CAISO: Alternatives to Puentes gas plant could cost up to $1.1B
California’s grid operator and Southern California Edison (SCE) worked to develop three alternative resource scenarios to meet the Moorpark local capacity requirements absent the proposed Puente gas plant.
Each of the scenarios includes 80 MW of energy storage enabled demand response resources, 25 MW of incremental solar/energy storage hybrid resources, and approximately 30 MW of existing slow responding demand response resources coupled with incremental energy storage.
“This represents an incremental 135 MW of distributed resources that are assumed to be procured or properly enabled in the Moorpark subarea under all three scenarios,” the report says.
But the incremental distributed resources is not sufficient to meet the local capacity requirements—so CAISO studied three scenarios to quantify the amount of additional “grid-connected” resources necessary to meet the applicable reliability criteria.
Incremental distributed resources plus grid connected battery storage is expected to cost $805 million. If the Ellwood Generating Station is also retired, incremental distributed resources plus grid connected battery storage could cost up to $1.1 billion. Other configurations without the retirement would cost between $309 million and $359 million.
