Axium Infrastructure and Canadian Solar’s subsidiaries of Recurrent Energy and CSI Energy Storage announced the two have installed and activated what they are calling the world’s largest single-phase energy storage facility. Named Crimson Storage, the site holds 350 MW / 1400 MWh of standalone battery energy storage, delivering flexible power to California’s grid.
The project is held by a fund managed by Axium (80%) and Recurrent Energy (20%). CSI Energy Storage operated as the turnkey system integrator of the project, delivering engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) services. The EPC will continue to provide long-term operational support for the site.
“The Crimson Energy Storage project epitomizes California leadership – clean energy, innovation, and economic development through good, union jobs. We’ve been laser focused on quickly bringing projects like this online to achieve our goal of a 100% clean energy grid. Congratulations to the people across the public and private sectors who are responsible for bringing this major project online to the benefit of all Californians,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom.
On average, the project is expected to store and dispatch enough electricity to power more than 47,000 homes each year. It is estimated that Crimson Storage will offset 275,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions as compared to natural gas fired turbines.
During construction, the project employed about 140 union workers, including International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, International Union of Operating Engineers, Laborer’s International Union of North America, and the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers Union. It is expected to bring about $30 million in property tax revenue to the local community over the life of its operation.
The project is located in the California desert on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. BLM approved the project in May 2021, marking the first standalone energy storage project to be approved on BLM lands under the Biden-Harris administration.
Image: Recurrent Energy
“The project represents another major step forward in the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. We look forward to supporting additional projects like Crimson Storage that ensure responsible energy development on BLM lands,” said Karen Mouritsen, BLM California state director.
Upon activation, Crimson Storage became the largest active single-phase storage project in the world, and second-largest energy storage project currently in operation of any configuration. The project holds two long-term contracts with utilities Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric. Both contracts are part of reliability mandates made by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
- Southern California Edison: 200 MW / 800 MWh 14-year and 10-month contract with Southern California Edison under a full tolling agreement.
- Pacific Gas and Electric Company: 150 MW / 600 MWh 15-year contract with Pacific Gas and Electric Company for Resource Adequacy only; Recurrent Energy and Axium will operate the battery system in the California wholesale power market.
“Recurrent Energy began developing Crimson Storage and our larger energy storage pipeline in 2015 when no large-scale storage projects yet existed. Last year, we started bringing these projects to fruition also thanks to our CSI Energy Storage team. Today we celebrate how far we have come in delivering the much-needed flexible generation that will support the U.S. and California’s transformative climate goals,” said Shawn Qu, CEO of Canadian Solar.
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How much did this plant cost? I’d guess up around 500 million dollars. If California had simply built solar with this money that’s over 500 MW with a generating potential north of 1 TWh a year. The emission offset would likely be 20 times as large if not bigger.
Can you guys not see the shell game being played here? Why in the world is California storing power in batteries while they’re still burning gas? If they had simply injected the power into the system they would have displaced more gas in the middle of the day than they displaced in the evening with the batteries. This is not leadership. This is regressive system operations and it blows me away that you guys promote this.
The best strategies for balancing solar are: 1. Ramp down your gas. 2. Ramp up your controllable loads. 3. Ship the power out of state. These strategies are an order of magnitude cheaper than balancing with batteries.
Lee Kasten: Your price estimate is pretty far off. Figure ballpark $200/kWh.
Batteries save money, The famous Tesla battery at Hornsdale, South Australia, that started with a Musk tweet, quickly saved millions.
A battery lets you buy power when it’s cheap, and use it when it’s expensive. They’re also great at providing essential stability services. Power put on the grid must always exactly equal power taken off. Batteries can instantly supply power, or remove it. For solar or wind to do this, you must run it well below capacity, which is clearly expensive and wasteful.
Transmission lines have limited capacity. Batteries let you make better use of existing transmission lines, by transmitting power at times when there is spare capacity.
Batteries are a key part of California’s strategy for replacing gas peaker plants. These are relatively inefficient plants that can start and stop quickly—but not nearly as quickly as batteries. Minutes vs milliseconds.
It is much more cost-efficient to store excess power for use later, than to build a lot of excess solar and wind. There is an optimum trade-off between excess capacity and storage, that changes with the costs of each and situation—but you always need both storage and spare generation.
We’ve been using pumped storage for over a century. Northfield Mountain pumped storage was built explicitly to store excess power from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant for use during periods of higher demand. Unlike the long-gone nuclear plant, the pumped storage remains in service. Batteries are much cheaper and can be placed anywhere, with months of planning, vs decades.
They don’t fill exactly the same role that pumped storage does, however. They are faster to respond. They can provide synthetic inertia. Rotating generators have inertia, which is important for grid stability. An increase in load draws on that inertia to maintain voltage and frequency. If the voltage drops, so does the frequency, and the generators can get out of sync, and the grid collapses. Insufficient inertia was part of the failure chain in South Australia’s 2016 Black System event; they only had about 3 GJ of inertia available. That is one of the things the Tesla batter helps with.
You should assume that engineers know what they’re doing, and that utilities don’t spend money for nothing, whether public or for-profit. They keep a close eye on the cost and engineering tradeoffs.
When politicians jump in, however, they’re fair game. At best, they’ll have access to experts. At worst, they’ll ignore them. But they have a positive role to play, too, if they’ll listen to experts in setting priorities and incentives.
When they don’t, well, Texas.
According to NREL the battery costs I mentioned are on the low side.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf
The cost is quoted at $550 million here.
https://electrek.co/2022/10/19/the-worlds-largest-single-phase-battery-is-now-up-and-running/
“It is much more cost-efficient to store excess power for use later, than to build a lot of excess solar and wind. There is an optimum trade-off between excess capacity and storage, that changes with the costs of each and situation—but you always need both storage and spare generation.”
You’re quite wrong. You should look up Dr. Marc Perez’s work. You should look up his father’s work as well.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5X44JIJdHs9VqnivjM3aZ2?si=e6_zzZo7Qv-NppZc_0j0Ng&nd=1
Pardon me… I misread the $550 million cost. That’s for the Crimson Solar Farm, not the Crimson Storage Project.
One of the huge red flags with Storage projects is the lack of transparency around how much they cost. There’s also a lot confusion around the value these projects deliver. The storage promoters have all this mumbo jumbo about the stack of benefits. The simple truth is that ancillary services are very shallow markets.
The diurnal balancing markets that batteries have moved into are a lot shallower than you might think. There are much cheaper ways to do this sort of balancing than batteries. The money California is wasting on these grid battery projects would be much better spent on building more solar and wind.
Here’s a 1680 MWh proposed battery that has a price tag of 624 to 700 million.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/10/18/blackrocks-akaysha-wins-contract-for-southern-hemispheres-biggest-battery/
631 million for 1680 MWh works out to $375/kWh. If the Crimson Storage Project has similar costs you’re looking at $525 million. This is close to my guess and consistent with the data NREL is reporting.
https://renewablesnow.com/news/blackrocks-akaysha-wins-bid-to-develop-usd-630m-aussie-super-battery-801491/
People use power at night when solar don’t shine.
What did the project cost, and what are the annual operating costs. Also, how long can the batteries store electricity and what is the degradation slope?
I will answer Lee’s question from Oct 18.
It is necessary to balance wind and solar energy with electrical storage (batteries, pump storage, etc.) because both sources are intermittent and unreliable. Most people think of solar as only producing energy during the daytime hours, but there are other effects that are necessary for energy planning. Solar produces ~1/3 to 1/5 the energy in winter than in summer (physics). If there is a large amount of particulate matter in the air (wildfires, volcanoes, smog, etc) there may be a long period of very low production. I have solar on my home and I experienced 5 days of ~zero to 5% of normal production during a wildfire event last year. Wind is just intermittent and unpredictable.
As he noted there are several ways to balance this intermittency and unreliability. They all cost money, and there is a greater need for them as wind and solar become a greater percentage of the power total. It is a balancing act.
1) Gas backup to produce power. This power can be started up to feed the grid when either wind or solar is not producing energy. In reality, it is necessary to have almost 100% backup for all of wind and solar unless planning shows the statistical possibility of zero production is so small that it is worth the risk of blackouts.
2) Allowable Blackouts. The electrical planning group can plan on a certain amount of allowable Blackouts. Most people are used to having reliable energy but they may be OK with a 5% to 20% level of Blackouts. This policy needs to be transparent to the public.
3) Nuclear. Install Nuclear instead of Wind and Solar. Nuclear is baseload electricity and it is emission free. However, today it is expensive and it is unacceptable to many energy activists.
4) Purchase variable load energy from other states. This will be very expensive as this electricity base has to cover peak loads (see #2), so California will have to subsidize capacity when it is not being used.
5) Mandatory or Volunteery load (electrical use) reduction. The state can shift or eliminate some of the peak load by shutting down some industrial load and possibly talking more people to not use electricity during the hours solar and wind are not available.
There are other methods not mentioned here, but this covers the majority of the alternatives. The issue is complex and very expensive. I suggest that there should be a long term roadmap of the path to zero emissions that includes the expected costs and CO2 reduction.
Thanks… I’ve been operating power plants for 25 years so I’m familiar with how the system works. I was asked to write an article about our balancing options a few years ago. Since then we have two additional years of data from California and elsewhere showing that batteries performance is trending down. There’s a growing pile of solid research showing that grid batteries could end up being While Elephants. Dr. Marc Perez in particular but also Dr. Ken Caldeira have done great work. I can’t speak for Dr. Cadeira but Dr. Perez is most definitely pro-solar and he’s one of the luminaries in the solar modeling space. His father is Dr. Richard Perez who is arguably the biggest name in solar modeling.
As you build more wind and solar it results in a phenomenon called ‘implicit storage’. You want to max out your implicit storage options prior to building grid storage. Dr. Caldiera’s work suggests that the build-out of EVs will dramatically reduce the utility of grid batteries – you could call the effect ‘implicit balancing’ I suppose. Anyway, the combination of implicit storage and implicit balancing potentially leaves very little remaining diurnal balancing needs. What little diurnal balancing that remains can be covered by back-up generators.
California should focus on building more RE, establishing the day ahead market and fixing their tariff structures to give consumers more information about when to buy electricity. You could do all of this for the cost of a single dumb battery project. All this battery stuff is an expensive distraction. There is no reason to charge batteries while you’re running over 10 GW of gas. Zero… Shut the gas down during the day and start it up in the evening… We call this two-shifting and utilities have been doing it for a hundred years.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/11/03/too-cheap-to-keep-how-throwing-away-power-is-the-best-way-to-balance-the-grid/
Either i missed it or it’s not listed. Which battery technology is being utilized -??- This is almost more important than the project itself, as it will determine longevity & ROI for the state. If it’s simply a variation/off-shoot of lithium-ion then you just wasted a HUGE sum of money on a system that will need repair/replacement in approx. 7-12 years in the BEST case scenario; if there’s tech to mitigate the inevitable lithium dendritic growths that will render the system inoperable.
Plus, if it’s a newer, long lasting, cost effective solution, it will promote more funding, research & system purchases that let them gain market share.
From the name I would like to assume they’ve just got a lot of slate in the boxes that they heat up or take heat from to store power but it’s probably a rechargeable conventional battery. If they made a pumped storage plant with the same money it would be able to store 600 megawatts. the only difference is that it’ll be 6 years to build and have multiple decades of low maintenance costs as they don’t have to replace every cubic meter of storage every 5 years