PG&E’s Moss Landing Elkhorn Battery System near Monterey Bay, CA

PG&E, in collaboration with Tesla, the pioneering electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery manufacturer, began operating the 182.5 megawatt (MW) site on April 7 of this year. The facility, which can provide enough electricity for about 275,000 homes for up to four hours, is part of a dramatic ramping up of battery resources on the California grid as it continues to transition from fossil fuels to more renewable power. Electricity generated by the lithium-ion batteries, charged during the day when solar energy is usually abundant, is typically dispatched after the sun has set and solar is not available.

“Just this year already, back in April, just days after being fully energized and connected to the grid, we were charging the battery at $10 a MW/hour midday when we had ample, abundant renewable clean energy resources,” she said. “Fast forward to peak that very same day, power was selling at $100 a MW/hour and this resource was dispatching to the grid.

The 256 Tesla Megapack battery units at Moss Landing were manufactured at Tesla’s new “mega-factory” two hours away in Lathrop. When that factory is at full capacity, it will be able to produce enough batteries to build the equivalent of 50 of the Moss Landing facilities per year for use in California and around the world, he said. 

With the Moss Landing site now online, PG&E officials said the utility currently has 955.5MW of battery storage capacity connected to the grid. Contracts have also been executed for large-scale battery systems that can generate more than 3,300MW of capacity by the end of 2024.  http://www.caiso.com/about/Pages/Blog/Posts/A-golden-age-of-energy-storage.aspx