As California modernizes its grid infrastructure and moves towards aggressive carbon emission reductions, A-CAES will provide reliable energy security for more than 50+ years.
As part of this transition, the Willow Rock Energy Storage Centre will create over 700 construction jobs, bring over $500 million in direct and indirect benefits to the local economy, and leverage proven technology that is built and operated by skilled jobs similar to the regions established oil and gas industry, providing stable, long-term employment opportunities.
The proposed Center will discharge 4,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, capable of delivering 8+ hours of energy delivery on a full charge.
With a 50+ year lifetime, the facility will provide a stable revenue source for local communities. A-CAES plants use standard components and enables workers from the fossil-fuel industry to transfer existing skills to the clean energy future.
The project will support diversified wage job opportunities and generate significant regional economic development from both the construction and operation of the project.
Willow Rock will allow California’s attractive and growing solar and wind resources to be directly converted into reliable, on-demand electricity for the greater Los Angeles region and the broader California grid for decades in the future.
The project supports the delivery of dispatchable electrical capacity into the Los Angeles Basin and broader California grid, and ensures sufficient long duration energy storage resources are available well into the future as they becomes increasingly important to reliably serve load.
Optimize the use of the existing transmission system, by storing excess energy during times of abundance and dispatching this energy when it is most needed, allowing for more efficient use of transmission lines to deliver reliable service and ensure new transmission is built where it is most needed.
Offers technology diversity for the California grid to help enable grid resilience and provide different generation characteristics when compared to the other grid assets and storage technologies.
The facility will deliver dispatchable capacity, using renewable energy generation in the High Desert area directly into the LA Basin and enable further renewable asset growth in the High Desert Solar Resource Area and Tehachapi Wind Resource Area.
Willow Rock provides an alternative to the use of fossil fuel power plants to meet electricity demand, and will support California’s objective of reducing GHG emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Key for enabling SB100 and LA100 objectives for 100% carbon-free renewable electricity by 2045.
A-CAES offers the equivalent bulk energy storage capabilities as pumped hydro storage with substantially lower land and water requirements. A-CAES is a sustainable energy storage technology that is non-combustible, has minimal residual hazardous waste at asset retirement and will experience virtually no performance degradation over its commercial lifetime.