Henderson Municipal Power & Light has entered into an agreement with a national energy company to construct a battery energy storage system on South Green Street.
According to general terms that HMP&L and NextEra Energy signed last week, the energy company will be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the battery storage system, and HMP&L will be able to charge and discharge the system as needed.
HMP&L General Manager Brad Bickett said both companies will sign a more specific contract later.
Bickett said HMP&L will be able to cycle the battery system up to 200 times per year, per the agreement.
The system would be able to discharge 12 megawatts of power over a 4-hour period, Bickett said. In layman’s terms, that’s enough energy to provide power for 4,000 houses for four hours and 12% of HMP&L’s peak need—think mid-August at 3 p.m.—which is 102 megawatts, Bickett said.
The energy storage system will be located near HMP&L’s substation #7, on South Green Street on a parcel of land currently zoned as general business.
The Henderson City Commission approved in November an ordinance relating to the zoning of battery energy storage system installations in which the parcel on which the system is placed must be zoned heavy industrial. A heavy industrial zoning requires a 100-foot distance from a structure to a residential area.
Bickett initially balked at that requirement, saying before the ordinance was approved that he believed the land on which the battery storage system is located only needed to be zoned light industrial, which requires 50-feet between a structure and a residential area. But he said last week that the parcel of land on south Green Street is large enough to hold the battery system and still maintain the 100-foot distance.
When city officials began studying battery energy storage systems, concern arose after learning that fires, some massive, have occurred at utility-size battery energy storage systems across the country. These are called thermal runaways and are caused when batteries inside the compartments of a storage system overheat.
Chemical reactions within the batteries hasten the blaze, and officials who’ve dealt with these say that spraying with water won’t put out the fire. Experts say that letting the fire burn itself out is the best approach to dealing with it.
In fact, City Attorney Dawn Kelsey said city staff who were in discussions about battery energy storage systems debated whether to place a moratorium on them in the city.
Bickett in a Tuesday interview with the Hendersonian acknowledged that there had been some past thermal runaways that were highly publicized across the nation. He said those events, which were few, have “made the industry adapt to new safety standards.”
Monitoring systems used to detect heating batteries and suppression systems to extinguish fires have both improved, he said.
Additionally, the type of battery that will make up the South Green Street storage is, in Bickett’s estimation, the best—a lithium iron phosphate, or LFP. Of the thousands of battery types, Bickett said LFP batteries are less prone to thermal runaway events.
“The important part for us is not to run away from the technology but to figure out how to do it correctly, how to do it safely,” he said.
There are eight residences within a stone’s throw of the proposed location for the proposed battery storage system. Across Green Street is the highly industrial area of Ohio Drive.
As the process begins to get the parcel re-zoned to heavy industrial, residents will have the ability to speak at public meetings, one of which will be when the rezoning comes before the planning commission. Bickett said he didn’t know when that will occur. He said NextEra will be a part of the rezoning process and both organizations would need time to meet before starting the process.
Bickett acknowledged that some residents could object to the battery storage system, but he’s confident bringing this new technology is safe and will keep rates low.
“Our rate payers will bear the cost if we don’t capture the energy,” he said.
Additionally, another project that had been stalled but HMP&L is now moving forward on is construction of a solar farm on 541 acres that straddle the 425-bypass. The project was initially going to be constructed by Community Energy, said Bickett. But that company was acquired by another energy company, AES, that wouldn’t agree to the terms that had been in place with Community Energy, Bickett said.
So, after the contract expired, HMP&L put out another request for proposal and landed on Stellar Renewable Power. Bickett estimates that construction will start in early 2025 and it will begin producing power in late 2026.
