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While a lot of details remain to be worked out, an energy storage system that is proposed to be built at a defunct paper mill in Lincoln has the potential to help change the electricity landscape in Maine and the country.
Gov. Janet Mills and other elected officials announced a $147 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project on Tuesday. The funding comes from a bipartisan infrastructure law, passed by Congress in 2021.
“A crucial aspect of the bipartisan infrastructure law I helped negotiate was the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program, which seeks to modernize our electric grid infrastructure, to allow for the deployment of energy storage and other innovative energy solutions,” U.S. Sen. Susan Collins said in a statement. “This investment will help revitalize the Town of Lincoln, formerly a mill town, while allowing New England to strengthen its electric grid to allow for the incorporation of new clean energy sources in the future.”
The project, to be built by a Massachusetts start-up company, would essentially turn part of the shuttered mill site into a huge battery. It could store up to 85 megawatts of power for up to 100 hours. That’s enough electricity to serve up to 85,000 homes.
The Lincoln project also fits with state efforts, called the Maine Community Energy Redevelopment Program, to use energy projects to redevelop vacant industrial sites. About 100 temporary construction jobs are expected from the project, which will result in a small number of permanent jobs.
Energy storage is a significant missing link in the ongoing transition to more climate-friendly sources of electricity like wind and solar, which are intermittent. The power storage system could store electricity generated by wind and solar arrays and discharge it later, when it is not sunny or windy. It can also store power that is currently generated but can’t reach electricity customers because of congestion in the region’s energy grid.
The Maine project is part of a $389 million regional grant to New England states funded through the Department of Energy’s Grid Innovation Program, which aims to strengthen and update the region’s electric grid to support more clean energy.
The regional proposal, Power Up New England, also includes upgrades to points of grid connections in Massachusetts and Connecticut to prepare for a significant increase in offshore wind energy.
As of March, Maine had 63 megawatts in energy storage capacity connected and operating through six projects, according to a March report by the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The largest storage sites are in Millinocket and Yarmouth.
State law has set a goal of deploying at least 300 megawatts of energy storage by the end of 2025 and at least 400 megawatts by the end of 2030.
According to the PUC report, four other stand-alone storage facilities are planned for development in Maine. The largest, with a capacity of 175 megawatts, is proposed for Gorham. An additional 19 co-located generation and storage projects are awaiting approval. The PUC says it is unclear what percentage of these projects will represent electricity generation versus storage. It is also possible that not all of these projects will come to fruition.
Storing energy can have wide ranging benefits, including reducing the demand for additional electricity generated from fossil fuel sources and reducing the need to build new power lines, which are expensive and can be hard to locate.
So, while the proposed project in Lincoln, which has to cross numerous regulatory and financial hurdles, won’t create many long-term jobs, it could be a significant benefit to Maine and its electricity customers.