Goldman Sachs-backed standalone energy storage startup Gridstor building first project in California
Goldman Sachs-backed standalone energy storage startup Gridstor building first project in California - Energy-Storage.News
US energy storage developer Gridstor has announced the start of construction of its first project, a 60MW/160MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in California.
The Portland, Oregon-headquartered startup was founded last year, and has the backing of Horizon Energy Storage, a fund managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Sustainable and Infrastructure Investing groups.
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Gridstor said last week (31 May) that cranes were putting into place the 44 containerised battery blocks (pictured above) which will comprise the energy storage system, in the California city of Goleta, Santa Barbara County.
It will occupy 25,000 square feet of a 2.6-acre industrial and commercial lot in the small coastal city, and according to Gridstor is the largest battery storage project in Santa Barbara County, as well as being only its second. The first appears to have been a 700kW system deployed by Tesla at the County’s Cater Water Treatment plant.
While the company’s release on the project was light on specifics – Energy-Storage.news has asked Gridstor a few questions and hopes to be able to update this story accordingly – it did say that adding resiliency to the local community’s electricity supply is a key reason for its installation.
Gridstor said it chooses strategic locations for its standalone grid-connected energy storage projects where the demand for them is greatest. In the case of the community around Goleta’s Cortona Drive, where the project is being built, electricity comes via a limited amount of high-voltage infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the area is prone to electricity supply disruptions from wildfires to mudslides and earthquakes, while Santa Barbara County is largely dependent on fossil fuel resources, including Ellwood Generating Station, a gas-fired peaker plant. The batteries in the Gridstor system will help the community store and utilise more renewable energy, the company said, including during blackouts.
As regular readers of this site will know, California has become the standout leader for grid-scale BESS installations, with more than 5GW and around 20GWh online already. The state’s Clean Energy Transition Plan, published in an updated version recently, emphasises heavily the role energy storage will play in enabling it to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2045, while maintaining stability of electricity supply and managing the retirement of legacy thermal generation resources.
Energy-Storage.news previously covered Gridstor when the company bought a 500MW/2,000MWh portfolio of in-development BESS projects in Los Angeles from renewable energy and energy storage developer Upstream Energy.
Those projects are due to come online between 2024 and 2026, while the project in Goleta is scheduled to come online in the Fall of this year. While the Upstream Energy portfolio comprised four-hour duration projects to meet California’s resource adequacy requirements, Goleta appears to be a 2.6-hour duration asset. Gridstor develops, owns and operates standalone energy storage assets exclusively.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.