By Julian Spector | Canary Media
MENIFEE, California — For a decade, twin smokestacks loomed against the bright blue skies of Menifee, in Southern California’s Inland Empire. But the old gas combustion plant came down, and on the flat industrial site it left behind an army of batteries is now being assembled.
When it comes online this summer, developer Calpine’s Nova power bank will store more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S. The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years.
The facility embodies the clean energy transition in multiple ways. The power plant itself will shift from an 800-megawatt combined cycle plant, installed by GE in 2008 as a model of efficiency, only to languish when its 12-hour startup time made it a poor fit for the era of cheap gas and weather-dependent renewable production. The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles, dulling the rays that inspired the name for nearby Sun City, which sprang up in the 1950s as home for heliotropic retirees. And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels.
