Energy Equity: Making the Case for Peaker Plant Replacement With Battery Energy Storage

Peakers are typically natural gas and oil-fired plants that infrequently run throughout the year to cover peak loads. This paper focuses on close to end-of-life peakers near urban centers and presents an across-the-board comparison of the costs and benefits of replacing the peaker with a battery energy storage device. The paper’s proposition is an expansion of typical benefit-cost analyses that only focus on the plant’s capital and operating costs, including the monetary impacts of zero operational emissions resources on local communities’ health. Our analysis finds that health cost considerations can represent a significant factor in the socioeconomic impact of conventional peakers and that accounting for them can make battery energy storage a viable option for supporting peak loads.