From Inside Climate News
The largest battery storage facility in the world, located along Monterey Bay in California, has completed an expansion, demonstrating how storage systems can exist on a gigantic scale and can easily expand.
Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, owned by Vistra Corp. of Texas, has now added 100 megawatts to the 300 megawatts of capacity that went online in December, for a total of 400 megawatts. The lithium-ion batteries can run for up to four hours on a charge, which translates to 1,600 megawatt-hours. The initial project and the expansion are operating under a long-term agreement with the utility Pacific Gas & Electric.
At the storage facility, rows of structures that resemble shipping containers fill an area that, even before the expansion, was about the size of three football fields. A large concrete box houses seemingly endless racks of batteries. The storage system is replacing a natural gas power plant and helping to provide flexible and carbon-free power to a part of the California grid that sometimes struggles with reliability.
California was already leading the nation with 1,438 megawatts of utility-scale battery storage capacity as of June, as much as the next 10 states combined, according to federal energy data.
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