California Regulators Approve Five Major Battery Contracts
By Christian Roselund
On 19 May, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved contracts to allow one of California’s three large investor-owned utilities to procure 497 megawatts of power from five battery projects. The five contracts signed by Southern California Edison (SCE) are operating under a “fast-track” process to meet reliability needs and are targeted to come online between August 2023 and June 2024.
Under these contracts, Tenaska, AES, LS Power, and Calpine will install batteries at a combination of new and existing facilities. These contracts fulfill part of SCE’s requirements under a CPUC’s order in June 2021, which requires that the state’s utilities procure 11.5 gigawatts of new resources by 2026 to meet reliability needs. 2 gigawatts of this capacity must come online by 2023 and another 6 gigawatts by 2024. All of this capacity must be zero-emitting generation, zero-emitting generation paired with storage, and demand response.
California is in a race against time to install batteries to keep the lights on, as its grid suffers under the strains of both heatwaves and a drought that is reducing hydroelectric output (for more information, see the first article in this report, “Grid Reliability Monitor Warns of Summer Blackouts”). And while these projects will not come online to meet the state’s needs this summer, California regulators are also planning for future summers, as well as for the planned closure of the 2,280 megawatt Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in 2025.
Read more:
News coverage: California regulator CPUC approves utility SCE’s fast-tracked 500MW BESS projects (Energy Storage News)
