> 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:
While usage of aircon during heatwaves stressing the grid is a valid concern, I think massive increase in solar could offset it. Solar will also generate maximum energy during sunny days with minimal cloud cover, meaning there shouldn’t be a shortage of energy if there’s enough solar.
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.
I 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.
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.
Ultimately the California Legislature and the CPUC (and therefore the governor who appoints them) are at-fault for rates. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, and in-theory the regulators are supposed to drive value for ratepayers. But our regulators simply do not care and do not perform. The legislature has larded a bunch of redistribution onto rates, and burdened the regulator with a bunch of conflicting goals.
The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.
Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
Relatedly, 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.
It is only very recently that California started trying to decarbonize.
When France did their amazing nuclear build, it was for energy independence, not for decarbonization purposes. It was a very forward thinking move, even if it wasn't as cheap initially imagined and ended up being stopped before fully completed. It was a national security project.
However nuclear is cheap when the high upfront capital costs have been paid off, and it's down to just the operating expenses. Building it is oppressively expensive, however, especially as labor costs have risen in the many decades since the 1970s while.
As France's nuclear fleet ages out and needs to be replaced, it seems unlikely that they will be able to pull off a build of a second fleet. Their efforts at prototyping the next design, the EPR, have been fairly disastrous, with builds at Flamanville and in Finland going very poorly.
I suspect that Germany & California's current route to decarbonization through renewables will be followed by France in the coming decades.
> 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
When 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.
One 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.
and 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)
I'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.
43 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 61.8 ms ] threadFeels 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:
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.
"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.
https://www.epa.gov/ca/moss-landing-vistra-battery-fire
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.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.
Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
- 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.
https://www.pbssocal.org/news-community/l-a-s-long-troubled-...
It is only very recently that California started trying to decarbonize.
When France did their amazing nuclear build, it was for energy independence, not for decarbonization purposes. It was a very forward thinking move, even if it wasn't as cheap initially imagined and ended up being stopped before fully completed. It was a national security project.
However nuclear is cheap when the high upfront capital costs have been paid off, and it's down to just the operating expenses. Building it is oppressively expensive, however, especially as labor costs have risen in the many decades since the 1970s while.
As France's nuclear fleet ages out and needs to be replaced, it seems unlikely that they will be able to pull off a build of a second fleet. Their efforts at prototyping the next design, the EPR, have been fairly disastrous, with builds at Flamanville and in Finland going very poorly.
I suspect that Germany & California's current route to decarbonization through renewables will be followed by France in the coming decades.
https://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/energy-issues/braz...
> 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
However, price gouging by monopolies also exist. See Enron and their intentionally caused rolling brown-outs.
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)
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...
This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"