California Community Power, a joint powers agency of 10 California Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs), has approved a contract for a 50-MW/400-MWh energy storage project in Escondido, California. The eight-hour lithium-ion battery project will be developed by Onward Energy and is expected to come online at the end of 2025.
“The collaboration of California Community Power members has been a tremendous success as we enter into our second long-duration storage agreement,” said Geof Syphers, CC Power Board Chair and Sonoma Clean Power CEO. “This new contract allows the participating members to meet our state-mandated long-duration storage requirements, showing how CCAs are leading the way to advance clean energy in California.”
The Goal Line project adheres to the long-duration storage enhanced conditions adopted by the CC Power Board. It will be constructed under a Project Labor Agreement, assuring prevailing wages and use of apprenticeship programs.
This joint procurement effort for long-duration energy storage is a continuation of the Oct. 2020 Request for Offers (RFO) seeking to procure cost-effective and viable long-duration storage resources. A subset of CC Power member CCAs issued the RFO before the California Public Utilities Commission Mid-Term Reliability procurement order (Decision 21-06-035). The Goal Line and Tumbleweed contracts will allow the participating CCAs to meet their obligation for the long-duration energy storage requirement mandated by the CPUC.
Participation in the RFO and resulting projects is voluntary for each CC Power member. The participating agencies for the Goal Line project are CleanPowerSF, Redwood Coast Energy Authority, San Jose Clean Energy, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, Sonoma Clean Power Authority, and Valley Clean Energy. The governing boards of each participating member will follow their local review and approval processes for the contract and associated agreements for the Goal Line project.
News item from CCP
“The eight-hour lithium-ion battery project will be developed by Onward Energy and is expected to come online at the end of 2025.”
Yes, yes, yes, something designed for more than two to four hours of backup. Now use this type of system as a matrixed product. One could have three of these 50MW/400MWh micro grids installed at a site where you’d start with one 50MW/400MWh system, then around 7 hours, start up and parallel a second unit, when it synchronizes to the grid, shut down the first unit and use the second unit for another 7 hours at 50MWh and on and on. If one needs a “season’s worth” of energy storage, then very large regional redox flow batteries in the GWh range would be the dispatchable energy storage needed for an interactive wholesale and retail grid connection.