California Plans 14 GW of Grid-Scale Energy Storage by 2032

California is off to a big head start on its plan to develop a grid-scale energy storage portfolio with the capacity to store nearly 14 gigawatts of power from renewable energy in battery installations at huge desert solar farms by 2032.

Grid-scale energy storage is a vital component in the Golden State’s effort to achieve net zero carbon emissions from its power generation by 2035.

The storage systems, which deploy thousands of industrial-scale lithium-ion batteries stacked in rows of 10 silos each, relieve demand on the electrical grid by storing renewable energy and allowing it to be delivered when solar arrays are not generating electricity at night or during stormy weather.

The battery storage systems are being deployed at mammoth desert solar farms the state has been developing on public land in seven SoCal counties for the past 10 years, with federal funding dating back to the stimulus bill after the GFC.

The program is focused on more than 10M acres of public land in the deserts to the east of Los Angeles and San Diego, including the High Desert, as the Mojave is known to locals.

Last month, California’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved for operation a new battery energy storage system at the world’s largest solar installation in Palm Springs—the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, where nearly 9M photovoltaic panels are installed in landscape-level arrays.

Construction on what is known as the Sunlight Storage II system began at the Riverside County facility in the Mojave Desert in 2021. The completed storage facility, which includes clusters of hundreds of lithium-ion battery cells, can now store up to 530 MW of electricity generated by Desert Sunlight.

A new report from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) said early-stage energy storage pilot programs, demonstration projects like the Desert Sunlight installation, and initial procurements of batteries have “successfully enabled a scalable and cost-effective energy storage” system, according to a release from Lumen Energy Strategy, which prepared the report for the CPUC.

By the end of 2021, the report said, 2,200 MW/8,900 MWh of storage resources were installed in California; the state has procured another 5,000 MW/20,000 MWh of what it calls “storage reliability” through 2023.

The benefits of a successful battery storage program include flexible power capacity and efficient, reliable service for ratepayers, as well as offsetting other investments that would be required to yield similar reductions in carbon emissions.

California will need an average build-out of 1.3 GW of storage per year to ensure power grid reliability over the next decade. The CPUC report places a “net grid benefit” value on the energy storage system that it says will grow to $1.6B annually by 2032.

The report said that California began deploying commercial-scale lithium-ion batteries in 2021 and experienced a steep drop in storage costs, with third-party prices ranging from $5 to $8 per kilowatt month at the end of 2021.

According to Lumen’s report, California also is investing in thermal energy storage systems with discharges durations that can range up to seven hours.