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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

#211

Post by yurishimo »

themafia wrote: post #67
rconti wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The previous high was in 2006(!). Overall, statewide energy consumption seems to be flat or declining. In 2020, there were extremely high heat days in August, with wildfire smoke covering the state. Thankfully I was out of town, but my wife was suffering, unable to cool the house OR open a window. In 2021 or 2022 I finally broke down and bought a window-mounted AC unit for my office, as I work from home. In 2024…

Equipment dies and needs to be replaced. When that happens a more energy efficient unit is usually available and is often the best option for replacement. That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.

This definitely plays a huge factor. Even people who get airco for the first time are already beginning with a different mindset. They also tend to run the units very conservatively because they aren’t used to living in an air conditioned space and often find it uncomfortable after a certain point.

I moved to Western Europe from a US state where airco is mandatory. I purchased a split unit here and on the worst summer weeks, it still only cost me €10 to run the unit on its coldest setting for a week (almost continuously since I was using it with a fan to blow cooler air around the rest of the house). Back in the US, I had summer electricity bills of hundreds of dollars every year.

Sure, the weather is a bit more mild here, but there have been heat waves, and I’m definitely an outlier when it comes to usage. But that just goes to show how efficient these new units are!

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

#212

Post by amoshebb »

Manuel_D wrote: post #124

One 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 original sin was using watts not joules. Humans hear watts as “gallons” and “watt hours” as “gallons per hour” and all the rest of this confusion in every article about EVs/fast chargers/distribution/solar/everything all trace back to “X-Hours” and “X” incorrectly sounding like a rate and a count, not a count and a rate.

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

#213

Post by yurishimo »

rconti wrote: post #149
jeffbee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statewide grid demand is somewhat declining because distributed small-scale solar is massive. It now has an aggregate capacity of 20GW. This is usually ignored by people who are only looking at ERCOT v. CAISO grid statistics. Texas basically doesn't have any small-scale solar.

Are you saying Texas doesn't have much rooftop solar? That's surprising. I suppose largely due to low electricity costs making the investment not worth it? (And, I suspect, secondarily, utilities not really incentivizing it)

In Dallas where I grew up, it wasn’t necessarily rare but it wasn’t a given by any stretch. Maybe 10% of homes the last time I lived there (2022)? The neighborhood also made a difference.

Where I live now in the Netherlands, it feels like 30-40% of private homes have solar and 80%+ of business and government buildings that use more energy during the daylight hours so the payoff is much more realizable.

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

#214

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too).

So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.

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

#215

Post by energy123 »

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…

This shouldn't be confused for an argument to build new nuclear power in the year 2025 when far cheaper alternatives exist. It is an observation that nuclear works really well if it already exists and the fixed costs have been paid for, and that nuclear was the best choice a few decades ago.

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

#216

Post by ZeroGravitas »

qaq wrote: post #195
andbberger wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

farming with desal water is insane. even with abundant power.

why ? at scale desal water via solar looks to be very reasonable thing ?

Current legal setups generally actively encourage people to waste water that they have property rights to. It would be infinitely better return on investment to reform that and put proper incentives in place, rather than work around it with technology.

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

#218

Post by roman_soldier »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #59
hagbard_c wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid.

> That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid This is a good opportunity to calibrate your sense of truth. The LA Times is owned by this South African-born immigrant [1]. (Himself the the son of "Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation.") He is, like Elon, pro-Trump (after, like Musk, supporting Democrats when they were in power) [2]. And he, like Elon, has censore…

The LA Times famously a left leaning publication and its stories are written and edited by the employees who are likely to be anti Musk, Trump hating woke types. The owner is a business man and will let the editors write for the audience's biases.

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

#219

Post by ziotom78 »

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?

I was going to reply, but kakacik already said what I wanted.

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

#220

Post by KaiserPro »

jaggederest wrote: post #24
SoftTalker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over in fixed position arrays which will mitigate the risk of fire pretty substantially, being low density and liquid. It's challenging though not impossible to light salt water on fire.

> Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over

Its unlikley, they are a massive pain to manage compared to lithium, expensive and have poor round trip efficiency. Oh and terrible energy density.

I'm not saying its impossible, but I'd be surprised.

I think the biggest two factors that play against them is that they round trip efficiency is something like 70-80% compared to 90%+. but the real pain in the arse is the charge managment. From what I understand, you need to charge them to full, and then discharge them fully. I don't believe that you can charge from halfway.

Most power markets work in 30miunute chunks, so managing charging/discharging would be really hard.

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