BrightNight LLC, a Florida-based business that earlier this year pitched a battery energy storage facility in south Thurston County, intends to follow through on that proposal, representatives of the business and a consultant told The Olympian this week.
The business expects to submit plans for that development, possibly as soon as this summer, they said. The first meeting with the county was a February pre-submission conference in which business owners and developers learned what local government will expect of their project.
According to the project description, the site, proposed between Bucoda in Thurston County and Centralia in Lewis County, will have 157 Tesla lithium-ion batteries with a total energy storage capacity of 508 megawatt hours.
Consultant Austin Hicks, BrightNight vice president of development Greg Vander Kamp and BrightNight development communications manager Yasmine Kattan weren’t ready to discuss the Thurston County project in great detail, but they did share more information about BrightNight.
The West Palm Beach business, which was formed in 2018 and has financial backing from the investment banking business Goldman Sachs, has two distinct operations: solar electricity generation and energy storage.
Under consideration here is energy storage.
“Energy storage has some different functionality and characteristics,” said Vander Kamp. “So it can store energy from the power grid, or it can store energy from adjacent generation sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, gas, coal, nuclear, whatever it may be, it’s agnostic to technology type.”
The stored energy can then be used for power grid resiliency or stability, he said.
“If there’s a surplus of energy during a time of day from a lot of hydroelectricity, or it’s a windy day, these batteries can charge during those surplus times, and then discharge at a peak demand time when there are a bunch of folks turning on their lights, or a bunch of people coming home from work and turning on their appliances,” Vander Kamp said.
“These batteries are able to discharge at those peak demand times, and overall help utilities and other types of customers maintain that stability and that grid resiliency,” he said.
The Thurston County proposal is one of six in Washington state.
BrightNight sees growth in power demand here from electric vehicles, data centers and the associated power demands created by artificial intelligence.
Given those demands, BrightNight argues there is a need for energy storage. For example, a 127-megawatt battery energy storage system can power about 50,000 homes for about four hours.
“Without projects like these, the risk of blackouts and brownouts would be much higher,” Hicks said.
“This is a way to help avoid those and keep the lights on for homes and businesses.”
