One of United States’ largest electric utilities, Southern California Edison (SCE), has recently signed long-term agreements for four battery energy storage projects with a cumulative capacity of 590 MW. SCE, which serves Central, Coastal and Southern California, had also procured 770 MW of energy storage capacity in May 2020. With the signing of the latest contracts, SCE’s portfolio of total installed and procured battery storage capacity increases to approximately 2,050 MW.
Out of the total 590 MW of new contracted capacity, 585 MW will come from three large utility-scale storage projects that will use lithium-ion batteries to store energy for future use. The remaining 5 MW will come from the fourth project which is a demand response contract and will use energy from customer-owned energy storage. These projects were selected after a competitive procurement process undertaken by SCE last year. The contracts will require California Public Utilities Commission’s approval and SCE expects to submit them for approval before the end of the year. These projects are expected to come online by August 2022 and 2023.
According to SCE estimates, California would need to add 30 GW of utility-scale storage to the grid and 10 GW of storage from distributed resources to meet the state’s clean energy and carbon neutrality goals, as laid out in Pathway 2045. In addition to helping the state to achieve these goals, these new contracts will provide additional grid reliability and improve the overall stability of power systems.