Where is the biggest battery bank in the world?
“Is it true that GVEA has the biggest battery bank in the world?” asked a member recently.
- Two of the battery strings in the BESS are pictured.
If by biggest you mean most powerful, then yes; it’s true. GVEA owns and operates the most powerful energy storage system (BESS) in the world. But it is totally behind the scenes and many people don’t even realize it exists.
The battery system is made up of 13,760 Nickel Cadmium battery cells. After installation in 2003, the BESS was tested at 46 megawatts for five minutes and made the Guinness Book of World Records.
Last year, the BESS responded to 40 outages, preventing an average of 3.9 outages per meter. That’s 171,600 times our members did not have to pull out candles or worry about heat.
The Interior is like an island when it comes to electricity. Golden Valley can receive up to 70 MW of power from Anchorage via the Intertie. But when the Intertie goes down or a local power plant trips offline, there is no one else to call.
This is where the BESS jumps in by providing up to 27 MW of power for a period of 15 minutes – about the same amount of time needed to fire up another power plant.
Speaking of islands, a similar-sized battery system in Puerto Rico is used to stabilize the frequency of electric power on the island. It can produce up to 20 MW of power for 15 minutes.
Another use for these batteries is wind regulation. Duke Energy is planning to install a 36 MW energy storage system to back up its 153 MW wind farm in west Texas. GVEA is also investigating using the BESS to back up the Eva Creek Wind project in Healy.
Where is the biggest battery bank in the world?,
Fabulous. This system, I assume, is performing correctly to supply GVEA customers with power when all other source fail. have you experienced any issus with the batteries? What is the capacity (Ahr) of your batteies? What type charger are you using?Do you experence ripple from the rectafier?Is there a technical paper published which explains the technical details of your system?
Thanks for posting, Bob. Below are the answers to your questions. Also, you may find this article from the ABB Review interesting: Cold Storage.
1) The BESS is not designed to provide power “when all other source fail.” The BESS reduces the number of outages that members experience by providing power during the most common types of power supply-related outages (for example, loss of a single generator or a single transmission line).
2) Battery issues that have arisen were covered by manufacturer’s warranty.
3) The batteries have a nominal 920 Ahr rating. Four strings of batteries are used in the BESS. Each string consists of 3,440 cells connected in series. Each battery string provides about 5,000 Volts DC, which is converted to AC at 138 kV.
4) The charging function is provided by the converter electronics, which are much more complicated that a rectifier. There is not significant ripple.