Axion Power International, a maker of lead carbon battery systems, has been selected to supply energy storage and frequency regulation to a 9.1MW solar farm in Pennsylvania, the company has announced.
The 9.1MW plant is expected to be the US state’s largest PV generation facility to date when completed. Spanning 19.4 hectares, Coatesville Solar Initiative, as the project is known, received its final land approval in February 2013. Some other local permitting and state regulatory approvals are still required. The plant was originally to be 7.2MW when it was first proposed in 2012, but the project appears to have been expanded since then.
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It will be built over several phases, with the first two phases to be constructed of equal size, 2.4MW capacity each, expected to generate around 6,300,000kWh annually between them. Construction is expected to begin before the end of this year and electricity generated will be sold through a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) to the local Coatesville Area School District (CASD), which is already in place.
Axion Power uses its proprietary technology, lead-carbon batteries through its trademarked PbC range, which the company describes as a “multi-celled asymmetrically supercapacitive lead-acid-carbon hybrid battery”. The company’s lead acid Powercube product has been approved for connection to the PJM grid, which spans 13 US states. PJM is notable also for having kickstarted a market for frequency regulation within its service areas that has what one analyst described as typically having the “most robust pricing” for provision of frequency regulation services in the US.
The full version of this story can be read at PV Tech Storage.
