Saltwind Bets $310 Million on Grid Storage, and on Hiring People It Cannot Find Yet
A 400-megawatt-hour battery block next to the community solar array would create 62 permanent jobs - if the pipeline for technicians exists.
Saltwind Energy will spend $310 million to build a 400-megawatt-hour battery storage block on the kiln grounds east of the channel, adjacent to the 28-megawatt community solar array it cleared for zoning in April, the company said Monday.
The announcement came with a jobs number that Saltwind’s own chief operating officer spent much of the press conference qualifying: 62 permanent positions, 340 construction jobs at peak, and a commitment to fill at least 45 of the permanent roles locally. The qualification is that Port Meridian does not currently produce enough people who can do the work.
“I can finance a battery in nine months,” said COO Delia Marchetti. “I cannot manufacture a high-voltage technician in nine months. That is the honest version of this announcement and I would rather say it now than in 2029.”
## What the block does
The installation would sit on 22 acres of the former Coastal Kiln property and connect at the same interconnection point as the solar array, which is one of the reasons the economics work. Saltwind estimates it saved $34 million by co-locating rather than developing a greenfield site with its own interconnection queue position — a queue that Coastal Power and Light currently quotes at 44 months for new requests.
Four hours of discharge at 100 megawatts is the design point. In practice, the block’s revenue comes from three stacked services: capacity payments from the regional market, energy arbitrage on the daily price spread, and a frequency regulation contract Saltwind has not yet signed.
Meridian Cooperative Bank is leading a $118 million construction facility, its largest single credit since the bank restructured its commercial desk. Bank president Ines Corvo said the underwriting hinged on the capacity payments rather than arbitrage, which she called “the part of the model that assumes the future keeps being weird in the direction you want.”
The remainder is tax equity, a $40 million state resilience allocation, and Saltwind balance sheet.
Cells come from two suppliers under a dual-sourcing requirement the bank insisted on. Neither is regional. Harbor University’s battery lab, which published electrolyte safety results in June, has a testing agreement with Saltwind but no supply relationship, and lab director Dr. Arun Voss was careful in a phone interview to say his work is nowhere near a purchase order. “We are eight years from a factory,” he said. “Nobody should build a workforce plan on us.”
The site will hold enough stored energy to run the ferry terminal, the hospital, and every traffic signal on the flats for a night, and the union hall two miles away cannot fill a Tuesday class.
## The employment question, honestly
The 62 permanent roles break down as 24 high-voltage and battery-systems technicians, 14 controls and SCADA staff, 9 security and site operations, 8 administrative, and 7 engineering. Median wage across the group is quoted at $84,000, with technicians at $91,000 and a shift differential.
That is roughly 2.3 times the median wage in the two census tracts nearest the site, according to labor market analyst Perrin Nakada, who runs the city’s quarterly employment series. It is also, Nakada notes, 62 jobs — against 1,900 residents in those tracts. “This is a good employer and a small employer,” he said. “Both of those are true and the second one is the one that gets left out of the ribbon-cutting.”
The pipeline problem is more concrete. Coastal Technical College’s electrical program graduates about 30 students a year, most of whom go into residential and commercial work. Its high-voltage and utility-scale track has 11 seats and ran at 6 last year. Program chair Wendell Oyelaran said the reason is not interest but sequencing: the track requires a math prerequisite that half the applicants have to take first, adding a semester most cannot afford.
Saltwind has committed $1.2 million over four years to expand the track to 28 seats, fund the prerequisite semester as a stipend, and pay for a training substation on the college’s back lot. First expanded cohort would enroll in January 2027. First graduates arrive in mid-2029. The battery block is scheduled to energize in late 2028.
That gap is real and Marchetti did not paper over it. Saltwind will bring in roughly 20 experienced technicians from outside the region for the first two years and expects to hold “most” of the permanent local commitment by 2031 rather than at commissioning.
## The objection
Odell Fry of the Harbor Building Trades Council supports the project. Jules Abernathy, who chairs the Basin Economic Justice Coalition, does not oppose it either — and that is what makes her argument worth the space.
“I am not going to stand here and say no to sixty-two good jobs, because I would be lying about what my neighbors want,” Abernathy said. “My objection is the arithmetic of the incentive. The state is putting forty million dollars into this. That is $645,000 per permanent job. Nobody would approve that if you wrote it on the check that way.”
Her proposal is that the state resilience allocation carry a clawback tied to the local hiring floor, and that the training money go to the college directly rather than through a corporate program that ends when a corporate strategy changes. She points to a 2019 abatement in the flats where the training component was quietly discontinued in year three after a management change, with no penalty.
Marchetti’s answer was that the $40 million buys grid capacity, not jobs, and that judging it per job is the wrong denominator. Abernathy’s answer to that was that the state fund is administered under an economic development statute whose stated purpose is employment. Both are correct about their own statute. The state energy office has not said which reading governs.
## Next dates
Construction permits go to the planning department in October. Saltwind wants a notice to proceed by February and first cells on site the following autumn.
Oyelaran, at the college, has already moved. He has asked his dean for the January catalog change and posted the training substation as a facilities request, both of which he did before Saltwind’s money is contractually committed. Asked why he would risk that, he said he has run the utility track for eleven years, watched three big regional projects announce and two of them cancel, and decided some time ago that the seats are worth building whether or not any particular company shows up to fill them.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s business desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com