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California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind

latimes.com

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

#201

Post by madaxe_again »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #197
ziotom78 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] -…

I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled. Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern. In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters. The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs. Just build ren…

As you say, dams are a net positive, and while failures do happen, these days we tend to be wiser about where we put PHES in particular.

I guess I’m surprised it isn’t more of an option for California - the U.K. uses Snowdonia as a giant battery, and afaik there’s been one failure of a dam that wiped half of trefriw off the map a century ago - which wasn’t hard as it’s a speck of a place. Since then the lakes have pretty reliably and safely provided somewhere to stick excess energy, and now are largely pumped by the offshore wind arrays nearby.

California has big mountains, but I’m not sure if the geology or terrain is right for PHES.

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

#202

Post by disentanglement »

ziotom78 wrote: post #188
sgustard wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] -…

Did you really just attribute the deaths from a bombing raid on a dam during WW2 to a hydropower incident?

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

#203

Post by oezi »

thakoppno wrote: post #179
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…

> the URL slug when will it replace the headline in editorial importance?

Usually slug, headline and teaser are all considered important parts to optimize. My wife works for a big online news company and while news journalists write headline and teaser, they have editors in chief who edit those again and a separate SEO team who will assign slugs.

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

#204

Post by jillesvangurp »

random3 wrote: post #26

There'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…

Sodium ion production is only recently starting to ramp up. It will take a few years for that to put a dent into LFP marketshare (both for grid storage and EVs). China is a bit ahead of course. CATL just announced they are starting mass production of their second generation battery in December. It will take a while for that factory to get to full speed production. And if they are building more factories, that will also take a while. Think 10s of ghw production short term.

The US only recently got volume production of LFP working. A lot of the battery production there is still older chemistries based on NMC. Companies like Peak Energy are indeed experimenting with sodium ion and are looking pretty good right now. But they don't have any mass production facilities yet. That's years away at best.

I expect there may be some licensing deals with Chinese manufacturers down the line to address this. Sodium ion might become a lot more dominant from 2030 onward. Until then, LFP should remain dominant.

And with LFP being quite decent already, there's no need to wait until the 2030s with large scale grid storage deployments. This stuff works right now. That's why adoption is so high and rapid around the world.

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

#205

Post by oezi »

MaxL93 wrote: post #136
derriz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity prices are set by the French government not the wholesale cost or cost of production. Which is why EDF - the operator of the French nuclear fleet - regularly posts massive losses. Like the €18 billion loss in 2023. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...

It should be noted that most of EDF's massive losses are due to the ARENH. The European Union insists that EDF must sell energy at very discounted prices, so that third-party "providers" can make an entry on the energy market. The idea was that they would eventually sell their own energy supply, but most just pocketed the difference between the dirt-cheap energy & what they charged customers, then ran away the moment…

I skimmed your posts but they don't blame EU rules. Can you point to EU regulation which caused this?

ARENH looks like a mechanism by which France wanted to entice competition in end customer sales (and distribution?) of electricity.

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

#206

Post by oezi »

idiotsecant wrote: post #174
sgustard wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I am a bit biased, as an engineer who works exclusively in hydro powerplants, but i think they're awesome too. With that said, it's becoming more apparent that in addition to the biosphere issues they cause, they also cause a pretty significant amount of methane to be released. https://www.hydropower.org/blog/new-study-sheds-light-on-res... It would put me out of a job but I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generat…

The linked article doesn't put these emissions in relation to anything. It is hard to imagine it to be a relevant amount of emissions, right?

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

#207

Post by kakacik »

disentanglement wrote: post #202
ziotom78 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] -…

Did you really just attribute the deaths from a bombing raid on a dam during WW2 to a hydropower incident?

If a nuclear reactor was bombed during the war, would the resulting deaths be counted as a nuclear disaster and used as argument against it, or just another war crime? Depends who you ask I'd say.

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

#208

Post by oezi »

diordiderot wrote: post #186
cheema33 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Since when does Poland have a significant nuclear power generation program?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland

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

#209

Post by blackoil »

dylan604 wrote: post #32
NedF wrote: post #21

[flagged]

random whacko comments >Come back in 5 years time when the batteries are 10 years old and failing like the bridges and schools and universities. This however is a valid point to make. In my experience with battery systems, regular maintenance and replacing failed units is one of the things that people are quick to not do on preventative schedule. Instead, they wait until the unit is completely dead and then gasp at t…

Unless all batteries are installed at once and will fail after a fixed duration it won't be a big issue. After 10-20 year 2-5% batteries will fail and will have to be replaced, along with any new capacity addition. We can emphasise on diversifying the supply chain or having multiple technologies so that a Covid like scenario doesn't completely conks the system, but it isn't much different from any other system we use. And in case of battery, we actually get a real-time info about its health and so can easily calculate capacity of the system. Batteries go from 90% to 0% in extremely rare case.

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

#210

Post by throwaway2037 »

minitoar wrote: post #184
throwaway2037 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The title of the article gave me a real laugh!

    > Manufacturers Say Hail Yes to Solar Panel Testing
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