PORT ANGELES — Sometimes an innovative idea doesn’t require any meetings or PowerPoint presentations to take shape — it just needs the right people to be talking at the right time.
That’s what three men — a city of Port Angeles staff member, property owner and businessman — said they found to be true during a Friday evening two months ago.
During a weekly gathering in a small office at The Landing mall, the group known as the Center for Community Design was listening to Port Angeles Power Resources Manager Phil Lusk explain how he was a few days away from submitting an application to the Bonneville Power Administration to make the city part of a regional pilot project aimed at reducing the strain on the federal agency’s electrical grid.
He had a few businesses signed up, each agreeing to lower energy use during certain times of the day when demand for electricity is at its highest.
But he had nothing on the level of what Mory Houshmand had to offer.
Store electricity
The Port Angeles resident, who runs Catalyst Energy Technologies, said his company has been producing lithium-ion batteries — which can store large amounts of electricity — for several years; mostly selling them to energy-starved resorts in southeast Asia.
The technology would be perfect for such a pilot project, Houshmand told Lusk, since it could store power at night when demand for energy is at its lowest, and release it during the day when the transmission lines are taxed.
It didn’t take Lusk long to come to the same conclusion.
“The timing was perfect,” he said during an interview last week.
“I could smell the business deal in about five minutes.”
All they needed was someone to host such a battery for the pilot project.
Paul Cronauer, owner of The Landing mall at 115 E. Railroad Ave. and not one to shy away from anything avant-garde, eagerly agreed to be the host.
The battery was added to the pilot project proposal, which was accepted by BPA.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
First commercial use
The equipment, about a yard wide and tall and able to store about four hours worth of the building’s energy needs, will be installed sometime in the spring — making it the first commercial use of the technology in the Pacific Northwest and possibly the nation, said Lusk and Houshmand.
“Certainly what we are trying to do here is unprecedented,” Houshmand said.
Cronauer said he hopes to use the battery to also charge electric cars or even store energy created by a small wind turbine he wants to install at the building.
“I’m very excited about this,” he said. “This [technology] has been a long time coming.”
Houshmand, who said he never thought “we would actually get a project going over here,” added that he hopes to make Port Angeles, to steal the slogan formerly used by the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce, the center of it all, if this use of the technology catches on.
“My plan is, if this is successful, actually creating a hub for improving and expanding and bringing other uses for this right here in Port Angeles,” he said. (His company, CET, currently has offices in Seattle and Connecticut.)
The use, as Cronauer already realized, goes beyond storing energy from the grid.
The batteries also can be used to harness power created by sources of renewable energy — such as wind, solar and tidal — notorious for not being reliable, Houshmand said.
That would allow the energy to be used when it’s needed most, he said.
Lusk agreed that the technology could be perfect for encouraging renewable energy growth on the North Olympic Peninsula.
“If we can capture enough of it and put it in batteries, in theory, we could produce about 100 percent of the power supply to the city and surrounding communities,” he said.
“Whether or not it’s going to be cost-effective to do that in 20, 25 years,” Lusk cautioned, “my crystal ball is not that good.”
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
