Standalone battery storage systems are providing the grid-forming types of ancillary services that conventional resources have historically performed—but faster and without emissions or need of water.
Since December, our Kapolei Energy Storage (KES) facility in Hawaii has been operating to support the HECO grid in this way. Here are two examples.
On February 9, 2024, the Oahu grid needed additional support. A turbine generator had tripped around 11 a.m., causing a sag in frequency to nearly 59.4 Hz, a very low level that can quickly lead to increasing grid failure if unaddressed. Hawaiian Electric dispatched KES as a backup. KES responded within 250 milliseconds—a blink of an eye—with 50 MW of power, delivering a grid-forming Fast Frequency Response signal for a half hour and bringing frequency safely back up above 60 Hz.
In another instance, around 1 a.m. on July 31, a 208 MW power plant went offline on Oahu, dropping the grid frequency again to approximately 59.4 Hz. As directed by Hawaiian Electric, KES responded within milliseconds with the Fast Frequency Response signal. Before sunrise, KES injected another 200 MWh of energy into the grid until solar generation came online. Later in the evening, KES responded again, providing over 300 MWh for four hours after the sun set and solar generation dropped. With the help of KES, the utility was able to avoid rolling blackouts.
As Hawaiian Electric recently wrote, “New technologies are critical to a secure system. We must remain flexible and adaptable as new technologies develop, particularly those that use less land and are not weather dependent...Transient stability studies in millisecond timescales are the new gold standard in high-renewable systems, and are an important part of long-term grid planning. New grid-forming capability can assist in stabilizing the system in place of conventional fossil fuel generation that traditionally provided physical rotating mass of inertia.”
We’re proud that KES, using Tesla Energy Megapack systems, is the world’s first example of standalone batteries performing this grid-forming service at scale. Hawaii has much to teach the U.S. mainland, and the world, about how to decarbonize while maintaining grid reliability.
Read more in Hawaiian Electric's blog post, quoted above: https://lnkd.in/eg5ac2nw.
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