Assessment of SMES benefits in electric utility applications

A scoping study was performed by Pacific Northwest Laboratory, in collaboration with Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), to evaluate the multiple benefits electric utilities might realize from superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES). Benefits and costs were compared on a levelized annual basis to indicate the general viability of system-specific SMES applications. A principal purpose was to provide information that could help increase utility interest in SMES and, thereby, assist the rapid development and deployment of the technology. This paper reviews eight SMES application scenarios and their estimated benefit/cost ratios under the operational conditions of specific utility systems. Most of the SMES scenarios show levelized benefit/cost ratios greater than unity. However, the value of a single benefit was seldom found to exceed the unit's levelized cost. This suggests, as a general principle, that the total value of multiple benefits should be considered to fully establish the cost effectiveness of SMES in many utility applications. These results should encourage utilities to conduct more detailed analyses of SMES benefits to identify the applications most beneficial to individual systems.