Recurrent Energy to Build 150 MW Solar Power System in California

Canadian Solar announced its wholly owned subsidiary Recurrent Energy LLC has signed two 15-year power purchase agreements with Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Monterey Bay Community Power for a 150 megawatt solar power system with 180 megawatt-hours of battery storage. This joint procurement effort represents the largest contracted solar-plus-storage project in California to date.

This first-of-its-kind partnership resulted from a joint procurement process that Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Monterey Bay Community Power launched in September 2017 to source cost-effective, renewable power for their respective communities.

“As a community choice aggregator, we are proud to help California lead the transition to clean, reliable and flexible energy,” said Girish Balachandran, CEO of Silicon Valley Clean Energy. “We are proud to partner on a new renewable energy project that makes a significant investment to reach our state’s carbon-free energy goals and contribute to solving the state’s grid integration problem by investing in large grid-scale energy storage.”

“We are excited to bring online the largest solar-plus-storage project by CCAs to date,” said Tom Habashi, CEO of Monterey Bay Community Power. “Joining forces in this process with Silicon Valley Clean Energy and Recurrent Energy has been invaluable, as we bring onto the grid the clean electricity that we know our customers desire.”

Power will be supplied from Recurrent Energy’s Slate photovoltaic-plus-storage project to be built in Kings County, California. The project is scheduled to reach commercial operation in 2021, and the energy represented by the contracts is enough to power 37,500 homes, providing Silicon Valley Clean Energy with 55 percent of the energy, and Monterey Bay with the other 45 percent of the combined output.

“We’re excited to have participated in this joint procurement effort that will not only include solar, but a landmark amount of energy storage for the state of California as well,” said Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian Solar. “With the integrated storage component, both CCAs will have the flexibility to fill the battery when wholesale energy prices are low and then discharge the energy when prices are higher to meet their unique load requirements in a cost-competitive manner. Recurrent Energy was the first developer to close financing for a utility-scale solar project with CCA off-takers and we will leverage this expertise to ensure the project is successful.”

The project’s lithium-ion battery component is 45 MW nameplate with 180 MWh of energy capacity, allowing for four hours of flexible energy delivery.