PG&E flooded with 5,000 MW of applications for energy storage

Dive Brief:

Pacific Gas & Electric may have gotten a bit more than it asked for from energy storage developers, Greentech Media reports. California's biggest IOU received applications for 5,000 MW of energy storage for a request for much less — 74 MW.
The utility issued the request for offers in December to meet its 2016 share of California’s 1,325 MW by 2020 energy storage mandate. The state's other two investor owned utilities have similar requests for storage out, and have already begun deploying it on their grids.
PG&E’s request for offers (RFO) was for 50 MW of transmission grid-connected energy storage and 24 MW of distribution grid capacity to be used either as ancillary services or to defer the need for new substations. PG&E will not take transmission-connected storage designed to replace generation. The winners will be named in a December filing with the California Public Utilities Commission.

Dive Insight:

San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) earlier put out an RFO for 25 MW of storage and Southern California Edison (SCE) recently procured 250 MW of energy storage and put out another RFO for 16.3 MW more.

SCE and SDG&E have procured storage to replace the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station and their retiring water-cooled natural gas plants.

Over half the utility executives queried in Utility Dive’s State of the Electric Utility 2015 survey picked energy storage as the most important emerging technology. Some 51% of the executives surveyed picked storage as the technology their utility should invest more in.

“Energy storage is such a big deal that in the electric utility business we called it the holy grail,” former Southern California Edison Senior Vice President Jim Kelly said recently. From the Utility Dive survey results, it appears utility executives would agree with Kelly that “2014 was the year of energy storage.”

“Utilities are embracing storage because they don’t see it as a threat,” explained Berkshire Hathaway Energy Vice President for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs Jonathan Weisgall. “It is not taking away revenue or electrons. It is enhancing what utilities are doing to deal with renewables.”