California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by idiotsecant » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #178

idiotsecant wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generation and solar with storage How about wind?

Wind is good too!

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

#262

Post by lokar » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

zbrozek wrote: post #251

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 regula…

The regulators also fail to force proper long term maintenance.

IMO the issue is the board is appointed, and it’s just full of political allies.

We should fill boards like this with experts. For example, make a majority of the board be tenured professors of engineering and finance from the university of California with no financial connections to the industry.

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

#263

Post by epistasis » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

Hammershaft wrote: post #168

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?

'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.

$0.5B is a tiny rounding error in the cost of standing up the first GW of a new tech. If SMRs could be built for $10/W, which is overly optimistic, that would be $10B. Much more likely is $30B-$50B for that first GW. And SMRs are not even going to start getting to a halfway competitive cost until at least several GW in. If they can eventually get to $5/W they might have a chance at competing for a fraction of the grid.

All this is to say that if there are high costs imposed by regulation, it's not the regulatory process it's in the cost of building the final design.

However, the "regulations make nuclear expensive" folks never seem to be able to propose the changes that might make nuclear cheaper, or by how much. The only concrete proposals I have heard are from people skeptical that nuclear can ever be cost competitive!

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

#264

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #260

epistasis wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

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

The EPR2 costs just keeps spiraling. They haven't even started building yet or been able to agree on how to finance the subsidies.

This is the same France that less than a month ago had another government collapse due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem and being unable to agree on how to fix it.

A massive handout to the nuclear industry sounds like just the right plan!

It is also funny that you mention Russia. You do know that the EU despite 19 sanction packages haven't been able to agree on sanctions for the Russian nuclear industry. We still are too reliant on it.

Germany was able to quickly phase out Russian fossil gas, while france keeps being EUs no. 1 importer of Russian LNG.

But I do love blaming everything on Germany. So much easier.

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

#265

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #246

disentanglement wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is Fukushima generally attributed to the Tsunami or to nuclear power?

Does that really matter? The cleanup costs are still socialized.

It is time we move on from the fossil tradition of socialized losses on private profits [1] and instead let the nuclear industry bear their true insurance cost.

No externalizing of costs like today.

[1]: https://www.imo.org/en/about/conventions/pages/international...

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

#266

Post by epistasis » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #159

labrador wrote: post #12

I remember the bad old days of rolling black outs when Enron was doing energy arbitrage with Calfifornia's electricity. A more recent negative event was the battery fire at Moss Landing on the Monterrey Bay near where I live. If we use Sodium-ion batteries in the future we won't have that risk. "On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey Co…

People don’t talk enough about the risk of fire. The crazy thing is when a battery installation catches fire they don’t actually fight the fire. They just have to let it burn out. The resulting environmental damage is terrible. This happened recently in the Central Valley. I can’t remember the name of the battery site but it was a huge one, and literally right next door to one of the largest Driscolls strawberry farm…

Correct, it wasn't the Central Valley, it was Moss Landing.

Though there were lots of fears about the fire, the biggest risk was that the battery was destroyed. There has been ongoing soil testing and not much found, in this worst case situation of a battery fire.

It is definitely fueling fears, however! A few highly motivated individuals put up big hand painted signs in their neighborhoods decrying the evils of batteries, and the terrible fires they cause. It's enough fear mongering that visitors to popular beaches 20 miles upwind, were imagining metallic tastes in the air months afterwards.

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

#267

Post by kangs » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

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…

hey you aren't supposed to notice :)

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

#268

Post by philipkglass » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

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.

France doesn't have any new reactors under construction. Its annual nuclear generation peaked in 2005:

    ~/git/iaea-pris % sqlite3 pris_data.db
    sqlite> select year, sum(electricity_supplied_gwh) from reactor_statistics, reactor_operating_history where reactor_statistics.reactor_id=reactor_operating_history.reactor_id and country_code='FR' and year > '1999' group by year;

    year  sum(electricity_supplied_gwh)
    ----  -----------------------------
    2000  395392.3                     
    2001  401256.49                    
    2002  415110.33                    
    2003  421028.62                    
    2004  428040.69                    
    2005  431179.56                    
    2006  429819.63                    
    2007  420129.49                    
    2008  419800.32                    
    2009  391752.97                    
    2010  410086.42                    
    2011  423509.48                    
    2012  407437.88                    
    2013  405898.51                    
    2014  418001.4                     
    2015  419035.02                    
    2016  386452.88                    
    2017  381846.02                    
    2018  395908.34                    
    2019  382402.75                    
    2020  338735.78                    
    2021  363394.15                    
    2022  282093.23                    
    2023  323773.23                    
    2024  364390.78

France is planning new EPR2 reactors, but no construction is expected to start before 2027 and none would run before the 2030s. I put little trust in announcements of future plans without actual construction work, whether the plans are for nuclear reactors, wind farms, data centers, or any other major investment.

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

#269

Post by hammock » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #266

hammock wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t talk enough about the risk of fire. The crazy thing is when a battery installation catches fire they don’t actually fight the fire. They just have to let it burn out. The resulting environmental damage is terrible. This happened recently in the Central Valley. I can’t remember the name of the battery site but it was a huge one, and literally right next door to one of the largest Driscolls strawberry farm…

Correct, it wasn't the Central Valley, it was Moss Landing. Though there were lots of fears about the fire, the biggest risk was that the battery was destroyed. There has been ongoing soil testing and not much found, in this worst case situation of a battery fire. It is definitely fueling fears, however! A few highly motivated individuals put up big hand painted signs in their neighborhoods decrying the evils of batt…

Did they test the air or just the soil? You mentioned they imagined the taste of the air but didn’t mention if they actually tested the air. And who tests it?

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

#270

Post by epistasis » Sun, Oct 26, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #260

epistasis wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

> Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence.

If the goal is energy independence, renewables will provide that more cheaply. If the goals are the other side effects of nuclear power: isotopes, national pride (Curie!), workforce augmentation for nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, then these goals also require far fewer reactors than enough to power the entire country.

I do not doubt that there may be some level of nuclear power in the future. But I would take a long bet that in 2050, France is closer to 0% nuclear power than it is to the current level. (That phrasing is confusing, but I think the fraction of nuclear power will be less than half its current amount)