Company charges forward with large-scale power-storage building in Brighton

A Boulder, CO company last week filed plans for the two-story, 50-foot-tall big battery building it's proposing for, really, the best street in all of Boston for something like that: Electric Avenue in Brighton.

Flatiron Energy says its facility, which will replace a construction storage and staging concern on the 2.8-acre site, will store energy in ten "vaults" full of modular batteries to be fed back into the regional grid at peak times or other times when generators can't keep up with demand, for example, at night when solar panels stop working. Currently, utilities rely on "peaker" plants, which begin burning fossil fuels when demand exceeds supply.

The power will be pumped into the site and then fed back into the grid via an existing Eversource substation next door.

What a drone would see:

The company's otherwise detailed plans do not describe just what sort of batteries will be installed in the 62,000-square-foot building or how much energy they can store, because the facility will be classified as a "large generator connected to the Bulk Electrical System" and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission "classifies certain information related to the production, generation, or transmission of energy as Critical Energy Infrastructure Information and cannot be publicly distributed."

Clues, however, come in the form of filings from Flatiron for a similar plant it wants to build in Chelsea and from Hecate Energy, a Chicago company that originally proposed both the Electric Avenue and Chelsea plants before selling the projects - and a four-year purchase-and-sale agreement for the site - to Flatiron last fall.

In a May, 2014 hearing, Flatiron told the Chelsea Zoning Board of Appeal that:

The batteries are small and put into racks, almost like a server farm. The battery racks are modular and over time the batteries can be replaced.

Also, the batteries have an expected life of 35 years and would work in four-hour charging and discharging cycles.

When Hecate first proposed the Electric Avenue project, it cited the output of its proposal at 150 MW - compared to 250 MW for the larger Chelsea site - and 700 MW for an even larger proposed battery-storage system proposed by another company on the site of what used to be petroleum storage tanks in Everett.

In its filing, Flatiron did detail its proposed construction schedule:

Outdoor construction, including site preparation, grading, drainage, below-grade construction, foundations, and structural erection, is expected to take six months. Indoor construction, including mechanical and electrical work, and installation of the battery racks and electrical equipment, is expected to take eight months. Following that, commissioning and testing of the building is expected to take four months.

ISO New England - which oversees New England's electrical grid - reported that after a review of the proposal, it did not expect the interconnection between the plant and Eversource to be ready before June, 2027.

But if Flatiron left out the "how" in its filing for Boston Planning Department approval, it discussed the "why" in detail:

The Project is expected to deliver enhanced reliability in the Boston Metropolitan Area, which has been suffering in recent years from increasing winter reliability risks1 and the loss of Mystic Generating Station, which represented over a fifth of the Boston Import Zone's peak electrical demand. The Project is also expected to provide dispatchable power and load balancing capabilities as increasing levels of offshore wind energy interconnect into the region toward the end of the decade.

Building energy storage in Massachusetts is critical to meeting the state's ambitious climate law, the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA). The GWSA requires the Commonwealth to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with an interim goal of a 70% reduction in emissions from the electric sector by 2030. As part of the GWSA, the state is conducting large-scale renewable energy procurements, dramatically increasing the proportion of renewable energy serving the state and with it, the level of intermittent generation. As Massachusetts integrates a higher proportion of variable energy, energy storage will play a vital role in bridging the gap between energy supply and demand, ensuring a steady, reliable power supply.

Site map:

Flatiron has code-named the Electric Avenue development "Project Lite Brite."

In Chelsea, officials asked if Flatiron could hire local artists to decorate its building there. The Electric Avenue filing does not say if Flatiron would consider something like that in Brighton, let alone hire the local artist most closely associated with Lite Brites - Peter Berdovsky of Mooninite Lite Brite fame.

In addition to putting up a swirling edifice, Flatiron is also promising the planning department it will widen the sidewalks around the property and install a retention pond stocked with native plants good at "bioremediating" runoff from the site. It said the plant will mostly hum along without the need for human intervention, so it is only planning on five parking spaces for occasional visits by technicians - along with a loading dock for occasional equipment shipments. The company added this means that the plant will have much less impact on local traffic than the current construction facility.

Complete project notification form (36M PDF).
35 Electric Ave. filings and meeting schedule.