Southern California Edison signs deals for 770 MW of battery storage

Author: Portland General Electric. License: Creative Commons, Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

US utility Southern California Edison (SCE) has contracted 770 MW of battery storage projects in a tender to enhance grid reliability and help address potential energy shortfalls identified in the state.

The utility has signed seven contracts for energy storage projects with capacities of between 50 MW and 230 MW. All of the plants will be commissioned by August 1, 2021, SCE said on Friday. Some of them are co-located with solar photovoltaic (PV) farms.

More details on the selected schemes are available in the table.

Selected bidder	Project name	Location	Contract term (years)	Contracted capacity (MW)
Southern Power	Garland	Rosamond, Kern County	20	88
Southern Power	Tranquillity	Tranquillity, Fresno County	20	72
TerraGen Power	Sanborn	Mojave, Kern County	10	50
NextEra Energy Resources	Blythe 2	Blythe, Riverside County	15	115
NextEra Energy Resources	Blythe 3	Blythe, Riverside County	15	115
NextEra Energy Resources	McCoy	Blythe, Riverside County	15	230
LS Power	Gateway 1-2	San Diego, San Diego County	15	100

The additional capacity will help integrate more renewable energy capacity into the grid and will support California's energy transition, addressing certain reliability issues in electricity supply that the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PSC) has identified. The projects will need to be cleared by the PSC and will be submitted for review later this month.

“These new emissions-free projects will help us ensure the reliability of the grid for our customers and integrate an ever-increasing amount of clean renewable energy over the next decade,” said William Walsh, SCE vice president of Energy Procurement & Management.

California has set a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.

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