By Logan Leo
Stacked cement blocks. dissolved salt. A flywheel. compressed air Water was pumped to higher reservoirs. And… good old battery. Energy storage technologies are booming. Since renewable energies are often intermittent, it is necessary to find bridges between windy and sunny moments.
Since last year, Hydro-Québec has set out to conquer the planet’s energy storage markets. Its EVLO division, with its 0.5 megawatt-hours (MWh) batteries, won contracts near a wind power plant in France and a solar power plant in a Montreal suburb. “We have also commissioned a 1 MWh system and we are working on a system with even higher storage capacity, perhaps 1.65 MWh,” explained EVLO’s CEO Sonia Saint-Arnaud.
EVLO systems have also been installed to test solar capacity in Kwaktak, Nunavik and the Lac-Mégantic microgrid. According to Mme At St-Arnaud, the capacity density of EVLO’s batteries is constantly increasing, with an estimated 50% improvement between a 1 MWh system and a 1.65 MWh system.
Variable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar power plants require batteries to guarantee hours of storage, said Venkat Srinivasan, manager of energy storage at the US government’s Argonne National Laboratory.
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