San Francisco getting huge new battery

Cool story from Canary Media on an example of how battery technology can be nimbly deployed in an urban area: Nation’s largest urban battery to take center stage near San Francisco.

the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City… will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.

The article points out the difficulty of “sticking a smokestack in San Francisco”, even if California were building new gas plants (which they’re not). This project is a much more feasible way to bring power right into the city.

These days, California expands generation by building large-scale solar plants in wide-open spaces, but those plants need to ship their power over many miles of transmission lines to reach the cities where it gets consumed. The Cormorant battery provides something new: a dense source of on-demand power that can slip into the urban fabric without any local air pollution, and which absorbs the far-off solar generation at midday to discharge later at night.