> ...leaving rolling blackouts behind
This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"
California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
161–170 of 363 posts
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#162One 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.
This also greatly annoyed me. 4 hours is the standard for grid storage batteries in California.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#163One 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.
As someone who's interested in all this, I agree it would be nice to have more precision around capacity. Especially as it relates to longer term storage. But! In this context, output is more salient than capacity. You'll see a lot of stories about grid-scale storage that use output. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/854999 offers a fuller explanation than what I'll give here.)
This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.
Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.
Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)
Hope this helps ease the peeve!
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#164One 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.
The ratio for LiFePO4 is between 1:3 and 1:4.
So rated power will give you that for about 3 to 4 hours.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think power infrastructure and supplying the electrons that jiggle on it are any sort of example of free market capitalism I have a bridge to sell you.
It's a publicly traded company. Feel free to do your research.
PG&E is a public utility. Everything they do down to department budgets are decided by state regulators. I imagine almost everyone on this board already knew that PG&E was a publicly traded company. But just because they are a publicly traded company, that doesn't mean that they get to do anything they want. It just means their stock can be bought and sold by others, in the case of PG&E its mostly owned by public sector union pension funds. So it is a quasi-public utility owned by government workers in a highly regulated market. The idea its some sort of paragon of capitalism is absurd. Just about anything they do can be traced back to a decision made by an appointed state government body.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s a public company, not run directly by the government. It has a monopoly dictated by the CA government. They have no interest in doing good service but instead in making money. They don’t have to really answer to anyone. Supposedly the CA government could implement things to improve the lives of Californians that would influence how PG&E operates but CA politicians are bought off by this corporation. So, there we…
PG&E is a utility. The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators. And the idea that PG&E buys CA politicians is laughable. The state worker's unions pension funds control CA state politics. They are the ones that donate the most money, PG&E doesn't even get a seat at the metaphorical table.
PS The largest and 3rd largest holders of US equity are those CA public sector union pension funds. They have far deeper pockets than PG&E by at least 10x.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?
How do you think SVP buys energy from its contracted generators? They don't own transmission from those places (unlike SMUD which, to an incomplete extent, actually does own its generating assets and transmission lines). SVP pays regulated wholesale distribution rates to PG&E to get access to their contracted generators. But the process determining such rates ignores the way that wildfire liability is assigned to PG&…
> PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out
Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices. Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns..
> Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns Who is we here? Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?
'We' could refer to democratic societies that regulate nuclear energy with absurdly stringent standards beyond how we regulate other forms of energy. Just the regulatory cost of approving a new small reactor design exceeds 500 Million Dollars! That's the lifetime earnings of thousands of engineers and bureaucrats.
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#169There'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?
Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
While Sodium Ion may be the future of grid batteries, it's not the present. As long as LFP is cheaper, there is no reason to go with Sodium. This calculus will probably change in 3-5 years, but today Sodium is more expensive and therefore has little demand without some form of discount or subsidy. The switch will be rapid once the economics make sense, but they don't yet.
CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh. If that ends up even partway true it'll completely change the economics of power storage.
> CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.
This got widely reported but there doesn't seem to be any source. I'll reference this video [1] to cover the claim along with a comparison to industry projections. Apologies for the video link but I don't have an article handy that addresses the topic as directly.