APPA-Funded Logan City Light & Power Energy Storage Project Advances

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
November 5, 2021

Pine Gate Renewables on Nov. 3 said that it has won a competitive bid with Logan City Light & Power (LL&P) to build a stand-alone energy storage system in Logan, Utah.

In 2020, LL&P received a $125,000 grant from the American Public Power Association’s Demonstration of Energy & Efficiency Developments (DEED) program to help fund the project. 

Providing 0.125 megawatts/0.5 megawatt hours (MWh) of backup energy for the grid, the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) will be designed and integrated with the city’s System Operational Control Center, which monitors the municipal electricity distribution system, power plants, power contracts and call center. 

It will also be able to accommodate the area’s wide range of changing seasonal temperatures and elevation in northern Utah. 

“The LL&P energy storage project is another example of how public power utilities are at the forefront of innovation,” said Michele Suddleson, Director of R&D Programs at APPA. “It is also illustrative of how the DEED program helps public power utilities to improve their operations and services through grant funding.”

The project will use the Eos Znyth Gen 2.3 battery and Nikola Power’s Intellect Plus Energy Management System.

The Eos system, a zinc hybrid battery, along with Nikola Power’s Intellect Plus Energy Management System, has the ability to charge and discharge energy on a predetermined schedule as needed to allow for demand charge reduction, provide backup power to critical loads and supply additional grid services to maintain reliable continuity of service for the residents of the community. 

The BESS dispatches power during peak demand hours and ultimately delivers cost savings to customers. 

Blue Ridge Power will conduct the engineering, procurement and construction for the project, which is expected to be operational by late 2022. 

Pine Gate has more 12 gigawatt hours of storage in development either as stand-alone or combined with solar projects across the country. Its most recent solar plus storage project was Grissom Solar in Enfield, N.C., which went online earlier this year and provides 10 MWh of energy storage. 

DEED members can access reports on this and other projects in the DEED research library. The library is key word and topic searchable.   

Quarterly reports keep DEED members up to date on current projects, such as Logan’s storage project, and once a project is completed, the results, lessons learned, and any resources created to assist other utilities in replicating a similar project are shared in the library.

APPA Storage Tracker

The American Public Power Association recently launched a Public Power Energy Tracker, which is a resource for association members that summarizes energy storage projects undertaken by members that are currently online. The tracker is available here.