Solar + wind, solar + storage, wind + storage—even fossil fuels combined with renewable energy—are supporting the growth of hybrid power plants that are breaking the norms of traditional power generation. Contact online >>
Solar + wind, solar + storage, wind + storage—even fossil fuels combined with renewable energy—are supporting the growth of hybrid power plants that are breaking the norms of traditional power generation.
Much of the discussion about the ongoing energy transition focuses on hybrid power plants, those generation facilities combining a variety of technologies to produce power beyond traditional electricity resources. Hybrids can include microgrids, along with utility-scale solar and wind projects co-located with energy storage. Advocates for renewable energy see hybrids as a way to integrate more of their energy along the power grid. Hybrid installations also can include the use of fuels such as natural gas and diesel.
The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to support development of hybrid projects, and already has spawned some U.S. installations. A project in Oregon that recently came online is one example; it’s a utility-scale plant that combines wind and solar generation with energy storage, according to joint developers Portland General Electric (PGE) and NextEra Energy Resources. Companies also are looking at designing hybrids using hydrogen, geothermal, and pumped hydro storage.
Research groups that track these plants and compile deployment data, such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, note that hybrids involve two or more generation sources, but there is no “one size fits all,” as the size and scope of hybrids can vary widely.
Hybrid power plants can provide many important ancillary services, including “frequency regulation, reactive power and voltage control, and operating and spinning reserves, among others,” said Kohlstedt.
The Berkeley lab earlier this year released its annual update of operating hybrid plants. Its data showed that at the end of 2021, there were nearly 300 hybrids—those with greater than 1 MW of capacity—operating across the U.S, totaling nearly 36 GW of generating capacity and 3.2 GW/8.1 GWh of energy storage. Solar-plus-storage facilities (Figure 1) are the most common; the largest such plants are in California, Texas, and Florida.
The report said much of the new energy storage capacity in the past year was adding batteries to an existing solar array. The Berkeley researchers identified nearly 20 other hybrid plant configurations, including several incorporating fossil fuels, with those installations “dominated by the fossil component,” according to the report.
Ron Hopgood, division manager for Rosendin’s Renewable Energy Group, told POWER: “Outside of the completely new installations where both PV [photovoltaic solar] and BESS are built together, we are seeing a lot of applications where we are being asked to go back and integrate a battery storage system to an existing PV facility.”
David Lincoln, senior vice president of the Rosendin group, said the company has “a number of AC- and DC-connected PV + storage projects in various stages of development and construction.” A few examples are the Scarlet I PV + BESS AC-connected project in Fresno County, California, that combines 284 MWdc of PV with 160 MWh of BESS, and the Sonrisa PV + BESS DC-connected project also in Fresno County.
Lincoln said, “First and foremost, hybridization of renewable energy [RE] projects addresses the biggest issue for wind and solar projects, which is power production variability. Integrating BESS solutions on existing PV/wind plants provides for time-shifting of power availability to periods where demand is higher and RE power production is low or non-existent. While providing power outside of typical RE production periods is critical, it also provides developers with significant commercial benefits by allowing developers to better forecast power availability and more flexibly engage in electricity markets.”
Said Coon: “In the case of Townsite, the inclusion of an energy storage system enables Arevon to shift the energy generated by up to four hours to supply electricity to the grid during hours of peak demand in the afternoon and early evening, helping to improve grid reliability.”
“One of the challenges with renewable energy is the intermittency of the resource,” said Daniel Casement, director of Power Markets for Arevon. “By combining the wind or solar with BESS in a hybrid configuration the battery can firm up the renewable energy so it can produce flat, predictable blocks of energy for each hour. Depending on the size of the BESS it can also shift the renewable energy to times of the day when loads are highest and provide dependable, clean energy when the grid needs it the most.”
Tim Allen, COO of PXiSE Energy Solutions, now part of Yokogawa, said the IRA will bring change for operators of hybrid plants. “Our work has primarily addressed hybrid power plants that include solar PV and battery energy storage systems or wind and battery energy storage systems. To operate in a wholesale market, these power plants are assigned a resource ID, which is how the market operator identifies and communicates with the power plant,” Allen told POWER.
“Among these kinds of plants, we see two types of configurations: those with single-resource IDs and those with multiple-resource IDs. A single-resource ID configuration aggregates all the generation assets under a single ID, whereas, in the case of multiple IDs, a separate ID is assigned for each asset within a single power plant. A plant with multiple-resource IDs has more flexibility in how revenue is earned as the plant owner can operate the solar PV and battery as separate power plants, which allows for maximum revenue optimization opportunities,” he said.
Allen continued: “In the past, the way the tax laws worked, power plant operators could only qualify for the Investment Tax Credit [ITC] on a battery installation if it was bundled with solar PV.” Allen said that situation drove operators to obtain a single-resource ID for their solar + storage configurations. The IRA changed that and now batteries qualify on their own for the ITC, which means there are additional tax benefits for qualifying the battery under the ITC, which was previously only for solar.
New technologies for hybrids are being explored worldwide. Officials in Singapore recently announced they would study the feasibility of a hybrid wind, solar, tidal, and wave energy system. Keppel Infrastructure, a Singapore-based energy company, along with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, are collaborating to research a system that would include modular floating solar platforms, along with wind turbines, ocean wave energy conversion technology, and tidal energy turbines and paddles. The groups said if the concept is proven, they would deploy a pilot project of at least 100 MW off Singapore, with the ability to be scaled up, and possibly implemented elsewhere.
Claudia D’Ambrosio, director of research at France’s CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) and lecturer at the École Polytechnique of Paris, told POWER, “Hybrid power plants are crucial in optimizing the integration of renewable energy in power systems. This is mainly due to the fact that renewable energy production is highly intermittent and uncertain. Thus, to guarantee the stability of the system and, in particular, that the demand and the production match, it is important to add some flexibility to the system.”
D’Ambrosio pointed to pumped hydro storage as a way to achieve flexibility. “Hydro plants allow storing of potential energy as water in uphill reservoirs. Thus, when the production exceeds the demand, it is possible to stabilize the system by consuming it to pump water from downhill to uphill reservoirs,” she said. “On the contrary, when the demand exceeds the production, it is possible to increase the production by releasing the water in uphill reservoirs and starting turbines. The flexibility provided by hydro plants can compensate the uncertain nature of renewable energy production.”
A housing development in the U.S. Virgin Islands is “an exceptional example of hybrid power plant configuration” said Darren Jamison, CEO of Capstone Green Energy. The former Capstone Turbine Corp. is a longtime manufacturer of gas-fired turbines, focused on microturbine power, and heating and cooling cogeneration systems. “The benefits of hybrid power plants are numerous because they have all of the advantages of the individual technologies,” said Jamison, pointing to the Magens Junction complex (Figure 2) built on St. Thomas.
“The system at Magens Junction has lower emissions, a lower cost of energy, and improved resiliency by drawing on multiple power generation technologies,” he said. “If one of the components is unavailable for any reason, the other technologies fill the gap, serving as a built-in backup. In addition, the Capstone microturbines also offer black-start capabilities in this particular system.”
Magens Junction is a 108-unit affordable housing development with its own microgrid system, which includes an 820-kWh BESS, 150 kW of solar, and 455 kW of Capstone microturbines that run on propane. Jamison said the microgrid “not only provides 100% of the complex’s electrical power requirements, but it does it with the least amount of propane needed. In this system, the electricity generated by the microturbines also charges the BESS.”
The aforementioned project in Oregon—the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities—includes 300 MW of wind, 50 MW of solar, and 30 MW of battery storage. The plant was commissioned in late September and is an example of how utilities are supporting hybrid plants. The Wheatridge system uses electricity from the solar power to charge the batteries, and the storage can provide continuous power for four hours. A subsidiary of NextEra operates the facility. PGE owns 100 MW of the system. The subsidiary owns the rest, and sells that output to PGE under 30- and 20-year power purchase agreements.
James Fraser, Emerson’s vice president of Renewables, detailed some of the ways utilities and other power generators can support growth in hybrid installations. Fraser told POWER, “There are many ways to create a hybrid energy system for use during peak and off-peak hours.” He said those include:
“Hybrid power ecosystems are becoming increasingly interesting for industrial process applications where the combination of traditional thermal generation on a production site can be combined with renewable generation to offset carbon emissions,” said Fraser, whose company has asset performance management software that helps monitor assets (Figure 3) and make sense of their massive amounts of data. “Additionally, excess energy can be used for green hydrogen production and then further processed in compounds, like ammonia, which can then be sold or used as a transportable energy storage media.”
Improving battery technology and the growth of variable renewable generation are driving a surge of interest in "hybrid" power plants that combine, for example, wind or solar generating capacity with co-located batteries. While most of the current interest involves pairing photovoltaic (PV) plants with batteries, other types of hybrid or co-located plants with wide-ranging configurations have been part of the U.S. electricity mix for decades.
This annually updated briefing tracks and maps existing hybrid or co-located plants across the United States while also synthesizing data from power purchase agreements (PPAs) and generation interconnection queues to shed light on near- and long-term development pipelines. The scope includes "co-located hybrids" that pair two or more resources (e.g., multiple types of generation and/or generation with storage) that are operated largely independently behind a single point of interconnection, and "full hybrids" that also feature coordinated operations of the co-located resources. The focus is on plants with one megawatt (MW) or more of capacity; smaller (often behind-the-meter) projects are also increasingly common, but are not included in this data synthesis.
Key findings from the latest briefing include:
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