At the foot of the Queensborough Bridge, where a fuel-burning electric plant neighbors a dense housing project, batteries are about to replace some of New York's dirtiest generators.
The nation’s largest public housing project, Queensbridge, sits kitty-corner to the Ravenswood power plant.in the Spring of 2020, it did so unevenly. Hardest hit by far were communities of color, where the death rate was roughly double that of white neighborhoods. Overlapping constellations of reasons drove this—such areas house more essential workers, living in more crowded homes, with less access to health care—but among the more insidious was chronic exposure to air pollution.
But in an American era defined by divisions and reckonings—both racial and environmental—Ravenswood is trying to clean up. That begins with its worst-offending units, the gas-fired plants known as “peakers,” turned on only to give the electric grid a boost on hot, or “peak,” days. The station can crank out some 2,050 megawatts of power in two ways.
Ravenswood is not alone. Slowly but surely—like a supertanker being turned—giant batteries that leverage renewable power and redress long-standing environmental injustices are replacing aging, dirty, expensive-to-operate gas plants across the US. This summer, LS Power activated a 230-megawatt battery system near San Diego, adding it to a portfolio that already included a 40-megawatt unit nearby, making LS Power the largest grid storage operator in the country. But not for long.
On Ravenswood’s spreadsheet, each box gets a dollar value: the bid to operate that one machine for that one hour, derived from the price of fuel and other calculations Plummer and his staff make to ensure their profit. The captains of the grid at NYISO then submit their order for the following day, working to carefully balance expected supply and demand for the 20 million people of the Empire State. The contract is crystal clear.
But limitations remain. As of now, the cells proposed by Rise Light & Power for Ravenswood are slated to be lithium-ion, the familiar technology already inside your phone and all those Teslas. At this point in time, the batteries that are similar in price to the peakers discharge all of their power in about four hours. But on days of peak demand, that won’t be enough.
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