Power company AES Corp. won support from Long Beach’s Planning Commission to build what the company is promoting as the world’s largest battery electric power storage facility.

AES wants to build three buildings to house an array of lithium ion batteries near the company’s existing power plant site in southeast Long Beach, between Studebaker Road and the San Gabriel River. Company leaders have described the planned storage facility as a means to make alternative energy sources like wind or solar power more reliable, since battery-stored power could be distributed during times when weather conditions are not amenable to power generation.

The facility, if built to full capacity, would be able to make 300 megawatts worth of power available over a four-hour period, AES executive Stephen O’Kane told planning commissioners during its Thursday evening meeting. He said that would be enough electricity to supply almost the entirety of Long Beach, with the exception being Port of Long Beach.

“This isn’t hyperbole, but this really is an industry- and world-leading sustainable energy program,” O’Kane said.

O’Kane is AES’ director of sustainability and regulatory compliance.

All four planning commissioners present for Thursday’s meeting voted in favor of the project, certifying its environmental documentation and granting a conditional use permit, among necessary approvals that also included special permission for AES to build the structures housing the battery arrays to a height of 65 feet.

AES’ planned site for the battery storage facility is near the Alamitos Generating Station, a power plant that first entered operation during the 1950s. The company recently began construction of a new power plant, called Alamitos Energy Center, that could begin supplying electricity as early as May 2020. The first phase of the new plant is designed to a maximum generating capacity of 640 megawatts.

Alamitos Energy Center is designed to be a natural gas-fueled plant. AES executives decided to build new power plants in Long Beach and Huntington Beach to comply with a 2010 State Water Resources Control Board regulation that essentially prohibits power companies from using seawater to cool generating equipment.

At the end of February, AES Energy Storage announced a pair of battery storage facilities in San Diego County that the company then reported were, combined, the largest such installations on the planet involving deployments of lithium ion batteries. The twin facilities can provide 37.5 megawatts of power over four hours, which according to the company is sufficient to provide energy to some 25,000 homes.