Southern California Edison launched testing of a massive $50 million, lithium-ion battery project that was connected to the grid mid-summer 2014. The stacks of batteries store electricity produced by the utility’s 2,000 MW wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains. Over the next two years, when and how to best release that energy from North America’s biggest battery project is being put to the test. “We have a lot of questions and hope to get a lot of good answers” during the two-year life of this 32 MWh storage project trial, said Doug Kim, Edison’s director of advanced technologies. The aim is to figure out its maximum number of uses, be it voltage support, congestion relief and/or deferred transmission investment—because the batteries are costly. “We are trying to pancake as many benefits as possible,” noted Kim. He acknowledged, however, some uses will be “mutually exclusive.” The Tehachapi Energy Storage Project is funded by Edison and federal stimulus funds awarded in 2010 by the Department of Energy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. LG Chem, which makes the battery cells in the Chevy Volt car, is the storage battery cell manufacturer. “This installation will allow us to take a serious look at the technological capabilities of energy storage on the electric grid,” Imre Gyuk, energy storage program manager in the federal agency’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. “It will also help us to gain a better understanding of the value and benefit of battery energy storage.” From the outside, the Tehachapi battery project looks like a server farm. It is made up of 604,832 lithium-ion battery cells, housed in 10,872 modules, which are stacked in more than 600 racks. The project sits inside a 6,300 square foot building at Edison’s Monolith substation. The project stores wind energy and 13 different transmission applications are being tested—from smoothing and firming load, to frequency control at the California Independent System Operator. The Tehachapi project helps Edison meet its share of the 1,325 MW of storage capacity by 2020 set by the California Public Utilities Commission in October 2013.