Article originally published by Green Tech Media
AES Corporation launched the world’s largest battery plant paired with solar generation Tuesday [January 8], on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. This type of power plant produces cheap, clean energy and uses batteries to deliver power when it is most valuable, instead of just when the sun shines. That’s vital to decarbonizing the island grids of Hawaii, which struggle with too much solar power at midday but still rely on fossil-fueled peaker plants in the evening…
The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) is finishing up commissioning for the Lawai Solar and Energy Storage Project, which combines 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with a lithium-ion battery capable of storing 100 megawatt-hours…
The battery alone holds more energy than all but one other U.S. plant: the 120 megawatt-hour facility AES built in Escondido in 2017. Taken as a whole, Lawai’s storage capacity outranks any other operational solar-paired battery system in the world, according to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables. But the ever-growing solar-plus-storage project pipeline means that title won’t be safe for long.