California has only one fossil fuel plant in its future queue
CAISO’s most recent interconnection queue contains one lone gas plant. While this list can change, it reinforces the trend of a move away from conventional generation towards renewables.
The California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO) grid represents 80% of electricity usage in California. Every spring and into summer new records are set on this grid – most solar generated in a day, highest percentage of electricity from solar at a specific moment, and highest amount of solar electricity at any specific moment.
But this is just the beginning, and the state is currently arguing over a bill to move to 100% renewable and zero carbon sources of electricity.
Another way to look at where the state is going is the California ISO Controlled Grid Generation Queue (XLS). In C11 – the most recent version of the state’s queue – there are 92 projects overall, and only one of them is a fossil fuel-fired project, a single gas plant. Cody Hill, director of energy storage at LS Power, broke down the queue in Twitter:
Verifying Hill’s note that not everything in the queue is built, a following tweet by Ravi Manghani notes, “A ton of those projects are in the queue from @PGE4Me Calpine replacement LSA #energystorage procurement. Only 550 MW of those got awarded.”
So take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, but – as Cody said – the trend is clear.
When focusing only on solar and energy storage projects, the list falls to 81 individual projects. Thirty two of them are energy storage alone. Among those are three of the the Moss Landing projects (PG&E Calpine replacements noted above) – each at 500 MW and larger, and two with ratings above 1 GWh.
Twenty projects list energy storage as the primary fuel, and these feature 3.8 GW of energy storage capacity and 5 GW of solar power capacity.
