A consortium of companies has signed engineering, procurement and construction paperwork for a 275 MWh battery storage project in Southern California that is expected to be completed by the middle of 2023.
The storage project is being added to W Power LLC’s Energy Reliability Center in Stanton, southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County. That natural gas-powered facility began operating in late 2020 and has a nominal 98 MW hybrid energy storage capacity and is connected to Southern California Edison’s operations.
W Power has contracted with publicly traded Energy Vault Holdings Inc. to provide its energy asset integration platform and energy management software and with an affiliate of Wellhead Electric Inc. (which is co-owned by W Power Co-Owner and Chairwoman Judith Dittmer) for the development and operation of the storage system. The three entities also plan to work together on other California projects that will add about 600 MWh of storage capacity in coming years.
Officials with Energy Vault say the Stanton project is on an accelerated timeline given the need for Southern California to tap more energy in the face of high demand and supply shortages. (See also: California ISO Board Takes Action to Boost Summer Grid Reliability from last week.) Their work is part of a massive Golden State push – spurred in part by an emergency proclamation from Gov. Gavin Newsom in mid-2021 – that the California ISO said contributed to the addition last year of 2,359 MW of storage capacity.
Energy Vault executives last month announced they had won the EPC contract for Jupiter Power projects in Santa Barbara County north of Los Angeles and in southwestern Texas. The company in the first half of the year lost $26 million on revenues of nearly $44 million but Chairman and CEO Robert Piconi and his team are forecasting that their top line will ramp rapidly and that combined 2022 and 2023 revenues will total $680 million.
