EDP Renewables Finishes a 92 MW Battery at Sandrini, With Redwood Coast Buying All of It
- Energy Storage News Solar + Storage Integration
Marin Holt
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- 7 minutes read
- Battery capacity: 92 MW / 368 MWh
- Co-located solar: 300 MW
- Offtake: 100% of battery to Redwood Coast Energy Authority
- Local tax revenue: $5 million from storage, $25 million combined
EDP Renewables North America has finished Sandrini Energy Storage, a 92 MW / 368 MWh battery in Kern County, California. The company and the Redwood Coast Energy Authority announced completion on August 18, 2026. Redwood Coast holds an energy storage service agreement covering 100 percent of the battery. It also buys 100 MW from the co-located 300 MW Sandrini Solar site.
The four-hour duration is the number that matters. A 92 MW battery holding 368 MWh runs at full output for four hours. That matches the evening ramp California pays the most to cover. EDPR NA puts the discharge at enough to serve more than 22,000 California homes.
A community choice buyer takes the whole battery
Redwood Coast Energy Authority serves Humboldt County, about 600 miles north of the project. The agency is a community choice aggregator. It buys power for its customers instead of building plants. Here it contracted for the whole battery, not a slice. That gives the agency one dispatchable block to schedule against its own load.
“The addition of the Sandrini Energy Storage project supports RCEA’s goals of building new, clean capacity matching customers’ energy needs,” said Beth Burks, executive director of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority.
Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDPR NA, said storage “transforms renewable power into reliable electricity, ensuring clean energy is available when demand is highest.”
Bolting storage onto a built solar site
Sandrini Solar was already operating at 300 MW. Adding the battery beside it reuses the interconnection, the substation and the land. That is the cheapest way to add capacity while interconnection queues run years long. The pairing also lets EDPR NA move midday solar output into the hours when Kern County plants get curtailed.
EDPR NA operates 1.23 GW of wind, solar and storage across California. Building the battery supported about 50 jobs. Across both phases, the company counts about 250 construction jobs. It projects more than $25 million in local tax revenue. The storage project alone accounts for more than $5 million of that.
Why It Matters
A full-capacity offtake deal with a community choice aggregator is a financing signal, not just a supply deal. Merchant batteries in CAISO live on volatile energy and ancillary revenue. One counterparty taking the whole block turns that into contracted cash flow. Lenders price against exactly that. Read the offtake share, not the megawatts, as the risk number.
Neither company named the battery supplier. Neither disclosed the contract length or the price. Both gaps limit what the deal says about storage economics in California today. The tax and jobs figures are company projections, not audited totals.
Critical Perspective
Read the completion announcement carefully. Neither EDP Renewables nor Redwood Coast disclosed the contract term or the price, so the claim that a full-capacity offtake de-risks the asset cannot be tested from outside. A one-year agreement and a fifteen-year agreement carry the same headline and very different value.
The technical position is also less distinctive than the megawatts suggest. A four-hour battery is now the standard product in California, not a scarce one, and 92 MW is a small block against the storage fleet CAISO already dispatches. The economics that made four-hour storage attractive depend on an evening price spread that narrows as more four-hour batteries arrive. Sandrini is one of the units narrowing it.
The local benefit figures deserve the same scepticism. The $5 million in tax revenue and the roughly 50 construction jobs are company projections, and construction jobs end when construction does. Ask what the permanent headcount is at a battery site that runs unattended.
Sources
- EDP Renewables and RCEA completion release (PR Newswire)
- Solar Power World
- Renewables Now
- EDP North America newsroom
