Dive Brief:
- Tennessee Valley Authority and Plus Power have inked a 20-year agreement for a standalone 200 MW/800 MWh battery energy storage facility in Jackson County, Alabama, the companies said last week. The Crawfish Creek project is expected to begin construction in 2028 and go live the following year.
- Crawfish Creek will be one of the first large-scale battery projects in TVA territory and will support the public power provider's plan to build 6.2 GW of new generation in the coming years, TVA and Plus Power said April 21.
- The companies said Crawfish Creek would allow TVA to store low-cost power during off-peak periods and discharge when demand is high. It will also provide grid-forming services, including frequency response, regulation and operating reserves, to keep the grid stable as load grows, they said.
Dive Insight:
TVA anticipates annual load growth of about 2% over the next five years, the utility said in a Feb. 3 investor presentation. Retiring CEO Don Moul said at the time that TVA expected demand from data center customers to double by 2030.
To meet that growth, TVA is pursuing an “historic” buildout of gas generation as part of a broader resource plan that will see it extend the lives of aging nuclear units, uprate hydropower plants and deploy additional solar, wind and demand response capacity.
New nuclear is in the mix as well following a September agreement with the power plant development partner of NuScale, a small modular reactor company. The deal with ENTRA1 would see up to 6 GW of SMR capacity deployed in TVA territory next decade. Separately, TVA submitted a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last May for a 300-MW, GE Hitachi-designed SMR that could come online by 2032.
In the nearer term, TVA’s Crawfish Creek project would contribute to a board-approved strategy to execute up to 1.5 GW of battery storage by 2029.
The Tennessee chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmental group that has clashed with TVA on resource planning, called the Crawfish Creek announcement “a big deal” in a Thursday blog post.
“This is TVA committing — in a binding, two-decade contract — to the idea that batteries are now a core part of grid reliability,” the group said.
In 2022, the Sierra Club sued TVA over its plan to deploy 10 aeroderivative gas turbines at the site of a retired 1.5-GW coal-fired power plant west of Nashville.
Monika Beckner, TVA vice president for power supply and fuels, said in a statement that energy storage would be a critical piece of TVA’s resource mix in the future.
“Battery storage is essential to protecting the reliable, affordable electricity our region depends on to power next-generation technologies,” Beckner said.
Projects like Crawfish Creek will “strengthen the Valley’s energy security” and help TVA manage extreme conditions, she added.
TVA’s transmission grid came under significant stress in late January due to a severe ice storm and prolonged cold snap. Hundreds of thousands of customers served by TVA distribution utilities, such as Nashville Electric Power, lost service during the event.
At least one of those distribution utilities is banking on smaller-scale energy storage to strengthen its local grid and reduce demand charges on the wholesale power it buys from TVA.
EPB of Chattanooga has 45 MW/95 MWh of front-of-the-meter energy storage on its system today and could add more than 100 MW more over the next three years, Ryan Keel, its president of energy and communications, told Utility Dive last month. That would represent more than 10% of EPB’s peak load, Keel said.
Crawfish Creek is Plus Power’s first announced project in the Southeast, but the company’s 1,650 MW/4,150 MWh operating portfolio serves vertically integrated utilities in other parts of the country.
Those include 360 MW/1,340 MWh at two locations in Salt River Project’s Arizona territory, a 150 MW/600 MWh installation with Public Service Company of New Mexico and a 185 MW/565 MWh project with Hawaiian Electric that Plus Power says can match 17% of Oahu’s 1,100-MW peak load.
