Power systems company to build world’s first 1 GW energy storage project in Utah

Enlarge / The Intermountain Power Project plant stands in Delta, Utah, U.S., on Wednesday, May 24, 2017. The largest coal-fired power plant in Utah plans to shutters its facility by 2025 as the company's largest customer base, Southern California municipalities, move towards regulations limiting coal-fueled electricity. (credit: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This week, Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS) announced that it planned to build the world's first one-gigawatt (GW) energy storage network. The Mitsubishi and Hitachi joint-venture said the storage network would incorporate several different kinds of energy storage, including renewable hydrogen, Compressed Air Energy Storage, flow batteries, and solid oxide fuel cells.

MHPS has only said that it will be able to deliver 1 GW of power, but it did not specify how the project will be rated in terms of gigawatt-hours.

The project appears to center around an advanced natural gas turbine that will be able to burn renewable hydrogen as well. "MHPS has developed gas turbine technology that enables a mixture of renewable hydrogen and natural gas to produce power with even lower carbon emissions," a press release from the joint venture states. That gas turbine technology will eventually be upgraded, "to use 100 percent renewable hydrogen as a fuel source, which will allow gas turbines to produce electricity with zero carbon emissions."

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