Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units (LFP chemistry) manufactured at Tesla’s Lathrop, CA “Megafactory.”
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
#42I 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 co…
LG Energy Solution supplied the lithium-ion battery racks/modules (TR1300 using LG JH4 NMC cells) for Vistra’s initial 300 MW/1,200 MWh Moss Landing system; Fluence was the system integrator/GC.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#44> 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.
> sunshine linked demand
The demand lags the sunshine which is why it's a non-trivial problem.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#46I 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...
Criminally overpriced. We're not getting shit for it either. God forbid you live in any of the more woody parts of California either. You'll have to have your own battery or generator anyway. As someone who plans to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains long term, I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.
Why is PG&E so poorly run? I don't live there, just follow the news and their name comes up constantly in negative press.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to lack of regulations.
This is ignorant culture war politics and/or anti-Texasism. I should point out that cold temperatures place a huge demand on the grid because consumers don't want to winterize for the marginal once-a-decade blizzard any more than utilities; around half our homes have relatively inefficient resistance heaters as opposed to furnaces. We have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relati…
> ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. It's particularly easy when you have to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load. Retrofitting winterization is more expensive. If you build in support for winterization when you build the capacity in the first place (which is what happens with sane regulatory oversight), it's all quite inexpensive. It'd be one thing if the cold was a once a century surprise, but when you know you're going to have cold events multiple times over the lifetime of your equipment, it's really easy to do this right.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#48Relatedly, 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...
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#49Earlier 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-...
And smashing everything in Nuclear, whilst America turns to fossil fuels. Much as I am against autocracy and oppression, china is doing very well at improving their energy sector.
Much as I have problems with current administration, Chris Wright is doing an outstanding job working with industry to push forward next-gen nuclear. I have a lot of well-founded hope for huge progress assuming the next Secretary of Energy continues with this and the NRC backs off just a little.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#50There'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…
> It looks like it's relevant part of China's strategy
For grid storage? Source?