ARRA SGDP City of Painesville, Ohio (Vanadium Redox Battery Demonstration Program)

The City of Painesville, Ohio and its partners demonstrated vanadium redox battery storage capacity at the 32 megawatt (MW), coal-fired Painesville Municipal Electric Plant (PMEP). Using stored power enables the facility to attain the same daily output requirement, more efficiently and with a lower carbon footprint. The plant operates at a constant 26 MW, 80 percent of rated capacity. The long-term goal is to scale the battery system in stages, ultimately upgrading the facility to 10 MW of capacity with up to 80 MW hours of storage. In the first phase, 1 MW of power with 6 to 8 hours of storage was installed. This capacity is sufficient for Painesville to evaluate the benefits of energy storage, assess its uses in optimizing power generation efficiency, and facilitate American Municipal Power with leveling the peak demands of the system. A bi-directional four quadrant inverter, with a rated capacity of 1.0MW and 1,440 amps at 480 VAC, will be used to provide AC/DC and voltage conversions. The battery was constructed with two parallel electrolyte flow systems providing the total net electrical capacity of 1.0 MW. Each subsystem will be comprised of 64, 10kW stacks. The subsystems were arranged in parallel to supply peak operating loads. Each stack subsystem has their electrolyte flow into two 15,000 gallon polymer tanks, at rates ranging between 500 and 1500 gallons per minute. The battery components are produced in the United States and the stacks are assembled in Painesville before being installed at the PMEP Battery Building.