Haunted by memories of blackouts and power reductions, utility and battery companies are stepping up efforts to upgrade their substations with larger batteries.

For instance, electric utility giant American Electric Power (Columbus, OH) has ordered three multimegawatt battery systems, with the goal of having 25 megawatts of storage in place by 2010, and 40 times that by 2020.

In a substation upgrade demonstration project in Charleston, VA, American Electric Power deployed a sodium-sulfur battery the size of a double-decker bus, plus power electronics to manage the flow of AC power in and out of the DC battery. The battery, produced by NGK Insulators of Nagoya,Japan, generates up to 1.2 megawatts for up to seven hours, easing the strain on an overloaded substation.

American Electric Power hopes to leverage the capacity of the larger storage†grids to harness renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. The company plans to connect its third two-megawatt battery system to a group of wind turbines at an undetermined site. The company hopes to find out whether batteries can smooth out short-term power flow fluctuations from the turbines, which could eventually lead to utilities absorbing larger levels of wind power on their grids.

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Batteries