16 hours of clean energy daily

 From Energy Storage News

San Jose Clean Energy, a non-profit electricity supplier in California, has celebrated the completion of a solar-plus-storage project which will ensure the delivery of carbon-free electricity during evening peak times.

The supplier held an online press conference on 2 February to officially inaugurate the Kern Solar and Storage Battery Project, which was brought online by developer Terra-Gen on 31 December 2021.

Under a 12-year power purchase agreement (PPA) signed with San Jose Clean Energy, Terra-Gen guarantees that 62MW of energy from the facility will be available to the supplier’s member-customers between 6pm and 10pm each day.

This is the period after solar production has tailed off for the day and evening demand for power from homes and businesses in San Jose, the largest city in Silicon Valley. The city is targeting becoming carbon neutral by 2030, which will make it the US’ first, and SJCE’s 350,000 customer accounts representing about a million people will be a big part of that, city mayor Sam Liccardo said at the press conference.

Liccardo said the 62MW of power is equivalent to about 20% of SJCE’s demand, but more importantly the project addresses the intermittency, or variability, challenge that renewable energy brings to the grid.

In effect, clean energy will be supplied from the project for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, SJCE director Lori Mitchell pointed out. It is also the first project to come online from a US$1 billion investment commitment into four large-scale solar and wind projects by SJCE, one of California’s Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) energy suppliers.

One of the next in that list will be another 100MW project by Terra-Gen, for which the CCA has signed a 15-year PPA, expected to come online during this year.

The Kern project is at the Edwards Air Force Base site in California’s Central Valley, in Kern County where many of the state’s large solar — and wind — farms are located.

Terra-Gen, which will own and operate the project, already has a 2GW wind energy power plant nearby, and the project for SJCE is part of a much larger solar and storage facility it is building at Edwards Airforce Base.

In fact the plant — or rather the vast complex — referred to as the Edwards & Sanborn project, is thought to be the world’s largest combined solar-plus-storage facility to date. Aiming to eventually reach 760MW of PV and 2,445MWh of battery storage, Terra-Gen closed US$804 million financing for its initial 346MWac PV and 1,501MWh of batteries in August last year.

Off-taker deals have been signed with a range of different parties, from corporates like Starbucks to other CCAs and some portions of the project have already been delivering.

Simon Day, VP and head of solar development at Terra-Gen said that for the SJCE deal, the developer built an oversized 118MW solar PV array at the site, as well as additional new battery storage.

It is also able to use other resources such as wind from the company’s portfolio to firm the delivery of clean energy for 16 hours a day, in what he described as a “groundbreaking” arrangement for the solar industry.

 

Aerial view of the project, built on land leased from Edwards Airforce Base. Leasing revenue will go towards maintaining the base’s mission, Terra-Gen’s Simon Day said. Image: SJCE / Terra-Gen.

16 hours baseload a day is great. And the remaining 8 hours can be covered by wind.  Unfortunately, the article doesn't give the cost (LCOE) but presumably it was competitive, i.e., even with storage.  Every day, we're getting closer to a grid which will no longer need fossil fuels.