Fluence Energy will supply its Smartstack four-hour storage system and turnkey engineering, procurement, and construction services for Rexford 2, a hybrid solar-plus-storage project Avantus is developing in Tulare County, California. The battery block is 200 MW / 800 MWh. It sits alongside 200 MW of solar generation under a 20-year power purchase agreement with Clean Power Alliance, the community choice aggregator serving parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Construction is slated to begin in 2027, with commercial operation targeted for late 2028.
Three things are worth pulling out.
First, the hybrid default. Rexford 2 is not a solar project with a storage adder or a storage project with a solar hedge. It is a single interconnection point sized for a 1.0 solar-to-storage ratio in power terms and 4.0 in energy terms. That configuration is now the modal California utility-scale build, because CPA and other load-serving entities have shifted from paying for peak megawatt-hours to paying for shaped, dispatchable capacity. A four-hour battery that time-shifts midday solar into the 5-to-9 p.m. net-load window is the cleanest way to sell that shape.
Second, the domestic content stack. Fluence disclosed that Smartstack cells, modules, enclosures, and thermal management systems for Rexford 2 will be produced in US facilities in Utah, South Carolina, and Texas. That is the specific content list Section 45X and Section 48E bonus-credit calculations weight most heavily. It also puts the project inside the foreign-entity-of-concern perimeter that the current guidance treats as the bright line for full IRA-tier credit stacking. A California hybrid at this size with a compliant US content declaration lands the developer roughly ten adjusted-percentage points of extra investment tax credit, which is the difference between a marginal and a bankable project at current lithium iron phosphate cell prices.
Third, the customer. Clean Power Alliance is a community choice aggregator, not an investor-owned utility. CCAs have been the fastest-growing procurement channel for California storage over the last three years, in part because they can sign 20-year contracts without the same rate-case optics that slow down IOU procurement. Rexford 2 continues that pattern and puts more of California’s incremental firmed-solar capacity on the CCA side of the ledger.
The read-through for the broader thesis is narrow but real. Marginal US utility-scale procurement is now assumed hybrid, assumed four-hour, and assumed domestic-content compliant. That combination is what the marginal capex dollar is buying, and it is where refiners, cell makers, and system integrators with in-country capacity get paid first.