The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has given the go-ahead for a large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) co-located with a wind plant in California.
BLM has approved the Alta Wind Battery Energy Storage System project, which will be located within the existing right-of-way land of the Alta 1 Wind Facility project in Kern County, California.
The BESS is being developed by independent power producer (IPP) Clearway Energy, as per the BLM National NEPA Register. The Register said it would generate 150MW of power and “store up to 1,200MW” of electricity.
In response to a query from Energy-Storage.news, the BLM said that the latter figure referred to MWh/megwatt-hours, meaning the BESS will be a 1,200MWh system.
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The BESS will utilise lithium-ion batteries and occupy 20 acres of land, with 23 used in total for the balance of plant (BOP) components. An expected commercial operation date (COD) has not been revealed.
Although unconfirmed by the BLM and Clearway, Alta 1 Wind appears to be part of the larger Alta Wind project that Clearway acquired from developer Terra-Gen a decade ago. It was then said to be 947MW in power, although recent announcements indicate it could be larger.
The BESS would smooth out the wind plant’s generation by discharging to the grid when the plant’s production tails off.
California has the most BESS deployments in the US, driven by its high solar PV deployments and long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) between utilities and project owners (through grid operator CAISO’s Resource Adequacy framework), enabling financing for large-scale projects.
Clearway is set to commission a separate BESS project totalling 147MW/588MWh also in Kern County this year and is also highly active in Hawaii, where it has multiple large-scale solar-plus-storage projects online.
This article was updated after publication following clarification of the 1,200MWh figure by the BLM.
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