The world's largest battery energy storage project has reopened a few days ago. The battery energy storage system called Moss Landing has a scale of 400MW/1,600MWh.
Owner and operator Vistra Energy has suspended the operation and market participation of the energy storage system following a battery overheating incident in two phases of the energy storage system.
The first phase of the 300MW/1,200MWh project, which was put into operation in December 2020, ceased operation after the accident in September 2021, while the 100MW/400MWh battery energy storage system deployed separately in the second phase was put into operation one month before the accident, but It was also closed in February of this year.
Vistra Energy said in a July 11 statement that the battery storage system was back in operation and can now supply more than 98 percent of the electricity it stores to the grid operated by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). . The company earlier said it would start operations in the first half of this year.
While Vistra Energy did not respond last month to the progress of the operation and investigation of the energy storage system, the company revealed that it has begun to gradually restart the battery energy storage system (BESS) in May and June. The final 7MW of battery storage will also come online once the relevant equipment (replacement of batteries and electrical components) is in place, and the company said it will continue to work with regulators and local authorities as recovery efforts continue.
Vistra Energy said that it is further expanding the scale of the energy storage system, with the third phase of the project adding 350MW/1,400MWh and starting deployment in January this year. The company has previously said that the Moss Landing battery energy storage system, which is primarily installed in the turbine hall and other locations of a disused local coal-fired power plant, has a power infrastructure and grid capacity of up to 1.5GW/6GWh.
In fact, California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the off-taker of the battery storage system operated by Vistra Energy, recently deployed its own battery storage system in Moss Landing - 182.5MW/730MWh Elkhorn battery energy storage system. Vistra Energy's battery energy storage system mainly uses batteries provided by LG LG Energy Solution, while Tesla provides batteries for Pacific Gas and Electric's (PG&E) Elkhorn energy storage system.
According to findings released by Vistra Energy in January this year, the failure of the battery storage system itself was not overheating of the batteries, at least not in the case of the first phase of the project.
Instead, it's because the fault detection system, in response to an overheated air conditioner, triggered the water spray and mistakenly sprayed water onto the battery rack, which was operating at normal temperature until after the water was sprayed. Thermal runaway.
Vistra Energy's investigation report also contains some of the corrective actions the company said it would take.
