California community choice aggregator MCE greenlit a 100-MW solar project that will be paired with 75 MW of battery storage. The Golden Fields Solar project, located in Kern County, was selected with unanimous support by MCE’s Technical Committee of the Board.
“Projects like Golden Fields Solar are essential to California’s transition to a carbon-free power grid,” said Ford Greene, board director of MCE. “Large battery storage projects that are co-located with renewable resources take us one step closer to an all-renewable electric grid, increase reliability, and create green-collar jobs.”
The project is expected to come online in March 2025 for a 15-year term. Golden Fields Solar will be constructed with union labor and will include pollinator-friendly habitats throughout the project site. The project developer has pledged $100,000 and 100 hours of employee time toward community benefit initiatives in the MCE service area and communities adjacent to the project location.
The Golden Fields Solar project will help MCE meet the California Public Utilities Commission’s mid-term reliability mandate, which requires MCE to procure an additional 72 MW of solar + storage capacity by 2025.
News item from MCE
Solarman says
This is a revelation of early solar PV farms constructed in California’s Riverside County from around 2003 to 2012. Many of these large solar PV farms “didn’t” have revenue adders like energy storage and companies like SCE, SDG&E and even PG&E realized these large solar PV farms of 250MWp and up were actually making the “duck curve” and driving down wholesale electricity rates to (negative values), so CAISO was having to find and “pay” other States to take the overgeneration during the day. Then at night right around 4 PM to 9 PM CAISO was signing spot market fueled generation contracts with out of State companies to support the California grid at night to keep the grid up. So, CAISO has allowed, “curtailing” output of these solar PV farms basically throwing away non-fueled energy generation while using more expensive fueled generation in standby capacity reserve mode and passed onto the residential electricity rate payers. Now the trend is local CCA and micro-grids that do use energy storage as part of the overall project. This paints a clear picture and a path to the future. Take all of these large solar PV farms in the desert and add very large BESS to existing sites and new sites will be constructed with large BESS up front from now on. The goal, use in place assets, (never) curtail solar PV generation and always store overgeneration to time shift for later energy dispatch. These huge desert size solar PV farms on the order of 2,500 to 10,000 acres of land could use something like Form Energy iron/air energy storage systems. One could use some of this real estate like 200 acres or less if you stack power units to store 500MWh for up to 100 days. At least this is what Form Energy claims. This will be how all of these grid decarbonization mandates will be met and RPS mandates will be met, very large scale local, regional energy storage constructed along the grid transmission and feeders in the wholesale as well as the retail energy market.