Southern California Edison (SCE) signed seven contracts for a total of 770 megawatts of lithium-ion battery-based energy storage — to enhance the regional grid’s reliability and replace four large coastal once-through cooling plants.
It’s one of the nation’s largest energy storage procurements and an indication of utility acceptance of massive-scale battery storage. Late last year, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) urged California’s power providers and community choice aggregators to procure 3.3 GW of storage and PV-plus-storage systems to solve grid congestion and to compensate for gas and coal plant retirements.
Remarkably, SCE wants these energy storage resources online by August 2021, an aggressive timeline unthinkable for any type of fossil fuel project of this size.
Most of the winning storage projects are co-located with nearby solar power plants to charge the battery over the term of the contract, help integrate renewable energy into the grid, and furnish resource adequacy during peak demand.
SCE claims these solar-plus-storage projects, located at the same point of interconnection, will be the first of their kind on California’s grid.
Dispatchable solar and wind?
In an era of plunging battery costs, these awards point to the end of intermittent renewables and the dawn of dispatchable solar and wind.
Southern Power, a subsidiary of U.S. utility Southern Company, was awarded two projects, both coupled with PV plants.
- 88 MW/352 MWh Garland Project
- 72 MW/288 MWh Tranquility Project
NextEra was awarded:
- 115 MW/460 MWh Blythe 2
- 115 MW/460 MWh Blythe 3
- 230 MW/920 MWh McCoy project connected to NextEra’s 250 MW McCoy solar farm
TerraGen was awarded the 50 MW/200 MWh Sanborn project and LS Power won a stand-alone 100 MW/400 MWh storage project.
These projects are located across Southern California’s Kern, Fresno, Riverside and San Diego counties. The projects have terms varying from 10 years to 20 years. SCE serves 15 million people in a 50,000-square-mile service area within Central, Coastal and Southern California.
“These new emissions-free projects will help us ensure the reliability of the grid for our customers and integrate an ever-increasing amount of clean renewable energy over the next decade,” said William Walsh, SCE VP of energy procurement and management.
The winning contracts will require CPUC approval. SCE expects to submit the contracts for approval later this month.
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How many MWH s are we talking about? That is the other key metric of a storage project. Did I miss that in the article? Is this for managing minutes? Hours? Days?
See what the 7 projects were broken into and what each battery system can DO as storage and discharge into the grid. They are ALL designed for a maximum of four hours of output generation at the stated MW of inverter output available at each site. To varying degrees, each one of these energy storage facilities could be used one at a time and generate from 50MWh to 230MWh in a 28 hour period, or 4 hours maximum at 770MWh with all energy storage facilities feeding the grid at once.
This looks like a lithium ion energy storage system, so in actuality one has an 80% depth of discharge to allow the batteries to last 15 years. So, it is actually, 770MWh for 22.5 hours design to 80% DoD. The argument I keep hearing is the 4 hour discharge point is the “cost to energy storage” price point. I don’t believe it. Going beyond the 4 hour storage design criteria, allows the economies of scale manufacturing run of batteries for packs to drive down costs. At eight hours of energy storage one has broken into the dispatchable generation arena, at the 12 to 100 hour energy storage system, one could cycle these types of energy storage and not have to keep running fueled generation in ‘spinning reserve’ or ‘spinning demand’ for now on. The grid is entering a era of energy storage beyond hydro power or fueled generation as the majority of power online at any time. The concept has NOT been grasped by the rote utilities, that energy storage can take any over generation resource on the grid and save it for later use, (generation neutral). Energy storage can be designed to store massive amounts of energy for days or for a few hours a day. When some of the “other” technologies are adopted by the utility industry, we may see 30 minute to an hour molten salt or molten metal batteries near commercial and industrial sites, to redox flow battery facilities on site of solar PV farms, and or wind farms with days of energy storage available to make these large non-fueled generation sites into dispatchable generation facilities. With proper design one could design say a very large solar PV farm as a 50MWh, to 250MWh generation resource to the grid on demand.
Solerman, hit me up. I want to discuss a project and you seem to have good insight where i don’t.
Customers who are connected to the grid and have residential solar systems can sell their excess power to Georgia Power in return for bill credits. Any solar energy generated in a given month will be carried over to the next month. For solar equipment installed in the home, homeowners are eligible for an unrestricted 26% federal income tax credit. For more info check georgia solar incentives.