"The Cow Palace arena, just south of San Francisco, has hosted Dwight Eisenhower, the Beatles, the San Jose Sharks NHL team, and an annual rodeo since it opened in 1941. But an even bigger act is setting up next door: an enormous battery that will perform a starring role in the Bay Area’s energy ecosystem.
Developer Arevon has begun construction of the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City. The battery facility will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.
Arevon has contracted the battery for 15 years of use by MCE, one of California’s biggest community choice aggregators — entities that purchase electricity on behalf of local residents as an alternative to Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities. The state requires MCE to buy grid capacity commensurate with its members’ usage, and the Cormorant project will fulfill 10% of this annual requirement, known as resource adequacy in California bureaucratese.
MCE has become a major force in the greater Bay Area: It now serves all of Marin and Napa counties, most of Contra Costa, and half of Solano. The aggregator can contract for power plants across California, but it looks for sites within or near its service territory when possible, said Jenna Tenney, MCE’s director of communications and community engagement."
