The AES Lawai Solar Project in Kauai, Hawaii has a 100 megawatt-hour battery … Contact online >>
The AES Lawai Solar Project in Kauai, Hawaii has a 100 megawatt-hour battery
Leeward Renewable Energy''s (LRE) Rabbitbrush Solar Facility, located in Kern County, California, completed construction and commenced commercial operations in November 2022. Rabbitbrush Solar Plus Storage Project is a 100-megawatt (MW) facility with a 20 MW/50 MWh battery energy storage system. Energy generated by the project will be provided to not-for-profit, community-owned electricity providers Central Coast Community Energy and Silicon Valley Clean Energy.
Golden Fields Solar will be constructed with union labor using a Project Labor Agreement and will include pollinator-friendly habitats throughout the project site.
MCE, a not-for-profit public agency based in California, announced approval for its largest battery-storage project to date. The Golden Fields Solar project, located in Kern County, will provide enough power for an estimated 52,000 homes each year.
The Golden Fields Solar project was selected after MCE''s annual solicitation for renewable energy and storage projects. With unanimous support by MCE''s Technical Committee of the Board, this new large-scale solar-plus-storage facility will generate 100MW of solar energy with a co-located 75MW lithium-ion battery.
The project is expected to come online in March 2025 for a 15-year term. Golden Fields Solar will be constructed with union labor using a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) and will include pollinator-friendly habitat throughout the project site. In addition, the project developer has pledged $100,000 and 100 hours of employee time toward community benefit initiatives that directly benefit MCE''s service area and communities adjacent to the project location.The Golden Fields Solar project will help MCE meet the California Public Utilities Commission’s mid-term reliability mandate, which requires MCE to procure an additional 72MW of solar plus 5-hour dispatch storage capacity by 2025.
MCE is a load-serving entity supporting a 1,200MW peak load, and it is dedicated to offering renewable energy at stable rates. It currently provides electricity service and programs to more than 540,000 customer accounts and more than one million residents and businesses in 37 member communities across four Bay Area counties: Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, and Solano.
More articles from Anne Fischer
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It makes solar power available at night, bolstering Hawaii’s renewable grid ambitions.
AES Corporation launched the world’s largest battery plant paired with solar generation Tuesday, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
This type of power plant produces cheap, clean energy and uses batteries to deliver power when it is most valuable, instead of just when the sun shines. That’s vital to decarbonizing the island grids of Hawaii, which struggle with too much solar power at midday but still rely on fossil-fueled peaker plants in the evening.
In the two years since AES announced the project, a flurry of headlines ensued as energy companies drove the price point for dispatchable solar successively lower. While the most attention-grabbing bids bank on several years of further battery cost declines, the Kauai plant is up and running right now.
The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) is finishing up commissioning for the Lawai Solar and Energy Storage Project, which combines 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with a lithium-ion battery capable of storing 100 megawatt-hours.
The battery alone holds more energy than all but one other U.S. plant: the 120 megawatt-hour facility AES built in Escondido in 2017. Taken as a whole, Lawai’s storage capacity outranks any other operational solar-paired battery system in the world, according to Wood Mackenzie Power &Renewables. But the ever-growing solar-plus-storage project pipeline means that title won’t be safe for long.
“This market is growing at a phenomenal rate,” said AES President and CEO Andrés Gluski. “I think you’re going to see a...lot [fewer] peaker plants.”
AES owns and operates the plant on behalf of KIUC, under a power-purchase agreement pegged at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The plant delivers solar power when a standalone solar plant can’t: at night. That offsets the peaker plants that turn on for the evening peak; in Hawaii, those plants tend to run on imported oil, at considerable expense.
“We’re in the money anytime you can dispatch to offset oil generation,” said Woody Rubin, president of AES Distributed Energy.
Lawai can crank a full output of 20 megawatts for five hours. With 100 megawatt-hours of stored energy, the battery can also operate more like a baseload plant, delivering a lower amount of power for more hours through the night until the sun comes back up. AES expects to offset 3.7 million gallons of diesel each year by dispatching more cost-effectively than the fossil-fueled incumbents.
An additional capability, for special occasions: The plant can black-start the overall grid if an outage knocks it out.
The battery technology allows many more use configurations than a standalone solar plant, which just produces electricity. As such, the process of testing out all the different functions has been “a fun time,” Rubin said.
“You open up the new toy and you start playing with it,” he said.
With the new plant, Kauai will be able to operate for certain parts of the day entirely from renewables, Rubin said.
Meeting Hawaii’s legislative mandate of 100 percent renewables by 2045, though, requires more than midday solar abundance. The early solar-plus-storage plants (Tesla/SolarCity also built one on Kauai) proved that cheap solar power could serve the grid when needed rather than flooding it when there’s already enough power.
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