Granite Construction (NYSE: GVA) landed a roughly $31 million Early Works Grading Package from Hydrostor for the Willow Rock Energy Storage Center, a 500 MW compressed air storage facility going up north of Rosamond in Kern County, California.
Compressed air storage sounds like something out of a middle school science fair, but at this scale it's serious infrastructure. Hydrostor pumps air underground when power's cheap, then releases it to spin turbines when the grid needs juice.
Carving Out an Underground Air Tank:
89 acres total project footprint
9-acre pad to support drilling and excavation
1.3 million cubic yards of cavern space carved roughly 2,000 feet below the surface
Four turbines once the facility's complete
Granite's scope covers the unglamorous but essential stuff: offsite road improvements, stormwater basins, laydown areas for subsurface mining crews and the topside EPCM contractors staging equipment.
Once finished, the facility is expected to power more than 400,000 homes for eight hours at a stretch, according to Hydrostor.
Home Turf Advantage: Granite's Bakersfield team is running point, tapped for local site development chops on a project that's about to get very deep underground.
Work kicked off in July 2026 and wraps grading duties by March 2027, with the award landing in Granite's Q3 2026 CAP.
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