Black Hills Energy plans 50 megawatts at Pueblo to allow it to store excess wind energy to help meet peak demands
The integration of batteries into Colorado’s energy picture continues, this time in Pueblo. There, Black Hills Energy has announced plans to add 50 megawatts of storage that will enable it to capture excess renewable energy when it is available.
The four-hour Tesla Megapack batteries (pictured above) will be located next to the company’s 420-megawatt natural gas plant near the Pueblo Airport. However, the intent is to use the batteries to store excess electricity generated by the company’s three wind installations in southern Colorado. They have a combined capacity of 149 megawatts.
“We’re very proud that our company’s first large-scale battery storage project will be built right here in Pueblo,” said Campbell Hawkins, vice president of Colorado Utilities at Black Hills Energy.
Black Hills expects to have the battery storage in place by late 2027. The company explains that batteries will enable it to better meet peak demands, such as on hot summer evenings, with renewable energy.
This is part of the company’s work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2030 as compared to 2005, as required by Colorado law.
The batteries in Pueblo can best be understood as part of a near explosion in energy storage in Colorado during the last two to three years. The amount of storage now on line is remarkable given that the very first _ and very small — set of batteries were put into place in 2018 at the United Power headquarters along I-25. And that 4 megawatt-hour of battery storage remained the largest in Colorado until 2022.
For a short recap of the battery story in Colorado, see this short story from Big Pivots in March: “Why big batteries are a Colorado game changer.” Or this longer piece, “How batteries are changing Colorado’s energy game.”
American Clean Power will host its Recharge conference in Colorado on Sept. 22-24. The opening session will include a very strong Colorado component on its opening day with both Eric Blank, chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, and Chris Hansen, CEO of La Plata Electric, having half-hour time slots. See more here.
At Pueblo, project partners are Linxon, a global engineering, procurement and construction company, and Cloudbreak Energy, a national developer and independent power producer of distributed resources and utility-scale solar and storage projects.
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It would be interesting to see how they use these batteries. Generally batteries work better with solar because they can charge and discharge on a daily cycle, charging during daytime and discharging into the evening peak.
It is much more difficult to fully utilize batteries with wind since wind is not on a daily schedule. This makes it difficult to get the full value out of the batteries if they are charging on less than a daily cycle. Because of this, wind + batteries are not as useful and you don’t often see this as a strategy at current battery prices.
The part of the storage curve that never makes the press release is who wires it. A 50-megawatt Megapack yard is a few months of electricians, equipment operators and a substation crew, and then it runs itself, so the hands who build these do not live in Pueblo; they follow the batteries from one site to the next. We run a job board for traveling trades workers, and the 2018-to-now curve you describe shows up on our side as electrician postings with per diem attached, a lot of them from contractors based somewhere else. We publish the going rate for storage and substation crews, pulled off live postings by trade and state, so anyone can see what Colorado work is paying against Texas or Arizona for the same job. If the state wants any of that labor to stick around, that number is the place to start. Late 2027 is closer than it sounds on a build like this.