> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.
California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
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Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#12I 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.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#13> 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…
> 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.) This is underselling it, if anything. The multi-day heatwave around Labor Day 2022 extended across most of the western US, not just California. T…
I didn't want to overstate it given I wasn't bringing any data to the conversation, but your account matches my recollection as well.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#14> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.
And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to lack of regulations.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is a mixed bad, they also lead the world in new coal power plants. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Less mixed than the states, more manufacturing and install momentum for renewables and far lower kwh install costs. So many people told me 10 years ago we shouldn't even bother trying to reduce global emissions because China would burn us all to the ground. So many brain dead takes.
Now I just think about where those takes started and all roads always lead back to the same culprits. Your parents and the hillbillies don’t come up with these takes on their own, they always starts somewhere and benefit the person whispering it in their ear.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-piv...
> The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer.
> This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#16I 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 Co…
Any time you have hundreds of megawatts of energy stored in a small area there is risk. This includes steam boilers, nuclear reactors, batteries, dams, etc. No getting away from that. Not saying that some battery chemistry might not be easier to manage than others.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#17I 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 Co…
The reports I read said this was an older installation - was that one setup in the same way as a modern plant would be done? That is to say - was there anything unique about this failure scenario?
The pictures I saw was that the Moss batteries were located inside a building. My mental image of battery storage is freight-sized containers offset from each other - presumably to minimize fire risk. Or was this plant a common dense configuration that is done in areas where they are heavily space constrained?
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#18This is the way. It's become standard practice in China, which now leads to the world with half of all battery installations.
China is a mixed bad, they also lead the world in new coal power plants. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
That's 2023. As of today they are expected to hit peak fossil fuel usage and start declining within the year.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/09/china-on-course...
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#19> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.
Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC + industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#20> 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…
With current technology getting through long days of sunshine linked demand is not an achievement worthy of celebration.