EDF Renewables North America has begun operations on a 375MW/600MWh solar-plus-storage project in California, US.
The company announced last week (31st January) that the Desert Quartzite project in Riverside County, California, began operations in December 2024. EDF Renewables – a regional subsidiary of French energy giant EDF – did not specify the suppliers of the solar or storage elements of the project. The battery energy storage system (BESS) is a 4-hour, 150MW installation.
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Solar projects in California are increasingly paired with energy storage to adapt to the state’s grid and energy mix. The “duck curve” – where solar generation peaks in the day and pushes power prices to near or below zero before it drops off when demand spikes in the evening – has made energy storage essential to balancing supply and demand across California.
A number of major project developers including EDP Renewables and Arevon have invested vast amounts in large-scale solar-plus-storage projects across California, to the extent that EDP Renewables North America CEO, Sandhya Ganapathy, told PV Tech that the “low hanging fruit” for solar developers was gone across major US markets. She said that companies would need to innovate, either in technology or geography, to be competitive.
Desert Quartzite was built on Federal Land managed by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is part of the Department of the Interior (DOI). The BLM manages millions of acres of land, largely across the western US, much of which it has proposed for renewable energy development.
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