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Pumped Storage Project Gets Seed Money … Now the Work Begins

/in , , /by /pv magazineby David Wagman Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

A 500 MW pumped energy storage project proposed jointly by the City of San Diego and the San Diego County Water Authority received $18 million in the California state budget. The support will help fund the San Vicente Energy Storage Facility through initial design, environmental reviews, and the federal licensing process.

The project would provide long-duration stored energy and is seen by backers as an asset that will help avoid rolling blackouts through on-demand energy production. It also could generate revenue to help offset the cost of water purchases, storage, and treatment.

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San Vicente Energy Project Allocated $18 Million in State Budget

/in , , /by /The Coast News Group Quoted: San Diego County Water Authority

The San Vicente Energy Storage Facility received $18 million from the state budget signed this week by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the San Diego County Water Authority announced on Friday. The money is enough to advance the large-scale renewable energy project through the initial design, environmental reviews and the federal licensing process. The project is an effort by the City of San Diego and the water authority.

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California Tests Off-The-Grid Solutions to Power Outages

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Daisy Nguyen

When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.

Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation’s largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.

The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month. It’s the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.

Opinion: To Keep the Lights On, Here’s How California Should Plan for the Extraordinary

/in , , /by /CalMattersby Julia Prochnik

The headlines are grim. Texas’ power grid fails in the midst of a deadly cold snap, putting millions at risk. A historic heat wave brings California’s power grid to its knees, putting millions at risk. Two massive states with two distinctly different approaches to energy, yet still facing a similar outcome: failure and blackouts. In both cases the cause is the same, a failure to plan for extraordinary climate events that are becoming all too ordinary.

In principle, California has moved in the right direction by embracing renewable energy. But in practice, due in part to bureaucratic delay, it has fallen short and now California’s energy leadership is on a precipice. Move forward with bold action to deploy, procure and plan for a diverse and complementary portfolio of renewable energy and storage – and California fulfils its pursuit of a true green energy economy. Hold back and California cedes its energy future to fossil fuels. It should be an easy decision.

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Opinion: Blackouts Expose Need for Expanding Energy Storage

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Daily Newsby Jim Madaffer Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

The sad reality is that the blackouts rolling across California this past week were both predictable and avoidable. The silver lining is that future blackouts across California are avoidable – if we invest in large-scale energy storage projects to provide on-demand power.

Energy analysts have warned for years that California’s embrace of renewable energy sources – while laudable – create significant risks that can and should be addressed to sustain our economy and quality of life while maintaining progress toward the state’s climate goals. What no one could have known was that we’d be roiled by a pandemic and a recession when the energy grid’s weaknesses were exposed for everyone to see.

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Opinion: Blackouts Expose Need for Expanding Energy Storage

/in , /by /The Orange County Registerby Jim Madaffer Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

The sad reality is that the blackouts rolling across California this week were both predictable and avoidable. The silver lining is that future blackouts across California are avoidable – if we invest in large-scale energy storage projects to provide on-demand power.

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Opinion: Approve Assembly Bill 1720: Two Energy Storage Projects Would Create Jobs

/in , , /by /CalMattersby Robbie Hunter

Free fall. That’s how people are describing California’s economy as the coronavirus ravages on.

Virtually overnight, one in five Californian’s became – and unfortunately remain – unemployed. In Los Angeles, the unemployment rate is tracking with the peak of the Great Depression. In other parts of the state, the jobless rate is projected to climb as high as 40%. As former Gov. Gray Davis said about today’s challenges, “There’s no playbook. There’s no precedent.”

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Largest US Battery Resource Connects to CAISO Grid, Signaling Next Phase In California’s Storage Growth

/in , , /by /Utility Diveby Kavya Balaraman

Around 170 battery storage systems larger than 1 MW are currently operating in the U.S., but the 62.5 MW first phase of the Gateway project is already the largest in the country, CAISO said in a press release.

Storage resources are becoming more competitive, but installations are really being driven by carbon reduction and clean energy goals, Mohit Chhabra, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean energy program, told Utility Dive.

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The Next Generation of Pumped Storage

/in , , /by /Water Power & Dam Construction by Jim Day

The first slide of Daybreak Power’s first-ever presentation to potential investors quotes Paul Allen, the legendary co-founder of Microsoft, asking what he calls the most exciting question imaginable: “What should exist? … What do we need that we don’t have?”.

The answer I reached in the years leading up to co-founding Daybreak in 2018 is this: A bunch of big-honkin’ pumped storage hydropower projects, for the simple reason that we’re going to need a ton of cost-effective, proven, long-duration energy storage if we, as a society, are to have any hope of integrating high levels of intermittent wind and solar power, and thereby slash greenhouse gas emissions to put the brakes on catastrophic climate change.

Plus, we can create a lot of jobs and maybe make some money on it!

Joyce Patry, a former MBA classmate, and I founded Daybreak in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, as an early-stage developer of these massive infrastructure projects.

Despite extremely limited resources, we pulled together some engineering and cost-configuration studies that had previously been conducted on potential pumped storage sites at US Bureau of Reclamation dams around the West. In late 2018 we filed a FERC preliminary permit application for the 1540MW Next Generation Pumped Storage project near Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, and followed that up with a July 2019 application for the 2210MW Navajo Energy Storage Station near Glen Canyon Dam/Lake Powell on the border of Utah and Arizona.

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Southern California Edison Wants its New, Huge 770 MW Battery Storage Procurement Online Fast

/in , , /by /pv magazineby Eric Wesoff

Southern California Edison signed seven contracts for a total of 770 megawatts of lithium-ion battery-based energy storage — to enhance the regional grid’s reliability and replace four large coastal once-through cooling plants.

It’s one of the nation’s largest energy storage procurements and an indication of utility acceptance of massive-scale battery storage. Late last year, the California Public Utilities Commission urged California’s power providers and community choice aggregators to procure 3.3 GW of storage and PV-plus-storage systems to solve grid congestion and to compensate for gas and coal plant retirements.

Remarkably, SCE wants these energy storage resources online by August 2021, an aggressive timeline unthinkable for any type of fossil fuel project of this size.

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