New gas peaker plants can actually produce more climate pollution than older units that are used less frequently, concludes a U.S. study that looked at battery energy storage systems (BESS) as a cheap, clean alternative to fossil fuels on the power grid.
The looming retirement of aging fossil fuel peaker plants in Maine illustrates of a transition needed across the United States, where more than 1,000 such plants are fired up whenever power demand spikes, says Sacramento, California-based Strategen in a recent case study. Maine’s transition “presents an opportunity to reduce emissions and their adverse environmental and health impacts”—but positive results depend on what replaces older plants.
Strategen’s study aims to inform policy decisions by comparing the costs of installing utility-scale BESS of developing new gas plants. The comparison goes beyond the relative costs of the new assets themselves, taking into account revenue impacts of different capacity markets and the costs associated with each option’s emissions.
Replacing aging peaker plants with more efficient gas plants will produce more emissions compared to both BESS and the emissions from the less efficient plants, the study concludes. That’s because the new plants, “being more efficient, could be run profitably more hours of the year than the existing plants.” The study also compared four-hour and two-hour battery systems, concluding that the longer storage option was more cost-competitive.
Furthermore, the emissions from fossil fuel plants—which are disproportionately sited in low-income communities, communities of colour, and areas already overburdened by pollution—result in negative environmental and human health outcomes like respiratory illness, cancer, heart disease, and premature death. The impacts of harmful particulate pollution and greenhouse gases would add US$7.1 million per year by 2030 to the cost of continuing to rely on gas-fired peakers.
“Reduced reliance on fossil-fueled peaking plants in Maine would therefore offer substantial health and environmental benefits for communities in the state while also supporting the mitigation of climate change risks,” Strategen says.
In Vermont, meanwhile, a new policy document suggests virtual power plants (VPPs) can play a significant role in helping utilities lower emissions and facilitate the shift toward a low-carbon energy system.
Defined as networks that link various distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar and electric vehicles, VPPs “can flexibly balance electrical loads and provide utility-scale and utility-grade grid services,” says the Virtual Power Plant Partnership (VP3).
In a report released in February, VP3 provides [pdf] a set of policy principles that decision-makers can use to advance VPP development.
VPPs were recently successfully deployed in Vermont’s Zero Outages Initiative, which distributed battery units to help customers respond to outages due to severe weather. But overall, the U.S. has not done enough to benefit from VPPs, says VP3.
The group recommends that policy-makers allow VPPs to operate in wholesale and retail utility markets with fair compensation for their services. The report also suggests measures to protect customers, like protecting data and simplifying VPP enrollment. Open communication protocols and standards for interactions between DER owners, aggregators, and grid operators will help seamlessly integrate all kinds of DERs into virtual power plants, VP3 adds.
“If the unifying objective of utilities and regulators is to ensure that present and incoming loads don’t jeopardize grid reliability or affordability, then VPPs are the key to delivering the reliable, resilient, sustainable, and affordable electricity system the 21st century needs,” writes Power Magazine, reiterating in March that “the U.S. utility industry is yet to leverage the full potential of these readily available, affordable, customer-sited resources to add flexibility to the grid.”
This story is republished from The Energy Mix under a Creative Commons License.
