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Schott Solar closing its doors in Mesa del Sol
New Mexico Business Weekly by Kathi Schroeder, Editor
Date: Thursday, June 28, 2012
Schott Solar, which employs about 200 at its operation in south-central Albuquerque, reportedly will shut its doors on Friday and close down its New Mexico operations, according to a report by KOAT-TV, Channel 7.
In an April 20 report by the Business Weekly, Schott Solar PV President and Chief Sales Officer Tom Hecht said the company had readjusted to normal production levels, with about 300 employed at the Albuquerque plant.
Does ABQ have much focus on solar energy for business and existing/new development? I've looked may have missed it. I spent some time in Tucson and their downtown/4th street area had quite a few business with covered parking and roofs lined with solar panels. As much sun as NM get, seems like it would be a no-brainer.
Yes, there is. PNM has a great group of people for businesses to work with in implementing solar systems.
I have seen solar panels all over. Sometimes unless you are looking for them you will miss them. Two recent ones I drove by were the new Police Substation on Ellison on the west side. And the Bell Group on Bluewater.
A small solar generating plant in Albuquerque equipped with backup battery storage is shining a bright light on the future of electric grids.
Public Service Company of New Mexico built the facility, dubbed the Prosperity Energy Storage Project, to show how batteries can smooth out the ups and downs of utility-scale solar photovoltaic plants. That’s key to making PV generation a reliable and consistent source of electricity for the grid, even when the sun is low in the sky, or when clouds are blocking solar rays.
The project, which includes a 500-kilowatt solar PV system and a 250-kilowatt battery storage system, came online in September 2011. Now, nearly 17 months later, PNM managers say it has performed beyond expectations.
“We’re learning a magnitude greater than what we originally thought,” said Steve Willard, program manager and the project’s principal investigator. “We have a lot of solar electricity coming onto grids, so we want to combine batteries with all that. We’ve proved we can do it with this system.”
Despite persistent fluctuations in sun availability from one day to the next, and throughout the course of each day, the battery system has allowed the project to provide a steady electric flow, Willard said. It offers stored electricity for the grid in the early morning when the sun is still rising, and in the late afternoon when it’s setting.
Battery containers and solar panels stand at the PNM Prosperity Energy Storage Project located at Mesa del Sol during the early day of the experimental project in September 2011.
Late afternoon capacity is particularly important, because during the summer, that’s when consumer electric demand peaks as people come home from work and crank up air conditioners, lights and other appliances.
At night, when the PV system is not working, the battery system can also receive and store electricity from wind turbines, which generate the most output in the evening. That allows the utility to shop around for the lowest price for wind-generated electricity, rather than buying it in the daytime when wind is weaker and power from turbines would cost more.
“If we know the next day is going to be really cloudy, we charge the battery a little with wind the night before,” Willard said.
By smoothing PV production and maintaining a stored base of electricity, utilities can count on those systems as needed, said Jonathan Hawkins, PNM manager for advanced technology and strategy.
“It makes those systems firm and dispatchable,” Hawkins said. “Solar (generation) goes up and down every day, but at peak times in the evening, this allows us to provide a bucket of power that you can take to the bank.”
That creates a multitude of benefits for the grid, such as avoiding starting up a natural gas plant to supply the grid at peak periods, Willard said. And, as battery technology advances, stored electricity could be used to run other grid infrastructure, such as electric substations.
“The project is really helping us to conceptualize how batteries can fit into the grid with PV, and how they can bring the most value,” Willard said.
But for widespread deployment, battery systems must decrease in cost.
“Right now it’s still too expensive,” Willard said. “But there’s a huge amount of research and development going on in the storage industry. A tidal wave of new technology is coming that will push costs much lower.”
The battery system installed at the Prosperity project is based on advanced technology developed by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. CSIRO added capacitors to lead-acid “ultra batteries” to improve their ability to manage the sudden charges and discharges needed to shore up renewable energy systems. It also added carbon to electrodes for more conductivity.
CSIRO licensed that technology to the Australian company Ecoult, which was later acquired by Pennsylvania-based East Penn Manufacturing Co. Inc. East Penn supplied the system for the PNM project, which includes 1,280 batteries stacked in eight industrial containers at the Prosperity site near Mesa del Sol in south Albuquerque.
Apart from testing and demonstrating the battery system, the project has shown that the advanced computer system and algorithm used for control automation is working efficiently, Willard said. The computer system collects more than 220 data points per second for analysis. It automatically tells the battery system to store or discharge electricity.
Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico are both collecting data for analysis. That provides a valuable educational component to the project, with post-graduate engineering students at UNM assisting in the work, said Andrea Mammoli, a mechanical engineering professor and director of UNM’s Center for Emerging Energy Technologies.
Northern New Mexico College is also collecting data for students to analyze, strengthening their math and computer skills, said PNM spokeswomen Susan Sponar.
Prosperity is one of 16 smart-grid demonstration projects nationwide that received federal stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE contributed $2.3 million, and PNM invested $6.2 million.
PNM’s project, however, is the first one to directly integrate a PV-battery system into a utility grid, said Haresh Kamath, program manager for energy storage at the Electric Power Research Institute.
In early January, EPRI awarded PNM its annual Technology Transfer Award for applying that strategy in a real-world project.
“PNM was one of the first to go forward with its project, and the data we’re getting is proving very useful to understand how to install and operate these systems in the future,” Kamath said.
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Solar energy in ABQ?
