Deepwater Wind has revealed that it has requested a 40 MWh (megawatt hour) battery from Tesla Energy for a proposed 144 MW wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, making it a dispatchable source of electricity.
Should the project become a reality, it will massively overshadow other planned projects to combine wind power with storage. For example, Norwegian oil company Statoil plans to supplement its 30 MW Hywind project with 1 MWh of storage, while Dong Energy will add a 2 MWh storage system to a 90 MW wind farm this year.
Wind energy has seen many advances in recent years, with lubrication manufacturers like Shell and Mobil – which also make hydraulic oils like Mobil DTE 25 and Shell Tellus S2 M 32 – developing new lubricants to keep pace with the growing scale and increasingly diverse environments of wind turbines. Despite this, wind power is still largely determined by the weather rather than actual demand.
By using such a large storage system, not only will Deepwater Wind’s proposed project minimize disruption to the electricity grid; it will be able to shift up to 40 MWh of electricity generated in off-peak hours to help meet peak demand. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and the state’s utilities also recently stipulated that proposals should help mitigate winter spikes in electricity prices.
Deepwater Wind developed the United States’ first 30 MW offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. It plans to build the proposed wind farm close to its existing 90 MW South Fork Wind Farm that currently provides power to Long Island.
