Turning away from fossil fuels is the central challenge for saving the global climate.Drawing more energy from clean sources is only one part of the puzzle. So is storing that energy for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.Just south of Seattle, a proposal for an industrial-scale energy storage facility has neighbors crying foul.
Omaha-based Tenaska, one of the nation’s largest privately held companies, wants to cover nine acres of undeveloped land in Renton with banks of lithium batteries. The facility could discharge 250 megawatts of power — about the output of a large coal-burning power plant, or one-tenth the typical power provided by Puget Sound Energy, the state’s largest utility — for four hours at a time.
“That’s really big,” said activist Fred Heutte with the nonprofit Northwest Energy Coalition.
“There were…