Nördnytt! 🤓California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
- mh- - 51987 sekunder sedan> California hasn’t issued an emergency plea for the public to conserve energy, known as a Flex Alert, since 2022.
Feels like that statement deserves to be contextualized with weather data. There were a few summers leading up to that where all of the major metro areas shared concurrent record high heat days, and sometimes coincided with poor air quality from wildfires (meaning more people closed their windows and ran AC even if they wouldn't have otherwise.)
> It was only five years ago that a record-shattering heat wave pushed the grid to its limit and plunged much of the state into darkness.
They mention it here, but then don't talk about whether similar circumstances have been faced since. Don't get me wrong, this is encouraging, but the article invited this kind of reaction by putting "leaving rolling blackouts behind" in the title.
Funny enough, if you look at the article's original title via the URL slug, it was much more measured:
california-made-it-through-another-summer-without-a-flex-alert - cbmuser - 42470 sekunder sedanThe electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California:
- France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly
- California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year...
And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan:
- https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh.
Nuclear power rules.
- labrador - 49059 sekunder sedanI remember the bad old days of rolling black outs when Enron was doing energy arbitrage with Calfifornia's electricity. A more recent negative event was the battery fire at Moss Landing on the Monterrey Bay near where I live. If we use Sodium-ion batteries in the future we won't have that risk.
"On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire."
- The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries. - About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by the fire.
- Manuel_D - 37514 sekunder sedanOne of my biggest pet peeves is when outlets talk about energy storage exclusively in terms of output and neglect to mention capacity. Does 15.7 gigawatts of storage mean 15.7 GWh? Capacity is as important, if not more important, than output.
- danans - 43486 sekunder sedanRelatedly, CA utilities have begun offering hourly variable priced rate plans, which will allow consumers with batteries to theoretically achieve lower average rates if your batteries can rate-follow. It's still not available for net metering plans, though.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
- random3 - 46605 sekunder sedanThere's this post about sodium-ion batteries from two days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45677243
My understanding is that they are particularly good for large scale storage. It looks like it's relevant part of China's strategy.
Yet, there seems to be close to 0 in the US in general (except from some pilots). I find it weird at least to boast about battery energy storage as a strategy while ignoring the most relevant aspect wrt to the future of battery-based storage.
- Lammy - 46338 sekunder sedanI don't really care if the power stays on for five-nines as long as I'm still paying 61¢/kW-h for it :/
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
- whiterook6 - 41001 sekunder sedanWhen they say their battery storage capacity is 15,000 MW, do they mean MWh? Because watts are time-independent, or rather, they're like speed to Joule's (watt-hour's) distance.
- rahimnathwani - 20046 sekunder sedanFunny to read this today. I live in San Francisco, and we had a blackout today.
- alecco - 42325 sekunder sedanThe Financial Times has a much better article: https://ig.ft.com/mega-batteries/
- gradientsrneat - 13930 sekunder sedan> cannot be extinguished with water
Why? I thought lithium ion batteries actually contained negligible amounts of lithium? Or is this for some other reason?
- radium3d - 18873 sekunder sedanI haven't had a rolling blackout in our particular grid in several years. The battery energy storage has been a great benefit. Our home battery energy storage system has been fantastic as well for localized unplanned outages.
- benzible - 33185 sekunder sedanI'm hungry for good news about technical solutions working - especially right now when Trump just killed the US's largest solar project (6.2 GW in Nevada), ended USDA solar support for farms, and posted "We will not approve...Solar". So I wanted to check if California's battery story holds up.
The data is actually encouraging. Peak demand hit 48,323 MW in 2024 - higher than the 2020 blackout year's 47,121 MW [1]. Weather was severe: 2023 broke 358 California temperature records, 2024 saw valleys top 110°F during multiple heat waves [2][3]. Battery discharge reached 5-7 GW during Sept 2024 peaks, offsetting ~16% of demand [4]. That's real.
Fair caveat: 2020 had compounding failures (imports fell 3,000 MW short, gas plants failed, planning issues [5]), and recent years benefited from better coordination and wet winters. But batteries were clearly the biggest new factor - going from 500 MW in 2020 to 15,700 MW today is massive buildout, and it performed when tested.
Nice to see an existence proof that we can make progress on adapting to climate change's second-order effects, maybe even progress on root causes - through technology, at scale, in the United States of 2025.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
[2] https://news.caloes.ca.gov/extreme-heat-breaking-records-at-...
[3] https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/california-...
[4] https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/
[5] https://calmatters.org/environment/2020/08/california-2020-r...
- nickzelei - 32015 sekunder sedanWhat does it mean saying California hasn’t done a Flex Alert since 2022? PG&E issued 3-4 in September/October this year. Is that different?
- metabagel - 53730 sekunder sedan> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
- dxxvi - 40755 sekunder sedanDoes it make the electricity price go down or up? It seems to me that the electricity price never goes down.
- qaq - 44743 sekunder sedanCA has strange pockets of pretty well setup infra. Like Carlsbad has a desalination plant, and a modern standby ng power plant
- delabay - 43883 sekunder sedanInteresting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units (LFP chemistry) manufactured at Tesla’s Lathrop, CA “Megafactory.”
- msarrel - 41047 sekunder sedanWe're still going to have rolling blackouts because PGE turns the power off.
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- tjwebbnorfolk - 31091 sekunder sedan> ...leaving rolling blackouts behind
This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"
- standardUser - 51235 sekunder sedanThis is the way. It's become standard practice in China, which now leads to the world with half of all battery installations.
- nodesocket - 42341 sekunder sedan"leaving rolling blackouts behind..." I'll take this bet CA blackouts aren't over.
- 1970-01-01 - 31908 sekunder sedanNo, more coal and gas is the only way. /S
- NedF - 48041 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- batterystorage - 46223 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- dekerklas - 4422 sekunder sedan[flagged]
- andbberger - 35159 sekunder sedanand there was a huge fire at the moss landing plant which left heavy metals and god knows what else raining down onto sensitive marine mammal habitat. kayak up elkhorn slough and you'll encounter dozens of otters, seals... less than a kilometer from the battery plant.
I don't think we're going to be appreciating the environmental consequences of that accident for years. heavy metals don't decay, they'll be there forever.
a pox on david brouwer and his faux environmentalism, and the politics and economic machinations that ever proposed solar and batteries as an alternate to baseload fission plants. (in fact brouwer did his damage long before solar was ever practical, so he has even less ground to stand on)
- nandomrumber - 42342 sekunder sedan> they burn extremely hot and cannot be extinguished with water, which can trigger a violent chemical reaction. The blaze emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
> In the first six months of this year, CAISO’s grid was powered by 100% clean energy for an average of almost seven hours each day.
emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
100% clean energy