Southern California Edison, one of the US’ top-ranking utilities for energy storage capacity already deployed, has signed contracts for seven more clean energy projects, totalling 195MW in its California service area.

The company has announced contracts for six energy storage facilities and one demand response contract. In April 2018, Smart Electric Power Alliance statistics showed that SCE was the leading utility in the US in the preceding year for deployment across the US, with more than 50MW going online. The utility is one of California’s three major investor-owned utility companies in a group which includes the embattled PG&E and SDG&E, which was joint-leader with SCE in the aforementioned rankings. The IOUs are each mandated to deploy a significant share of a 1.5GW target for energy storage deployment by the mid-2020s.

However, a release sent by SCE to Energy-Storage.news over the weekend said that unlike many previous solicitations for large-scale energy storage in the US and elsewhere, the latest 195MW procurement will directly address local network needs including the shortfall in gas generation locally in the wake of the Aliso Canyon disaster.

Aliso Canyon’s big leak resulted in some of the world’s fastest deployments of grid-scale storage, as covered extensively on this site. In continuing efforts to provide adequate capacity to the local area, SCE put out the Aliso Canyon Energy Storage 2 Request For Offers and Local Capacity Requirements Request For Proposals, this year and last, respectively.