Los Angeles muni speeds deployment of 20 MW battery storage project

Dive Brief:

The board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) last week approved an agreement with Doosan GridTech CA to build a 20 MW battery storage system.
The lithium-ion battery system is sited north of Mojave, Calif., in a location that will enable it to capture and mitigate the intermittency of 600 MW of solar power and 135 MW of wind power.
The storage project will interconnect with the 250 MW Beacon solar plant and the recently constructed 1,200 MW Barren Ridge Renewable Transmission Project.

Dive Insight:

Under an accelerated timeline, the Beacon Energy Storage System (BESS) will come online in March 2018 instead of 2020 in order to address reliability issues stemming from the loss of natural gas supplies as a result of the October 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leaks.

Earlier this month, a California appeals court lifted a cleared the way for limited gas injections to resume at the Aliso Canyon facility in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles. The threat of fuel shortages to fuel gas turbines led to the fast-tracking of several large energy storage projects in Southern California.

The BESS will also move LADWP closer to achieving its target of having 178 MW of new energy storage in place by 2021. In California, AB 2514 allows local governments to establish energy storage targets for their public power utilities.

LADWP set the 178 MW target in 2016 and affirmed it at its recent board meeting, but revised the location of energy storage on its grid to be more cost effective. LADWP said it could increase the storage target in its 2018 integrated resource plan.

The BESS project will add to LADWP’s energy storage portfolio, which already has 1,296 MW of storage capacity. That capacity was already in place before the 178 MW goal was put in place and does not count toward that mandated target.

“With half of our energy portfolio expected to come from renewable sources by 2025 and continuing to grow from there, the Beacon battery storage system approved today will help maximize the amount of solar we capture and deliver to Angelenos,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement.