Colorado Springs Utilities’ first large-scale battery storage project will be connected to the power grid later this month to begin charging and testing the new array.

The project is under construction next to the Jackson Fuller substation outside of Falcon. Even through the snow Tuesday morning, construction was underway to get the batteries and the power station ready for launch.

Utilities contracted with NextEra Energy Resources, a Florida-based clean-energy development company, to build and operate the battery system. When completed later this year, the array of batteries will store up to 100 megawatts of power for four hours that can be pulled back into the local grid as needed to meet demand.

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The power is stored in rows of climate-controlled containers, each filled with racks and rows of small lithium-ion batteries. The site has 124 battery containers in place right now and NextEra plans to eventually increase that to 150 containers.

“We overbuilt the project to accommodate. For the first four years, we won’t have to do anything and then slowly have to add a little bit of batteries to maintain it over the life of the project,” NextEra project developer Chris Haas said.

Electricity from the city grid will be passed from the city substation to a substation built by NextEra, then along to a series of power inverters that are each connected to four battery storage containers. Each step of the process lowers the voltage from the main grid and converts the power to an easier format for the batteries to hold.

The city plans to connect the battery grid to the power system on Jan. 22 to begin testing the equipment and charging the batteries. Utilities spokesman Steve Berry said the plan was to officially bring the battery system online in May as a reliable power option.

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Steven Gaeta, project manager for Utilities, said the storage would be especially useful during the summer. Utilities saw a record demand for power consumption in July, with one daily spike in use drawing in 1,000 megawatts of power to homes.

“It really helps with peak demand times. You get these enormous curve fluctuations between when everyone is using power and no one is using power, and that’s when they really become useful.” 

NextEra engineers said the battery system can send the full amount stored into the grid in less than a minute. Recharging the batteries fully will take around four hours.

In the 25-year contract between Utilities and NextEra Energy, Utilities will pay a monthly fee for each kilowatt-hour of power that is stored in the batteries. Gaeta said it cost Utilities around $4 million to complete the substation improvements that go along with the batteries.

NextEra covered the construction cost for the project and will have technicians continue working on the batteries. The construction will include the addition of soundproofing walls around sections of the battery line during the spring and landscaping work to make the addition less noticeable.

The battery project is part of a larger effort to more than double Utilities’ electrical capacity by 2030. Utilities leaders have said the goal was to bring projects online to generate 1,500 megawatts worth of electricity as the city moves to meet the state goals for clean energy and reduced carbon emissions.

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“It’s really a necessity for us to be prepared for the future. We have to modernize our grid and the battery energy storage is one important piece of that,” Berry said.

NextEra Energy previously built a solar energy site for Colorado Springs Utilities outside of Calhan and built two battery storage projects in Pueblo. The company has three other battery projects in development across the state.