US 2024 Election: California to open one of the world’s largest energy storage plants
By Anders Lorenzen
As President Biden continues to drive forward his climate agenda as a key campaign tool for the November election, another large clean energy infrastructure project is announced.
A battery plant near Los Angeles (LA) in California, US will come online later this year and could become one of the largest in the world, another sign that the power storage industry is starting to take off.
The project promises to bring valuable support to California’s power grid when it comes under stress from the peak summer season and help meet its climate goals.
The plant, Nova Power Bank constructed and owned by Calpine, an energy company is to be constructed on the site of a failed gas-fired power plant and will be able to power about 680,000 homes for up to four hours when charged. It would boost the state’s large renewable energy industry which currently provides a third of its electricity needs.
A huge boost to California’s storage capacity
The battery bank built with lithium-um batteries will have a capacity of 680 megawatts (MW) and would provide a staggering 55% of the nation’s power storage capacity, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It will be constructed in two phases, in the first 620 MW will be brought online this summer, with the remaining 60 MW in 2025.
Battery projects in the hundreds of MW have until now been a rarity, but in California, Florida, Australia, the UK and China similar-sized projects are currently under development.
Calpine’s new facility happens at a time during a boom for the sector in both California and Texas, the two largest US states are also the biggest renewable energy players in the US, with power storage facilities making such resources more robust and easier for grids to manage.
California pioneered a mandate requiring utilities to begin procuring energy storage more than a decade ago. It is expected the state will need 50 gigawatts (GW) of battery storage to meet its 2045 target of getting all its power from CO2-free sources, currently, 7 GW is installed. Since 2020 battery capacity has expanded significantly in California as a series of blackouts during a summer heatwave promoted state officials to launch emergency procurement. Two years later, batteries provided during the September heatwave became valuable and accounted for 2.4% of generation during evening hours.
Last year in the US, new grid storage installations soared 98% and are expected to grow by a further 30% this year, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie.
Calpine which currently has 2 GW of battery capacity under development is best known in the state for its fleet of gas plants. Producing electricity from gas still supplies more than half of California’s power needs.
California is largely recognised to be one of the country’s most progressive state’s when it comes to climate action and was an early adopter of ambitious climate and clean energy technologies.