Florida utility to shut down natural gas plants and build huge solar battery

Florida Power and Light (FPL) announced Thursday the withdrawal of two natural gas plants and the replacement of these plants by what is expected to be the world's largest battery bank powered by solar energy, once completed. 2021.

FPL, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, serves approximately 10 million customers in Florida. The electricity company said its plan, including additional efficiency improvements and the installation of smaller batteries throughout the service area, will allow customers to save more than 100 millions of dollars in total thanks to avoided fuel costs. FPL also claims that its battery and upgrade plan will help prevent 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

The plan calls for the construction of a 409 megawatt (MW) / 900 megawatt hour battery facility in what will be called the Fate Manatee Energy Storage Facility. As a reminder, the largest battery installation in the world was built by Tesla on a wind farm in Hornsdale, South Australia; which has a capacity and a power of 100 MW / 129 MWh.

The batteries will be charged by an existing solar power plant in Manatee County, FPL said. Being able to store solar energy in batteries is a considerable advantage for the utility. Photovoltaic solar panels are intermittent sources of energy because they only produce energy when the sun is shining. Typically, this occurs in the morning and around the middle of the day, when the demand for electricity tends to be low. If a utility can store the excess energy in a battery pack, it can use that electricity later in the afternoon when people return home from work and turn on their air conditioner, increasing the demand for electricity.

FPL did not specify which company would provide its batteries, how much it would pay them, or whether it was lithium-ion batteries or whether they were using another chemical. However, lithium-ion batteries are currently the preferred chemical-scale battery systems on the network. The badyst firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance wrote this week that the cost of lithium-ion batteries has decreased by 35% since the first half of 2018.

The two natural gas plants that FPL will decommission were built in the 1970s and have reached the end of their useful life. According to NextEra's 2016 Annual Report (PDF), FPL produced 70% of its electricity from natural gas and 4% from coal. PFL, however, has decided to change this in the last two years. The company says it has spent two decades implementing a modernization program to replace its older oil-burning facilities with more efficient natural gas facilities. Now that natural gas is becoming the worst offender among the carbon sources of the United States, traditional natural gas plants are being replaced by cleaner sources.

"FPL also remains on the verge of eliminating its only coal-fired power station. Florida at the end of this year, "said the public service press release. The company has also closed two coal-fired Jacksonville in 2016 and 2018, respectively, collectively avoiding nearly 7 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. "