California’s largest VRFB project to date, supplied by Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEI), has been participating in wholesale market opportunities since 2018. Image: SDG&E / Ted Walton.
Four new grid-scale battery energy storage projects have been announced by California energy supplier Central Coast Community Energy (CCCE), including three long-duration flow battery projects.

CCCE, one of the US state’s community choice aggregator (CCA) energy supplier groups, said it has selected the projects in response to a request for proposals (RfP) it issued in June. In total, 21 proposals from 16 developers were submitted and two more energy storage projects are still being considered along with the announced four.

In what could be the biggest utility procurement of the technology so far in the world, vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) systems with eight-hour storage duration will be built ranging in size from 6MW / 18MWh to 16MW / 128MWh, together with a four-hour lithium-ion battery system. CCCE gave an estimated date of 2026 for all of the approved projects to be operational.