Homer Electric Association’s General Manager, Brad Janorschke, was the featured speaker at the luncheon held at the Kenai Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center last Wednesday. Janorschke started the presentation marking the 70th anniversary of Homer Electric Association, noting that nine citizens of Homer met and began working together to form Alaska’s fifth rural electric cooperative with the system energized on March 13, 1950. He noted the pandemic prevented HEA from celebrating last year.
Janorschke spoke on BESS, Battery Energy Storage System, which arrived in Alaska and was installed at the end of July. They are modular batteries that are housed at the Soldotna Generation and Substation Facility. The BESS allows HEA to meet its reliability requirements without burning additional fuel. He says that incorporating the BESS into HEA’s grid structure will ultimately lower greenhouse gas production by allowing HEA to utilize non-dispatchable renewable energy.
“We are excited, in fact, the batteries are installed over next to our Soldotna Generation Plant. They are Tesla megapacks. 46 and a half megawatt batteries. Very large batteries for our system. You are right when you talk about reliability and keeping the lights on, very important on the generation side where it really is attached to the transmission system. It will not prevent our members from experiencing outages on the distribution line, for example when a tree falls on the line, but you are spot on when you talk about saving fuel. Our natural gas. That’s one of the things, the attributes, the batteries will bring to the system. We are pretty excited about it. they should be online later this month as we’re working with a team from Tesla to make sure they integrate appropriately with our control system.”
Janorschke speaks on if the battery power reduces carbon emissions:
“Absolutely it does because usually when we have to fire up an extra unit to provide and meet the needs of our members, we end up backing down an efficient unit. We end up running two units both inefficiently. That means higher greenhouse gases, more fuel consumption per megawatt hour produced. With the battery, we can avoid running that second unit, bringing it online and keep our first unit running very efficiently and avoid purchasing the gas and reducing our emissions on a per megawatt hour produced.”
The BESS is capable of storing 93 megawatt-hours (Mwh) of electric power which can be delivered to HEA’s grid at a rate of 46.5 megawatts (MW) per hour.