Update 3 February 2025: The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved the six Mid-Term Reliability (MTR) contracts with Copia Power at a meeting held 30 January 2025, finding ‘SCE’s request for approval of the contracts presented to be reasonable.’
Investor-owned utility (IOU) Southern California Edison (SCE) is seeking expedited approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for six separate offtake agreements associated with developer Copia Power’s Centennial Flats hybrid solar and BESS facility in La Paz County, Arizona.
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Although SCE first sought approval of the agreements in an Advice Letter (AL) filed with the state regulatory body during the final quarter of 2024, CPUC has decided to initiate a staff review of the contracts. The move sees the AL suspended until 4 April 2025.
Copia Power and SCE request certainty from CPUC
Within the original AL, SCE requested CPUC approve the agreements, along with the associated recovery costs, by 30 January 2025, in order to ‘maximise the likelihood of [Copia Power] meeting the online dates.’
SCE elaborated further, saying that upon commission approval, the project would have limited time before the contractual operation date, ‘due to the time required for equipment deliveries, project permitting, construction, and interconnection.’
The contracts are a result of SCE’s phases 2 and 3 Midterm Reliability Request for Offers (MTRRFO) issued by the utility back in 2022 and 2023, respectively, to satisfy procurement targets mandated by CPUC.
As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will remember, SCE is also seeking approval from CPUC of a further 620MW of battery energy storage system (BESS) resource adequacy (RA) across three projects as part of the same procurements. Although SCE was similarly requesting expedited approval of these agreements no later than 20 February 2025, CPUC has also issued a suspension notice for the associated AL until the later date of 4 May 2025, in order for a review to take place.
500MW of solar and 1GWh of BESS across 3 phases
SCE is the sole offtaker of Copia Power’s Centennial Flats project, which comprises 500MW of solar PV co-located with a 267MW/1,068MWh lithium-ion BESS located approximately 65 miles west of Phoenix in La Paz County, Arizona.
Copia Power holds a large generator interconnection agreement (LGIA) with the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) for the project (queue number 1529), which was processed as part of the system operator’s cluster 11 group. The project will connect to the grid via DCR Transmission’s (DCRT’s) 500kV Cielo Azul switchyard on the Ten West Link 500kV transmission line, known formerly as the Delaney – Colorado River transmission line.
The BESS RA offtake agreements, which also include financial settlement, are 15 years in length and cover a third of the project’s total storage capacity, with each 89MW/356MWh battery portion co-located with a third of the project’s total solar output.
The first hybrid solar BESS portion is contracted to come online by 1 June 2026, with the second scheduled to reach commercial operations two months later in August, and the final portion contracted to start delivery in September 2026.
Project acquired from Sweden’s Eolus Vind
Initial development of Centennial Flats was carried out by La Jolla, California-based developer Upstream Clean Energy, which incorporated a subsidiary for the project – Upstream HC-1, LLC – with the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) during April 2018.
In February 2019, the subsidiary was handed over to the North American development arm of Sweden’s Eolus Vind AB, Eolus North America, Inc., which then sold the project to Copia Power in 2022.
In related news, it was announced this month that Eolus had sold a 100MW/400MWh standalone BESS, also connecting to the CAISO grid, to power provider Sonoma Clean Power (SCP). The Pome BESS project is under construction and expected to reach commercial operations during the first half of this year.
The development and sale of projects appears to be somewhat of a strategy for Eolus, which also sold its first storage project in the US, known as Cald BESS, to IOU San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) in 2021.
US$1.24 billion financing for Centennial Flats
On 19 November 2024, Copia Power announced it had secured a US$1.24 billion debt facility to fund the construction of the Centennial Flats solar and storage project with a consortium of banks made up of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Crédit Agricole CIB, KeyBanc Capital Markets, Natixis CIB, and Wells Fargo.
According to a separate press release issued by KeyBanc Capital Markets, the facility comprises a US$898 million construction-to-term loan, a US$257 million tax-credit bridge loan, and US$74 million in letters of credit.
Earlier during November, Eolus announced that it had received a US$64.7 million payment from Copia Power following the decision to commence construction of the project. Eolus has so far received US$116.9 million from Copia Power and will receive a final US$6.9 million payment once the project is operational.
The original version of this article suggested that the proposed CPUC Staff Review could potentially ‘jeopardise’ Copia Power’s ability to deliver the projects on time. Energy-Storage.news accepts that this was not the case, and as noted in the Update above, the contracts have now received CPUC approval.
