Four California Community Choice Aggregators (CCA) – Peninsula Clean Energy (10 MW), Silicon Valley Clean Energy (10 MW), East Bay Community Energy (10 MW) and Silicon Valley Power (2.7 MW) (the four Load Serving Entities are collectively defined as LSEs), have put out a request for proposals (RFP) for purpose of installing at least 32.7 MW of energy storage across Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The joint proposal (PDF) notes that the exact purpose of the RFP is twofold:

The LSEs seek to identify new and existing DER systems capable of providing capacity to satisfy RA requirements while also supporting the development of DERs to increase resilience in each service territory. The increasing threat of Pacific Gas and Electric Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) events has intensified the urgency and need for resilience region-wide. DERs deployed through this program will be capable of providing resiliency benefits to the LSEs’ customers and the broader community in advance of the 2020 and 2021 fire seasons.

The RFP, brought to this author’s attention by MicrogridKnowledge, was launched November 5, and had a webinar November 12th. Any questions should be sent to jross at ebce dot org by November 22, with final proposals due December 23, 2019. Developers must submit their proposals specifically to the CCA that they wish to build in, and are not required to submit any documentations to CCAs whose territories they aren’t building in. The CCAs have available one year of 15 minute interval data for sites within their territories upon request.

The unique RFPs can be found on each of the CCA’s websites:

The RFP notes that four specific system type are eligible, with one requirement of all of them being that the system is able to island the location in case of PSPS:

New battery energy storage (BES) systems

New combined solar photovoltaic (PV) + BES systems

BES retrofits on existing PV systems

Existing BES systems (provided that dispatchable capacity can be contracted by

the LSE and is not otherwise contracted)

Specifically, the bidding by developers must be submitted with a $/kWh-month because the base of this programs is a Resource Adequacy (RA) requirement that must be met by the utilities. Sunrun won a bid for RA using 20 MW of distributed residential solar+storage in the ISO New England territory for $3.80/kW/month – totaling $76,000/mo, and $912,000 for the full year contract. Those who accept these systems to be built at their locations will be given the total systems at a lower price in exchange for allowing the CCA to make use of these additional features for the broader grid utilization.