Renewable energy asset management software group Power Factors will add a 100MW battery energy storage system (BESS) to its recently-launched battery storage performance management platform.
The company said this week that the 100MW / 400MWh Saticoy BESS project in Ventura County will be onboarded into its platform, called Drive. The platform is designed to give asset owners, asset managers and operations and maintenance (O&M) providers advanced analytics, data and event management and field service management capabilities for wind, solar and storage.
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Power Factors manages over 110GW of wind and solar assets globally and in the past two months has acquired renewables O&M and asset management provider 3Megawatt and software company Greenbyte, both Europe-based.
Enabling the management of portfolios of clean energy assets from a single software platform, the battery storage offering can also help manage the health of assets and track the state-of-charge and cycling of batteries as they perform different revenue-generating applications.
Power Factors has been contracted by renewable energy company Arevon to add the Saticoy project to the Drive platform, and Arevon will add two more large-scale battery assets to the platform this year, according to a release by the software company.
“Energy storage is the fastest growing renewable energy asset class and our customers have been asking for a complete solution for managing all their renewable power assets,” Power Factors VP of product Abilash Krishnan said.
The Saticoy project was originally developed by Strata Solar — now known as Strata Clean Energy — which began construction on it in May last year and completed work in September. A power purchase agreement (PPA) for its output was signed in April 2019 with utility Southern California Edison (SCE), and the system is connected to SCE’s transmission network.
The project was proposed as an alternative to building out new natural gas peaking capacity when a legacy gas power plant in the area was deemed to fall foul of new California regulations on efficient water use for cooling. The new natural natural gas plant had looked set to go ahead when state regulators denied it in 2017 and it was found that the cost of battery storage had fallen enough for it to be a viable alternative.
“The reality is competition has driven down costs while scaling up manufacturing. The talking points from two and a half years ago of natural gas needing to be a bridge for California has proven to be not necessary,” Strata Solar's director of origination Will Mitchell told local news outlet VC Star last year as construction began.
The BESS, which is currently among the largest in the world, was acquired by global asset management firm Capital Dynamics, an affiliate of Arevon, earlier this month, together with infrastructure developer S&B USA Energy. Capital Dynamics owns 51% of the project and S&B USA the remaining 49%.
Similar to the Alamitos energy storage project which was inaugurated earlier this year and is also 100MW / 400MWh, the Saticoy project pitted batteries as an emissions-free alternative to natural gas peaker plants in California. Already a global leader in battery energy storage deployment, California is welcoming a massive wave of new battery energy storage projects over the next few months and many of those will be four-hour duration, transmission network and wholesale market operator CAISO said recently.
