Clearway Energy Group announced that its Victory Pass project, a 200-MW solar and 200-MWh storage site under development on BLM land in Riverside County, California, is fully contracted with two investment-grade rated community choice aggregators, Silicon Valley Clean Energy Authority (SVCE) and Central Coast Community Energy (CCCE).
“Solar and storage energy projects like Victory Pass are central to California’s transition to 100% carbon-free electricity,” said Valerie Wooley, VP of origination at Clearway. “We’re honored to partner with SVCE and CCCE on these projects to move toward the Golden State’s renewable energy goals and support the role of community choice aggregators in providing California residents and businesses with clean, reliable, and affordable power. We thank our customers and many other partners who are making the clean energy transition possible.”
SVCE provides clean electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources to more than 270,000 residential and commercial customers in 13 Santa Clara County jurisdictions. Silicon Valley Clean Energy is advancing innovative solutions to fight climate change by decarbonizing the grid, transportation, and buildings. SVCE signed a 15-year contract for 100 MW of solar capacity and 25 MW of battery storage capacity from the Victory Pass project.
“The Victory Pass project not only provides solar energy capacity but carries great value with the 4-hour discharge battery pairing. As California summers continue to bring extreme heat and high electricity demand, the ability to discharge energy during peak hours is critical as we transition to a clean grid,” said Girish Balachandran, SVCE’s CEO.
Central Coast Community Energy procures clean and renewable energy on behalf of 400,000 residential and commercial customers throughout 33 Central Coast communities. In addition to renewable and storage projects, CCCE accelerates the electrification of transportation, building and agricultural equipment while strengthening energy resiliency. CCCE signed a 15-year contract for 100 MW of solar capacity and 25 MW of battery storage capacity from the Victory Pass project.
Victory Pass is part of a larger solar and storage complex in Riverside County along with Clearway’s Arica project. Once complete, the full renewable energy complex will generate enough clean electricity to power approximately 132,000 homes and represents an investment of $689 million, including $5.9 million in local economic benefits during operations. More than 1,000 jobs will be created during construction and once operating, the larger solar and storage complex will employ several full-time positions.
Clearway is one of the largest renewable energy companies in the state with about 1,700 MW of operating renewable energy facilities, which are owned by its public affiliate. Victory Pass will expand Clearway’s footprint in Riverside County, where the company owns and operates 180 MW of solar capacity.
Construction of Victory Pass is scheduled to begin in 2022.
News item from Clearway Energy Group
“Victory Pass is part of a larger solar and storage complex in Riverside County along with Clearway’s Arica project. Once complete, the full renewable energy complex will generate enough clean electricity to power approximately 132,000 homes and represents an investment of $689 million, including $5.9 million in local economic benefits during operations. More than 1,000 jobs will be created during construction and once operating, the larger solar and storage complex will employ several full-time positions.”
This has been a target area in Southern California where the desert has hundreds of thousands of acres of desolate land that can readily accommodate solar PV farms. One of the early solar PV farms McCoy wash was originally supposed to be a four stage build out over 10,000 acres and was supposed to be 1GWp when finished. SDG&E and SCE balked at signing any more PPAs for this project. I’m thinking this project at 250MWac is being curtailed and SCE and SDG&E refuses to contract power they will end up curtailing.
Now would be the time to revisit McCoy Solar Energy Project and install a very large redox flow battery or other energy storage system and store several GWh of generated electricity from this one site to extend the solar PV day into night and help service Southern California’s energy needs into the night. Even with simple fixed arrays in this area of the desert one can expect from six sun hours a day during the winter months and up around 8 hours a day in summer months. In the Winter time this kind of energy storage would represent a baseload generation resource of 250MWh and in Summer it would represent 333MWh of stored baseload generation. IF the site was revamped and solar strings were mounted North and South and were installed on single axis trackers that rotated East and West one could expect 333MWh of baseload generation in Winter and right at 420MWh baseload during the Summer. The obvious site adder is to find old solar PV farms and install large energy storage systems to these already constructed assets to make them valuable as baseload generation to finally replace fueled generation resources now online.