it uh batteries if you don’t know for need to be maintained at uh

59:10at about 20 degrees celsius temperature maybe room temperature nominally and so

59:16each one of these has a little chiller to do that and and this one might contain about uh

59:22400 kilowatt hours so you might put a row of these adjacent to one of those

59:27megawatt inverters that you saw in the solar field on robert’s diagram

59:32and that would provide the energy storage for each one of those blocks on a solar field so the the storage system

59:41need not necessarily be built as one piece that’s electrically

59:46interconnected it could be distributed using these individual outdoor rated units throughout the solar field

59:55uh so with that i show you in the upper left hand corner a standalone battery system little cartoon just so you see the parts

1:00:02and pieces there are the batteries and there there are tens of thousands of these individual cells

1:00:09in a facility it has a power conversion system to take the dc

1:00:15current that you get from batteries and convert that to ac and this particular item is bi-directional

1:00:22for a solar field it just goes one way from the solar field on out to the grid for a battery you want to be charging

1:00:28and discharging it and as part of the overall system there’s a little step up transformer to get up to

1:00:34distribution voltage and then a gsu to get it up to transmission voltage

1:00:41the lower right there you see a facility that might consist of a number of battery systems

1:00:47in a hybrid facility that has uh wind here in the background and solar here in the right background

1:00:53and it’s providing firm dispatchable electricity

1:00:58just as the grid has been expecting for for uh decades with conventional generation

1:01:06uh with that bill i’ll turn things back over to you thanks very much frank great overview

1:01:15um got a couple questions um bill dorsett asks can you refer us to

1:01:20any recent good studies of the capacity credit for distributed solar and

1:01:26distributed storage on the transmission and distribution systems and i i think

1:01:32he might be looking more at the you know uh residential or you know

1:01:39neighborhood even behind the meter type of distributed um

1:01:45solar and storage and how that uh gets credited um

1:01:52for capacity if if it does uh you have thoughts on that or uh yes uh that is not well established

1:02:00yet um the the general concept there is is what is sometimes called a virtual

1:02:06power plant a vpp and that’s where the hundreds of solar and storage facilities that might

1:02:12be distributed on a circuit circuit with the appropriate controls could be aggregated in some way

1:02:19and and in states like new york state and massachusetts and

1:02:24california there actually are uh capacity credits there so look at the

1:02:30um there’s a fun report title called the state of charge that massachusetts published about 2018

1:02:39and it talks about that concept it is implemented for

1:02:44getting credit for delivering capacity to the grid in those regions where electricity is expensive

1:02:51and like i said that’s the west coast and the east coast and the urban environments it’s only as prices come down

1:02:57will they become as cost-effective in areas like kansas and missouri and here in the midwest

1:03:05so good bill has a follow-up question we know there’s no

1:03:10100 efficiency no perpetual motion machine anything like that but he asked what what is the round

1:03:17trip efficiency of today’s best uh battery systems

1:03:23i i get asked that a lot and i had a colleague at black beach who would always say

1:03:29uh you know batteries destroy energy if you put 100 in you get 90 out so 90

1:03:36is is a nominal round-trip efficiency for lithium-ion based battery energy storage

1:03:42i’ll challenge robert you know in that uh his solar panels only all taken 100 of the solar but only

1:03:49delivered 20 of that as electricity so i think my batteries are better a little competitiveness there

1:03:56well yeah and it’s all about you know there is a cost to using any of these technologies so if the benefit of

1:04:03shifting that power to a different time is more than the 10 that’s lost then

1:04:09you know you you have something worthwhile perhaps so um

1:04:16to add to that uh there may be more rather than curtailing your wind or solar farm cutting it from

1:04:22100 megawatts to 50 megawatts it may be worth the operator to keep it operating at a more efficient

1:04:30capacity factor storing that and then returning 90 percent of what he stored back to the grid later on

1:04:37in order to maintain his facility at a more stable operating condition

1:04:43okay so alice asked about

1:04:48she mentioned some of the smaller batteries but or real questions are about uh how many

1:04:55charge and discharge cycles can these batteries do uh can they be discharged completely

1:05:02and what is their uh lifetime you know how many how durable are these things nowadays well excellent

1:05:10questions alice uh the the system is designed um when they’re shifting

1:05:18energy from one time of the day to another they’re designed to cycle once a day to do that

1:05:24for 365 days a year for 20 years so up to 6 000 cycles

1:05:31now in order to do that you know i know when i charge and just fully charge and fully charge my cell phone it kind of

1:05:39is noticeably deficient in in two or three years uh so in these systems you purposefully

1:05:46put in more storage than the name plate so you’re not charging it fully you’re

1:05:51charging it maybe at a 90 percent and you’re not discharging for it fully and you know that’s not rare in

1:05:58engineered systems in your car you don’t run it at the red line rpm all

1:06:03the time you have a transmission system that you know you run it at a lower rpm if you

1:06:08were to run your car at 6000 rpm all the time it would wear out fast too uh so if you want your car to run for

1:06:15five or ten in fact i’m going on 22 years with my honda um

1:06:20you run it at a more benign condition in order for it to last longer

1:06:27very good um i want to throw out one about heights because you know planners look at things

1:06:33and you know how many stories are is this building and all that sort of thing and what’s acceptable have you seen

1:06:39situations of batteries stacked uh very high at all or

1:06:44is it pretty much just one container level as far as the height

1:06:50yeah one of these containers looks like a shipping container you know so it’s about 10 or 12 feet tall

1:06:58anybody ever pick up their battery in their car batteries are heavy batteries are really

1:07:04um mass dense and so what uh uh one of these 20-foot

1:07:09containers that you see here weighs about 50 000 pounds

1:07:15and so while they can be stacked too too tall we’ve developed designs for that you

1:07:21have to reinforce the containers so you pay a little extra for that but if you’re in a site constrained uh

1:07:28space-constrained site it’s it’s worth that to the owner i will

1:07:34ask you to google a company called energy vault and they’re building a crane as tall as

1:07:40those wind turbines you see in their background which are stacking concrete blocks on top of each other

1:07:47so that would be very very tall but it’s a different form of energy storage it’s gravity energy storage

1:07:52just like pumping water uphill and then letting it run downhill and pumped hydro they’re stacking blocks

1:07:58tall and then letting them go down to the ground and and storing energy

1:08:04that way okay so paul asked about

1:08:09comments you might have on the comparative advantages or disadvantages

1:08:15of compressed air storage technology compared to you know batteries and other options

1:08:22that’s a very active area of of research right now

1:08:28um there are two compressed air storage systems built in the world one in germany

1:08:33and one down in alabama um and and and they store upwards of of

1:08:40um uh 250 to 300 megawatts worth of power for 24 or 48 hours so they could they

1:08:48could last through these uh weather events that we’ve been having

1:08:53what it consists of is that you you know use compressors that could be using

1:08:58renewable electricity to compress air to a high pressure store it in underground caverns so it has some

1:09:05geologic considerations as to where you can site these uh the achilles heel of

1:09:12those two plants is that they recover that energy from the compressed air

1:09:18by co-firing that in a gas turbine that is they remove the compressor

1:09:23parasitic from a gas turbine and that kind of improves a gas turbine efficiency only by almost by a factor of

1:09:29two you know it lowers its carbon footprint by a by a half um

1:09:35the the development’s underway is how to take that high pressure air and run it through an expander

1:09:41and have no combustion necessary to recover that energy

1:09:47okay um we have a question uh

1:09:52from the chat actually that is about battery storage on the customer side of

1:09:57the meter at large industrial users is that something that can benefit the

1:10:03grid as well as the customer uh it can that has an acronym and a name

1:10:09these days it’s called behind the meter btm when when you install a a battery at a

1:10:17customer site uh ftm front of the meter would be for these grid scale batteries but um

1:10:22that’s beneficial from that peak shaving standpoint that i talked about earlier and especially industrial facilities

1:10:29in between shifts when production goes down and then production ramps up that’s

1:10:35another variability in the load that renewables often can’t follow

1:10:41and that storage could fill that gap okay um

1:10:47bill dursett has another good one the central centralized thermal storage

1:10:56he asked if it’s limited to district heating types of he mentions a system in

1:11:01austin but i guess there’s at least a couple of kinds of thermal storage the very high temperature

1:11:08thermal storage and maybe a more moderate thermal temperature storage

1:11:14do those let’s try and relate those these types of solar plants that we saw

1:11:21uh robert present do those have applicability here and then maybe

1:11:26briefly on where else they might have applicability all right that uh with

1:11:31with solar panels when you dig into it um and robert could correct me but but

1:11:37their production is is dependent on the temperature that they’re at and and um

1:11:43uh if if there were some i’ve i’ve seen at least some patents putting you know

1:11:49thermocouples thermoelectric generators on the back of solar panels in order to turn the heat into electricity and boost

1:11:55the electricity and cool the panels increase their efficiency that’s not a commercial technology to

1:12:01the best of my knowledge but thermal energy is is one way to store uh

1:12:07thermal storage is one way to store energy and we’re all used to to doing it at

1:12:13mid temperature like our 150 degree water heater at home that

1:12:19gives us all the hot water that we need unless you’ve got many teenagers in the house

1:12:26but bill referred to those tall solar power towers that used that were are in the desert with mirrors around them

1:12:32focusing sunlight on something that contains rock salt that when you get that up to

1:12:40five or six or seven hundred degrees centigrade turns molten and you can move it around

1:12:46and that molten salt could be used with water to generate steam and that steam could run through a

1:12:52turbine and that turbine produces electricity just like a conventional power plant uh so so that’s a proven technology for

1:13:00storing high temperature energy and creating electricity

1:13:07on the other end you know it takes a lot of energy to to

1:13:13change the phase of something and by that that means going from water to steam or water to ice but think about

1:13:19going from air to liquid air liquefying air in a cryogenic process same way we liquefy

1:13:27natural gas through a cryogenic process to ship it very efficiently by ships

1:13:33that would store a lot of air in a very small space and then as you expand that air back to

1:13:39atmospheric conditions it could generate power

1:13:44okay another uh question we have is on the lifestyle lifespan

1:13:50lifespan and recycling options for battery systems and i know

1:13:56my own just casual google search is turning up more and more and more uh developments in that area

1:14:02uh yes yes um the the there’s there’s an old joke about when

1:14:08you’re camping and uh with your friend and and and you’re escaping a bear

1:14:14and um uh a friend said hey we’re under you we got

1:14:20to run faster than the bear and uh and he said no i only have to run faster than you

1:14:26and so um uh the electric vehicle industry is going to have that problem

1:14:32far ahead of when the 20-year life of these energy storage facilities expire because uh

1:14:3890 of all production of lithium-ion batteries go to electric vehicles ninety percent

1:14:44um five percent go to mobile devices and five percent go to stationary storage so

1:14:49uh someone else is gonna have to solve that problem before a stationary system that said uh let’s not avoid it um

1:14:56right now the the supply the tier one suppliers of batteries the samsungs of the world the lg chems of the world the

1:15:03panasonic’s of the world they will take back these modules at the end of life and and deal with them and that’ll be

1:15:10part of the contract that you sign with uh the epc that might build your facility for you

1:15:16um also there’s very active um involvement by the federal government as

1:15:21part of research into batteries in fact they have a grant energy storage grand challenge

1:15:27and they’re looking to accelerate the development uh to be able to to just like with lead

1:15:33acid where we recycle 99 of all the material in a lead acid battery we’d like to do that with these lithium ion

1:15:39batteries i will say less than five percent of a lithium ion battery is lithium

1:15:45most of its aluminum in the container and the graphite in the electrodes and

1:15:51and hydrocarbons that are in the electrolyte so it’s a very complex chemical mix

1:15:58uh that’s not economical yet to recycle because you can buy the raw materials more cheaply

1:16:05but let’s hope we all get environmentally conscious more conscious and and learn to recycle these things

1:16:11for a better world okay so i’d like to bring robert back

1:16:17into the mix here where we can maybe have some solar and or battery questions

1:16:25and more easily allow him to respond to anything that might come up please put

1:16:32your questions in the q a system and for either solar or battery and we’ll

1:16:40take a look at those there’s one question that came in about

1:16:47is there any strong case for pairing large-scale solar and storage in regions

1:16:52that do not yet have high levels of solar penetration i think that would fit kansas pretty

1:16:59well are these large are large battery systems in these regions typically being

1:17:04held off until solar generation increases so that’s a bit about

1:17:11does this battery storage follow the solar generation

1:17:16you have thoughts either of you on the kind of marketing aspect or the commercial aspect of

1:17:22of that situation [Music] yeah i think it depends on what the use case

1:17:28is right we see uh applications for kind of concentrated microgrids where right off the bat you

1:17:34need both of them paired together because it’s serving a certain type of function that needs a more regular

1:17:41output of energy but i guess i’d say generally speaking if i go back to what frank brought up on

1:17:48the use case for storage of of it’s really makes a lot of sense when you’ve got so much solar that you’re otherwise

1:17:54going to curtail it you’re going to waste energy well then that 90 round trip efficiency looks pretty darn good

1:18:00compared to zero so i think that’s really the the primary use case and

1:18:06to get there it certainly helps to have a large amount of solar penetration like you get in

1:18:13places like california right now right yes uh certainly those areas where

1:18:18electricity is more expensive um it’s made of business sense first but it

1:18:23but it’s coming here to the midwest um i i add to what robert said there’s a

1:18:28specific type of solar and storage where you put the storage on this on the same dc bus as the solar

1:18:36panels because they’re they’re really sunny days when the solar production is more than

1:18:42what the inverter could pass through it that’s called clipping at not curtailment when when the system

1:18:50tells you to turn back but when the the solar module modules are producing so much it can’t get through the inverter

1:18:56because the inverters optimize to produce most over the course of the year so if you could add batteries

1:19:02in order to be able to save that clipped energy then you could increase the production of that solar field and so it

1:19:10might make sense and i think even with um with the advent of these bifacial um uh

1:19:16panels uh i i’ve seen customers in in canada putting in bifacial

1:19:23uh solar collectors along with battery energy storage in order to get that maximum production over the course of

1:19:28the year yeah that’s a great point and and we’re we’re still thinking of the use case of you know shift energy from

1:19:35you know time one to time two there’s also natural pairings to either

1:19:40um smooth out or kind of change the shape of solar if you think about clouds kind of coming and going right your

1:19:46solar might kind of bounce around a little bit you can smooth that out which which provides some benefits to the

1:19:52overall transmission grid and can help avoid some some costs elsewhere on the system

1:19:58so yeah there’s a few different cases to consider there well here’s a good question from ryan

1:20:05and he’s asking about the you know we talked about the sppq the

1:20:10the waiting list to get solar onto the grid in the midwestern region the great

1:20:18plains region uh and he his question is how

1:20:23how do they does sbp do solar forecasts or do they do they uh

1:20:30you know when over what period of time might we expect this you know 11

1:20:36000 or megawatts or 11 gigawatts of solar for kansas to be developed

1:20:44yeah good question uh unfortunately svp has about as long of a q uh wait time as

1:20:51anywhere in the country right now and they’re working on uh getting through that and making that a little bit more

1:20:56efficient process but um without kind of going through the individual sites

1:21:02i would suspect that the vast majority of that 11 gigawatts of of uh solar

1:21:09would be a planned commercial operation date prior to

1:21:142025 so within the next five years now again not all of those will get built that’s what people have submitted

1:21:21applications for a lot of those will drop out but a lot of new ones will come in kind of behind them but

1:21:26usually when you’re looking at those cues they’re they’re three to five years out tops

1:21:35so um michael miller asks a question about

1:21:40something we we did talk about you talked about earlier the bifacial uh

1:21:46solar modules that collect uh power from both sides of of uh from both sides of

1:21:51the module um he’s asking how well established is this technology we we certainly know it’s

1:21:58commercial but do you have ballpark estimates of the percentage of

1:22:04the plants that are going in is this becoming the standard of the typical uh

1:22:10module design type now yeah i’d say the the majority of polysilicon

1:22:16installations at large scale are now looking at bifacial so it definitely seems to be the the

1:22:24dominant uh technology for a new build robert on that i might ask uh

1:22:31is there the extra benefit that say where there’s a lot of snow even

1:22:36the backside won’t get covered with snow it’ll produce power and it’ll heat up

1:22:41and melt the snow on top and actually produce more than any any flight any single-sided might ever do

1:22:48yep helps it slough off and then as soon as you get snow off the front side which the nice thing about snow is it’s got a little

1:22:54bit of a natural abrasiveness so you clean your panels when that happens and as soon as you don’t have snow on top

1:23:00and you got snow underneath you got a great reflection and you can get some really good uh

1:23:06production and sunny days with a little bit of snow on the ground

1:23:12so here’s an another question about the facility and

1:23:17he addresses it to robert but it’s kind of applicable to all any of us but

1:23:22is there a way for the plants to coexist with wildlife such as deer rather than building seven foot

1:23:29fences around to keep them out thoughts on that yeah that was a

1:23:35follow-up to one that i typed well well frank was going on uh the seven foot fence is not to keep deer out it’s to

1:23:43keep people safe and keep our equipment uh safe right it’s it’s electrical equipment that can be

1:23:49dangerous in the wrong hands so that’s the the primary

1:23:54focus there not not keeping the wildlife out i i will be interested to see you know

1:24:00kind of sub markets and different applications um you know as we move into

1:24:05say agrivoltaics right uh solar mixed in with farming right and

1:24:11some more kind of open-ended applications there that maybe don’t have uh quite the same you know fencing

1:24:17requirements and stuff but right now that’s that’s what i see mostly from a security standpoint

1:24:23the restrictions kind of just the byproduct of that so this is a bit of an open-ended one

1:24:31but what benefits do you see for kansas if if kansas does embrace utility scale

1:24:37solar and it becomes a you know significant share of the

1:24:43generation mix for uh kansas utilities i i have a short point to make and and

1:24:50then hopefully robert could chime in too but but i i think the natural pairing of

1:24:56kansas already has a lot of wind and and the difference in the production profiles you know wind higher after

1:25:03midnight and moderate during the day and it has dramatic changes paired with solar that has a

1:25:09nice predictable shape the production is going to vary with the with the clouds but but that pairing together is more

1:25:16stable delivery of electricity of the grid than either one alone and then storage could fill in the gaps

1:25:23yeah i think that’s a great point frank we’ve done a number of curtailment

1:25:29studies and and yeah they they work together very well and and to me one of the biggest

1:25:34challenges with a lot of renewable energy is the transmission and distribution infrastructure that you

1:25:40have to build out to take all these wind farms and solar fields and connect them

1:25:46back to your your load centers right and so to the extent that we already have that built out for wind

1:25:52for each of those point interconnect for the the wind farm if you can put solar and use the exact same infrastructure

1:25:59not have to beef up your wires or anything and have that kind of natural pairing of daytime nighttime

1:26:06i think that’s a huge opportunity for for kansas in particular

1:26:12well and certainly that’s uh how to make the grid perform better but it’s also the possibility of more

1:26:20jobs more maintenance jobs more uh you know

1:26:25of those kinds of things located in the state so

1:26:31we do hope to see benefits like that so i think that’s the last question so i

1:26:36will turn it back over to dorothy barnett thank you

1:26:43well thank you frank and robert and bill um

1:26:48great insights today really robust question and answer we appreciate having you all

1:26:55join us today thanks to bill for moderating um and thank you to all of you for joining us

1:27:03we hope that you have found this to be an informative and educational workshop

1:27:08you can find a recording of this webinar on our youtube channel and the slides will be available on our

1:27:15new website climate and energy.org if you liked what you heard and you want

1:27:22to learn more please join us on october 25th

1:27:27for our energy horizon forum that we are co-hosting with the kansas

1:27:33advanced power alliance and we’ll dig deeper into utility scale

1:27:39storage um utility solar and electric vehicles

1:27:45seating will be limited so please get your tickets today

1:27:51and with that i just would add an additional thank you

1:27:56frank and robert and bill excellent contact

1:28:01content great questions and we look forward to hearing from you again on october 25th

1:28:08thanks so much everybody