Environment |

New battery facility in Stanton supports California’s transition to renewable energy

With California increasingly relying on renewable energy, how can we keep the lights on even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

One key to avoiding those dreaded rolling blackouts is batteries, which can store energy harnessed by solar panels and wind turbines and then dispatch that electricity when and where it is needed. So, along with a need for new solar and wind farms to generate electricity, and new power lines to distribute it, California also is projected to need 52,000 megawatts of storage capacity to meet its goal of running entirely on clean energy by 2045.

We’re only starting to reach that goal. The state has 6,617 megawatts of storage capacity, according to an online dashboard the California Energy Commission launched in October. But that number is rising quickly, the agency said, with a nearly eight-fold jump over the past four years.

And this week marked the official opening of one of the largest battery storage projects in Southern California, a commercial facility capable of storing 68.8 megawatts of power — enough to run 65,000 homes for four hours — in Stanton.

“Right now the California energy grid is going through an amazing evolution — probably the biggest evolution since it was first energized,” said John Phipps, executive director of grid operations for the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, which manages about 80% of the state’s electricity flow, during an event Wednesday, Dec. 6, to celebrate the Stanton facility’s official opening.

“The transition from the traditional fuel resources to the new clean energy or carbon-free resources is happening very quickly and introducing new operating characteristics on the grid we haven’t seen before,” Phipps said.

“So the flexibility that the storage resources such as Stanton Battery provides has become more and more critical to our daily operations and ensuring reliability of the grid.”

Wellhead, which has built power projects in California for more than 40 years, developed the Stanton Battery Energy Storage facility in partnership with W Power. It is situated on the back half of a 2-acre plot along Dale Avenue, behind a hybrid natural gas- and battery-powered plant Wellhead opened a few years ago. The projects are independent but can work together, with a potential to store power from the gas plant at the adjacent battery facility or dispatch stored energy over to run the plant’s turbines.

The entire facility was built in less than five months, with testing in July and the plant already running at maximum capacity. And they easily sell all the power they can store, according to Grant McDaniel, a director with Wellhead.

The Stanton facility relies on 15,540 lithium-ion batteries, similar to the ones that power cell phones and electric vehicles. Each is roughly a quarter the size of a Tesla car battery, with the 265-pound modules stacked on top of each other more than a dozen feet high and housed inside shipping container-style metal boxes.

When an energy generator, such as a solar farm or hydro plant, makes more power than it’s contracted to provide, that energy can be stored in the Stanton facility’s batteries. Otherwise, that energy would simply go to waste and the power producer would likely shut down until demand rises.

Instead, the stored power is listed as available for sale on the wholesale energy market that CAISO oversees, a trading arena that operates a bit like the stock market. Buyers such as Southern California Edison, which runs a substation across the street from the Stanton facility, can bid for the energy in real time, as needed. And CAISO coordinates it all, keeping prices down for consumers by matching providers with the most affordable energy on the market at that time.

Adding storage capacity to the mix can help energy providers and consumers when, say, demand spikes during a heat wave, or if utilities have to shut down other power lines during a period of elevated wildfire risks.

As Edison pivots to more renewables, company spokesman Jeff Monford said “adding energy storage is a primary focus.” That way, he said, utilities can draw on stored renewable energy “during the critical hours right after the sun goes down” rather than having to keep turning to natural gas-fueled power plants.

The Stanton plant has a sophisticated control system that can direct energy to charge or discharge from the batteries in milliseconds, explained Shaheen Fakhar, a software engineer director with Energy Vault, which engineered and built the facility. A display screen showed how the facility’s batteries send out increasing amounts of power to meet demand throughout each day before they start to recharge each night.

While newer lithium batteries, like these from Samsung, are much less likely to catch fire than models that came out even just a few years ago, Tim Mann with Wellhead explained that sensors are constantly monitoring for slight temperature increases or other warning signs. Alarm systems are in place and crews from Orange County Fire Authority have spent time at the facility, he said, with response plans aimed at keeping any fire that does happen contained within the walled-in facility.

Though company CEO Harold Dittmer declined to share specifics, he said a “very significant” portion of the storage facility’s total cost — listed on a White House website as $118 million — came in the form of a federal grant through the 2021 infrastructure package.

State and local officials who attended Wednesday’s ceremony said they see such facilities as a key part of our energy future.

“We have set some of the most ambitious climate goals in the world,” said Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine. But, she added, “We have a monumental task before us to actually achieve those goals to actually deliver and to realize our clean energy future.

“We need lots of renewable clean energy. We need systems that can harness that energy. We need resilient systems that can stay up in the face of unpredictable demand and even in the event of disaster. And most importantly, we need that now,” Petrie-Norris said. “And so this project is absolutely what Orange County needs. It’s absolutely what California needs.”