GridPoint, Inc., a smart grid software company, announced Tuesday that Xcel Energy (NYSE: XEL) selected its software platform to control the flow of power between the grid and a massive battery charged by wind power.
The sodium-sulfur battery, which is undergoing testing in Luverne, Minnesota, is made by NGK Insulators’. When fully charged, the one-megawatt battery will hold approximately 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity, potentially powering 500 homes for over seven hours. This is the first U.S. application of the battery as a direct wind energy storage device.
The GridPoint Platform allows Xcel Energy to explore using real-time grid conditions and energy pricing to determine when the battery charges or discharges. Based on system regulation and pricing signals received by the software platform, the battery’s charging behavior will be adaptively controlled. When the demand for electricity is high, as an example, stored wind energy could be automatically discharged to the grid, supplementing the power flow. When demand is low, the software platform could issue commands for the battery to store the available energy.
"Dispatching stored energy according to the real-time needs of the grid is essential to increasing our use of renewable energy," said Frank Novachek, Xcel Energy’s director of corporate planning. "Incorporating GridPoint’s software in the wind-to-battery project is in line with our ongoing efforts to modernize and upgrade the grid to allow easier integration of variable renewable energy sources."
The project will take place in Luverne, Minn., about 30 miles east of Sioux Falls, S.D., adjacent and connected to the nearby 11-megawatt (MW) wind farm owned by Minwind Energy, LLC. S&C Electric Company will install the battery and all associated interconnection components. The battery is expected to go on-line in January 2009.
GridPoint is a member of Xcel Energy’s Smart Grid Consortium, which is providing guidance, products and services needed to implement SmartGridCity, a $100 million effort in Boulder, Colo., to modernize the electricity grid and bring it into the digital age.
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