Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 363 posts

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#181

Post by nextworddev »

tooltalk wrote: post #77
WillPostForFood wrote: post #7

Earlier 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-...

China is adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity by the end of next year, or 180GW. These new installations don't replace old coal plants -- in H1 2025, China decomissioned only about 1GW. China is also increasing their coal footprint outside China despite their pledge not to[1]. 1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Nich…

Not sure why you are downvoted. Theres bot rings everywhere on the internet that downvote anything that mentions Chinese emissions

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#182

Post by slashdave »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #130
slashdave wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does rolling blackouts in California have to do with renewables? Opposite, really.

Renewables are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Also unless california has gone for lots of redundancy the would also be displacing fossil fuel power plants. Again i'm not trashing renewables, because what's wrong with free energy. What i am doing automatically is wondering why batteries are a better option then traditional power stations. California does have much more expensive electricity then anywhere else,…

You are being contradictory.

Solar is not intermittent (the sun shines every day). Making your grid reliable is expensive, thus drives costs.

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#184

Post by minitoar »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #177
jeffbee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the hail, I suppose.

I never thought about the impact of Texas hail storms on solar energy. Is there an industry standard practice to shield the panels during hail storms? Or do they use stronger glass? I am curious to learn more.

UL has a standard, this article goes into some details https://www.ul.com/news/manufacturers-say-hail-yes-solar-pan...

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#186

Post by diordiderot »

cheema33 wrote: post #110
xondono wrote: post #92

Earlier 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?

> Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?

France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#187

Post by Tade0 »

caminante wrote: post #173
mikeyouse wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I’m generally a nuclear proponent but one of the worst investments the French utility made was investing in the UKs reactor debacle at Hinkley C.

Per wiki, cost midrange is now 45 BEUR. That's ~14 MEUR/MW capacity (v. solar @ ~1MEUR/MW). Ouch!

To make matters worse gas peaker plants cost approximately €1mln/MW as well, so at the cost of that plant you could have massively overprovisioned solar, backup gas plants and plenty of money for fuel to spare which you wouldn't be spending immediately, so it could be invested instead.

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#188

Post by ziotom78 »

sgustard wrote: post #106
cbmuser wrote: post #63

The 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…

Quebec has them both beat. Hydro rules! https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-QC/5y/yearly (To be transparent, there's controversy around calling hydroelectric renewable.)

What strikes me is the fact that nuclear power has received an incredible amount of backslash after the Chernobyl incident (a few thousands deaths) and the Fukushima incident (one disputed death), but hydroelectric power is considered a "good" source of energy despite a few incredibly deadly incidents:

- Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]

- Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]

- Machchu (India, 1979): 5000 deaths [3]

- Vajont (Italy, 1963): 2000 deaths [4]

- Möhne dam (Germany, 1943): 1500 deaths [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_failure

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hne_Reservoir

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#189

Post by k1t »

mh- wrote: post #3

> 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…

I feel like the additional unstated context is that nothing has changed.

Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.

I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.

Re: California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

#190

Post by klempner »

nickzelei wrote: post #157

What 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?

Are you sure you're not thinking of "SmartDay" days that are part of the SmartRate program?

Flex Alerts are CAISO and ultimately about grid stability. SmartRate/SmartDay are ultimately about marginal cost of production on PG&E. The two are certainly correlated -- at the very least, a Flex Alert day is almost guaranteed to be a SmartDay.

Notably, the SmartRate program is capped at 15 days per year, and in practice PG&E will keep a few in reserve for surprise late season events, but even if there are no Flex Alert days they're still going to be called on electricity-is-expensive-even-if-the-grid-is-stable days.

Post reply on HN