Arevon breaks ground on a 1-gigawatt-hour battery project near San Francisco

Arevon has begun construction on a 1-gigawatt-hour battery storage project in Daly City, California, moving one of the country’s largest urban energy storage installations from development into the field. The Cormorant Energy Storage Project will sit just southwest of the Cow Palace arena, placing a major grid battery directly next to the Bay Area’s power demand rather than far out on the transmission network.

Arevon starts work on the Daly City site

Construction crews have begun clearing the vacant lot and strengthening the foundation for the project, which will occupy about 11 acres. The battery system is being built in Daly City, a location that gives the facility a direct role in supporting evening supply for the San Francisco-area grid as solar output falls after sunset.

The project’s scale makes it notable not just as another storage addition, but as a physically large urban battery in a dense coastal load center. That matters in California, where grid operators increasingly rely on storage to cover the steep ramp between daytime solar generation and nighttime demand.

Why an urban battery at this scale matters

Battery projects near major demand centers can reduce the need to move power long distances at peak hours and can respond quickly when the grid needs capacity, frequency support, or other balancing services. In a region with high solar penetration, the ability to shift energy from midday to the evening peak is central to keeping the system flexible.

For Daly City, the key news is the transition from approvals and planning to visible construction on a site that had remained vacant. Once online, the project is expected to serve as a dispatchable block of stored power close to one of the state’s most constrained and closely watched load pockets.

California’s storage buildout keeps getting larger

The project also reflects how battery storage in California has moved from a niche grid resource to core infrastructure. Large-scale lithium-ion systems are now being built at a pace and size that would have been exceptional only a few years ago, with projects increasingly measured in hundreds of megawatts and, in some cases, in gigawatt-hours of capacity.

That shift has been driven by the state’s solar-heavy generation mix, summer reliability concerns, and the growing need for resources that can start quickly and discharge when gas-fired generation would otherwise be called on to meet demand. The Daly City project fits squarely into that operational logic.

With construction underway, the Cormorant Energy Storage Project now moves into the part of the schedule that matters most for grid planners: whether a large battery in the Bay Area can be delivered on time and put to work where electricity is needed most.