Huge power storage in the Californian desert put into...

Huge power storage in the Californian desert put into operation

The gigantic power storage facility Crimson Storage has just gone into operation in the Californian desert. The battery storage project will deliver 350 megawatts (MW) of electricity at full capacity for 1,400 megawatt hours. The battery should store and distribute enough energy on average to supply more than 47,000 households with electricity per year.

According to Walter Kreisel, founder and CEO of neoom - a company for decentralized energy systems - that would be 4 kilowatt hours per household, which is quite conceivable. "With 1.4 million kilowatt hours, around 280,000 battery modules are used in 14,000 cabinets. That sounds like a lot, but it's not," he tells futurezone. An installation team of 40 people can do it in about six months without laying the foundations or connecting to the grid.

Such large systems would be built to secure the base load due to the different weather, solar radiation or wind in the transmission grid. "Due to the mixture of small and large apartments and small and large houses, it is 30 kWh, which corresponds to more than one day's consumption, in order to create technical and economic benefits in the downstream transmission network in order to ensure a clean and secure supply based on renewable energies to create,” he says.

2,000 acres of land

Crimson Storage is located on 2,000 acres west of Blythe in Riverside County, California. It is the first standalone energy storage project approved by the Biden administration in May 2021 on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. The BLM is an agency under the US Department of the Interior responsible for the management and commercialization of public lands in the United States.

2 long-term contracts signed

According to Electrek, the Canadian manufacturer of solar modules, Canadian Solar, supervised the construction of the battery system. He also supplied the battery storage systems. Axium Infrastructure and solar and storage developer Recurrent Energy will be the long-term owners of Crimson Storage.

2 long term contracts with local utilities have already been signed including a 14 year 10 month contract with Southern California Edison and a 15 year contract with Pacific Gas and Electric. California Governor Gavin Newsom is excited about the project: "We have been focused on getting projects like this online quickly to achieve our goal of a 100 percent clean energy grid," he says.