A Battery in Every School

New Orleans Public Schools used to be the largest district in the state. Its 76 schools have reestablished and reinvented themselves since Lake Pontchartrain spilled through broken levees during Hurricane Katrina, when water reached the tops of school buses and filled auditoriums with polluted flood water. Families fled, and many of them never returned. Beyond physical displacement, those students experienced trauma that had a lasting negative impact on learning.¹

Hurricane Katrina was long enough ago that it seems disconnected from the current discussion on climate change, but it served as a preview of images that might become more common in coming years as sea levels rise and disasters become more frequent. There are thousands of schools in the cities most likely to be affected by climate change. Miami, New York, and Philadelphia top that list for the U.S., but even non-coastal cities like Nashville and Las Vegas have reason to prepare for a changing climate.² In addition to the direct preparation schools need — emergency plans, upgraded HVAC, food security plans — schools need to pitch in to help decarbonize the grid, and they are uniquely equipped to be part of the solution.

The nearly 100,000 public schools² in the U.S. are intentionally placed near population centers, which makes them well placed to contribute to a decarbonized grid. Electricity is best generated and stored close to where it is needed. If power has to travel long distances, some it will be lost during transmission. About 5% of all electricity is lost to transmission and distribution.³ This transmission loss is one of the barriers to bringing grid scale projects to remote areas — sure there is a lot of sunshine in the Mojave desert, but there isn’t a lot of demand for electricity there.

If we really are to replace our electricity production with solar and wind, those solar panels and wind turbines have to be somewhere.⁴ Often they have to be somewhere else and the energy has to be transported. Transmission requires high voltage power lines, which require, you guessed it, more land. More troubling, much of the land we are talking about could be used for agriculture, so this green energy would be competing with food. Even storage requires space, and while homes can have their own batteries, having larger, cheaper batteries on underutilized land nearby makes more economic sense, and it does not require millions of people to independently choose their own home storage solution. The resulting paradox puts power generation and distribution in a hunt for usable land, preferably near the places that need electricity. Schools have land, much of it underutilized, and all of it near places where people live.

The first contribution schools could make to a decarbonized grid is through solar. Schools are perfect for solar projects for so many reasons the discussion deserves its own article, but the short version is that schools have lots of roof space and not a lot of energy demands after 3 o’clock or during the summer, precisely when energy demands are greatest.

The second contribution schools could provide is in allowing grid-level energy storage on their campuses. By distributing this storage and connecting it to solar, schools could smooth out some of the peaks and valleys of energy supplied by wind and solar and decrease the amount of energy that has to be transmitted across long distances. There is a robustness that comes with distributed storage. If all the power storage for an area is housed on one site far away, the likelihood that power will be disrupted increases, but dozens of storage centers around town mean that it is unlikely that power will ever be entirely cut or for very long. This is precisely the logic of Direct Relief which has announced their own plan to supply a free health clinic in New Orleans with energy storage and solar as they have already done in Puerto Rico. This robustness not only helps with emergency backup on the scale of a hurricane, it is also the kind of day in day out resiliency that can make renewables reliable enough to gain wide acceptance.

A long duration flow battery like the one developed by Primus Power is about the size of two refrigerators sitting back to back and stores 125 kWh. A school could have a half dozen of them behind the dumpsters without losing more than a couple of parking spaces, or if a school was inclined (read, compensated) they could have 50 in a space smaller than a half-court basketball blacktop.The average single-family home uses 14 kWh in a 24-hour period, so even in an environment where the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow for 24-hours, 50 of these units would power 450 homes. But sun does shine, and assuming the storage is only needed at night, we double the reach to 900 homes. The math only gets more favorable for higher-density housing.

With 100,000 schools hosting an average of 10, schools could be the home of 125 GWh of grid storage right where people need it. Depending on which estimates you use, this could be as much as 10% of the nighttime storage we need for residences, and this is without considering any of the storage homes might purchase for themselves or any contributions wind or other renewables might contribute to the grid at night.

There are those who might chafe at the idea of big batteries butting up against classrooms, but the lithium ion batteries in a child’s iPad is more dangerous than the new generation of flow batteries. For one, there is no fire risk with these batteries, but more importantly, these batteries do not need to be anywhere near the building. In a common school footprint, they could be peripheral, closer to the road or the parking lot than anyplace where children are. Moreover, many school districts will hold empty land for years or decades while the population of the district changes. This empty land could be come revenue-generating if it were leased out for solar and storage.

The barriers to placing grid scale batteries on school property are mostly political, but these are easy enough to overcome. School boards respond well to two forces: votes and money. Boards are publicly elected, so if people demand their leaders to address climate change, they will look for ways to do it. Money, however, is the easiest route to acceptance. If these batteries come with reduced rates on energy or monthly payments from the power company, schools will find places to put them. While it might seem unlikely at this point that batteries on campus would become the norm in a school, schools are especially susceptible to institutional isomorphism — that is, they tend to copy each other. The first wave of adoption of green tech is solar, and that is well underway, but the second could very well be storage. What will tip the scales in favor of widespread adoptions will be money. If the economics of solar plus storage are right, schools will not be able to avoid it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned all the thing schools quietly do in addition to their well-known mission to educate children. They provide meals and mental health services and access to technology and recreation and entertainment for the town on Friday night. When a crisis comes, schools often step up to offer shelter or distribute supplies. Although this crisis is a slow motion crisis, schools should be no less involved. They can still be the hub that provides shelter and resiliency to their communities.

While Lake Pontchartrain has receded back within its levees, the lesson to school leaders is that climate change is coming for us all. In New Orleans, Katrina was a preview of what the collision between the climate and schools might look like. It might mean that your school has to deal with enrollment changes from climate refugees; it might mean increased utility costs due to heat waves, and it might mean that your schools are literally under water. Modern day schools are a hub for so much, it would not be such a stretch to imagine them serving their communities in one more quiet, but essential way.

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR430.html

[2] https://www.nestpick.com/2050-climate-change-city-index/

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_105.50.asp

[4] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

[5] To hear a great discussion about this challenge check out the Catalyst Podcast from Canary Media: https://www.canarymedia.com/podcasts/catalyst-with-shayle-kann/climate-techs-surprising-bottleneck-land-access