Season 4 episode 3 - Danish Fields: Charging Batteries With the Texas Sun

Olivia Topete
Project Manager TotalEnergies
One of the biggest misconceptions about Olympic weightlifting is that it's all about brute force, or just the power.
The technique and the mindset are just as important.
As a chemical engineer, I know a little bit about power.
There are a lot of parallels between what I do in lifting and what we're doing in the renewable industry.
We're constantly making incremental changes to become more efficient, more powerful and just better at what we do.
Houston gets approximately 200 days of sunshine per year when the sun isn't shining.
Our solar panels aren't generating as much power or energy.
In order to sort of combat that, we've begun installing battery storage on our projects.
There are some days when I get to Danish fields.
The sun is just rising and I realize the incredible scope of what we've accomplished here and invokes so much pride.
My heart didn't start out with chemical engineering.
I had My Portfolio ready.
I was on my way to art school and the Institute of Chicago, and then I discovered chemical engineering and organic chemistry.
And you know, chemical engineering, I will always say, is probably the most creative engineering discipline you can find.
It touches everything.
Renewables is just making its name.
That's super exciting because that leaves a lot of room for innovation and novel changes.
And that's where the creativity really comes in.
The utility scale solar that we were executing on even a year ago looks completely different to the utility scale that you'll see at Danish fields.
At peak capacity, Danish fields can power approximately 300,000 homes.
Houston is a very important place for the energy industry, but I think traditionally most people think of hydrocarbon or oil and gas, but total energies is really changing that landscape through renewables.
Between 2019 and 2021, Houston has actually doubled its solar capacity.
Danish is different in that we have both solar and battery storage.
We have 114 battery containers and each of those weighs about £80,000 each.
So they're huge.
SAFT is the company that is supplying our battery storage.
I work with Stephanie and she's just an incredible person.

Stéphanie Lengemann
Senior Program Manager
Saft
So as you know, the solar panels require the sun to produce.
The sun's not always there, Sometimes it's cloudy, sometimes it's night.
The batteries can absorb and provide power when you need it on demand.

Olivia Topete
We're helping some really large clients like Amazon decarbonize and that's really exciting.
We've also signed a long term agreement with Sango Bond, which is a global construction materials company and we're helping them offset 90,000 tons of CO₂ emissions per year here in the power management system.

Stéphanie Lengemann
We've got a graph of the power.
Some of them we've ramped up to Max power.
That's indicative of how we can actually command the batteries on demand when we need them.

Olivia Topete
Weightlifting is a single person sport, but we have a team, we're there to support each other.
It's not just about, you know, how can I get better?
It's how can I make the rest of my team better.
And I think what's so amazing and exciting about the team that I have the opportunity to work with is that we all come from different engineering disciplines.
But we all want to make the world better.
And we all believe, and we're all passionate that we're doing that through renewables.