May 14--EaglePicher Technologies wants to store the Kansas wind.

More specifically, it wants to store energy generated as that hard-blowing wind cranks thousands of turbines that utilities are building across Kansas and other Great Plains states.

One weakness of those gigantic wind turbines, though, is that sometimes the fickle wind doesn't blow hard enough to crank them; at other times, it blows too hard, and turbines disengage for safety reasons.

The result is that wind energy -- while renewable, clean and free -- can also be unpredictable, and that has been the bane of utilities being pushed by voters, legislators and regulators to add more green power.

EaglePicher Technologies wants to develop commercial batteries big enough to store the Kansas wind, and release it to the grid at times when demand is high but the breeze isn't blowing. The batteries also would allow storage of energy at night, for example, when the wind might be blowing but demand is low.

Wind farms

The power coming from wind farms right now, if it could be charted, would look like a roller coaster, with sharp peaks and valleys, and utilities tapping that energy potential at some range across the middle, and then adjusting their other sources of power in response to the intermittent wind. If the wind were recharging large batteries, and those batteries were interfaced with the grid, the steep peaks and valleys of that roller-coaster chart moderate some and the result is a more reliable feed to the grid. One official with a Minnesota-based utility likened the batteries to "shock absorbers."

But the kinds of batteries it would take to store that wind energy would be enormous, said Ron Nowlin, EaglePicher Technologies vice president and a general manager of aerospace systems.

"This would be a facility encompassing the size of a football field," he explained.

Essentially, it's one 60-megawatt hour multiple-cell battery, he said. A megawatt is one million watts.

For comparison purposes, "Your typical car battery would be about 600 watts," said Nowlin.

Nowlin thinks EaglePicher may be able to make as many as three of these huge batteries per year for utilities such as the Empire District Electric Co., which already has two 20-year contracts for wind power from two Kansas wind farms, one near Concordia, Kan., and the other near Beaumont, Kan.

Combined, those two contracts mean Empire has the potential to get up to 15 percent of its electrical energy from wind, which would allow it to meet renewable energy standards that voters mandated for investor-owned utilities in a statewide initiative passed in November.