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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

#251

Post by zbrozek »

Lammy wrote: post #27

I 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...

Ultimately the California Legislature and the CPUC (and therefore the governor who appoints them) are at-fault for rates. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, and in-theory the regulators are supposed to drive value for ratepayers. But our regulators simply do not care and do not perform. The legislature has larded a bunch of redistribution onto rates, and burdened the regulator with a bunch of conflicting goals.

The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.

Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.

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

#253

Post by nullc »

energy123 wrote: post #43
redundantly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As if that were the choice...

In PG&E land we have extraordinarily expensive (e.g. hitting over 0.60$/kwh) electricity that has outages more often than Texas.

High prices go hand in hand with low reliability because the same incompetence and corruption results in both.

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

#254

Post by LogicFailsMe »

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)

Texas has rooftop solar, but it doesn't have the same incentives as California, and in fact, the Texas grid itself has a million little different franchises that repackage Centerpoint and/or Texas and New Mexico Power generated electricity with different usage plans you have to renew annually to semi-annually.

Our dear leader has been busy decimating small businesses that rely on federal incentives to build renewable power generation lately. This hit particularly hard in Texas.

The boss move is buying a plan with cheap to free electricity at night in exchange for a ludicrous day rate, bonus points for buying batteries to self-consume and/or charge at night as needed.

Going strictly by the numbers, it's a judgment call as to whether it's "worth it" or not, but the power independence for doing so is fantastic IMO YMMV. My Maslow hierarchy may not match yours.

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

#255

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

mpweiher wrote: post #247
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

France? France is increasing its nuclear output. And planning to build new plants. (Expanding nuclear generation was prohibited by law up until March of 2023). The added renewables help to make the nuclear plants more efficient and profitable, by taking up a good amount of the variable demand.

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.

The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

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

#256

Post by epistasis »

cm2187 wrote: post #223
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The batteries mentioned in the article have only a few hours of capacity, and are designed to smooth the peak usage intraday. I think many people are confused and seem to think batteries are a viable way to address the volatility of wind, where you may deal with weeks with no/low wind, or solar, which in countries with cold winters is of little help. I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal wi…

You don't need batteries with longer capacity in terms of power:energy ratio, you simply need more batteries.

Getting to France's level of nuclear decarbonization with batteries is cheap and easy with current prices. Using existing thermal plants for a few weeks a year and renewables for the rest is quite similar overall to France's mix.

What's challenging is the final 10%, 5%, and 1%. But it will take 15-20 years of deployment of our current cheap renewables+storage technology before we need to solve those final percents. In that time, technology will have advanced tremendously and we don't know what the cheapest solution will be, just that it will be cheaper than current tech. Plus it would take much longer than 15 years to even build nuclear in any significant quantity! France said a few years ago that they would be building handful of new reactors but I still have not seen progress!

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

#257

Post by LogicFailsMe »

sciencejerk wrote: post #192
slashdave wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The sun does not shine 24 hours a day. Therefore, if you want to run a power grid 24 hours a day, you need expensive batteries to hold energy collected during peak production. Fossil fuels can be burned continuously, lessening the need for energy storage

~$12,000 is expensive? I await your reasons why this is so with baited breath.

https://www.earthtechproducts.com/ecoflow-delta-pro-ultra-30...

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

#258

Post by boringg »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #230
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…

While usage of aircon during heatwaves stressing the grid is a valid concern, I think massive increase in solar could offset it. Solar will also generate maximum energy during sunny days with minimal cloud cover, meaning there shouldn’t be a shortage of energy if there’s enough solar. Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of ene…

It doesn't solve the problem- its the end of the day when solar has ramped down that the crises happens. Its the duck curve. Where its still hot and air conditioning is still running hard.

Solar depresses the energy demand during the middle of the day. Energy storage smooths out the load profile.

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

#259

Post by xondono »

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?

> Who is we here? Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?

Does it really matter? There’s always a first country to do anything.

It makes no sense actual exposure to radiation is increasing because of the lack of nuclear plants…

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

#260

Post by boringg »

epistasis wrote: post #249
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…

California has been an oil state from the beginning. To this day there is urban oil extraction over various parts of LA: https://www.pbssocal.org/news-community/l-a-s-long-troubled-... It is only very recently that California started trying to decarbonize. When France did their amazing nuclear build, it was for energy independence, not for decarbonization purposes. It was a very forward thinking move, even if it wasn…

I will counter this. I think theres going to be a significant work to push down the costs of re-powering the aging nuclear fleet.

Renewables will continue to be a force and work around the edges. Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence. Potentially but not certain future where other people are also purchasing nuclear assets which pushes down maintenance / manufacturing costs. Risk is that China deploys globally and is the operator. France isn't known for high quality - reasonably costed items - fast time line products.

As well - unspoken part of renewable is in case of a security incident in Europe (see Russia) - nuclear is much more stable work load then solar (could easily scatter bomb solar assets). I know that sounds unintuitive given peoples concern about Nuclear - but there is a such a common good to protect nuclear assets due to fallout where solar assets are localized.

Germany de-carbonization path (shutting down their nuclear plants) was a massive mistake and have seriously hindered their economic long run competitiveness. Its been a black eye for them.

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