[HN Gopher] California invests in battery energy storage, leavin...
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California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling
blackouts behind
https://web.archive.org/web/20251025210426/https://www.latim...
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 100 points
Date : 2025-10-25 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| metabagel wrote:
| > California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top
| state for battery storage.
| zanon234 wrote:
| I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future.
| California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory
| hurdles and permit issues.
| redundantly wrote:
| And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to
| lack of regulations.
| landl0rd wrote:
| This is ignorant culture war politics and/or anti-Texasism.
|
| I should point out that cold temperatures place a huge
| demand on the grid because consumers don't want to
| winterize for the marginal once-a-decade blizzard any more
| than utilities; around half our homes have relatively
| inefficient resistance heaters as opposed to furnaces.
|
| We have a lot more growth in the past few years than most
| other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big
| state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than
| small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024
| levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.go
| v/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg
|
| So no wonder our reserve margins run thinner when we're
| already having to build at such speed just to keep pace
| with regular demand.
|
| Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to
| supplement generation capacity and is taking some
| leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable
| base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is
| going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much,
| this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with
| reasonable control and oversight.
|
| ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things
| considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization
| for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new
| generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline
| load.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC +
| industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would
| have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.
| mh- wrote:
| _> 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 AC
| even if they wouldn't have otherwise.)
|
| _> It was only five years ago that a record-shattering heat wave
| pushed the grid to its limit and plunged much of the state into
| darkness._
|
| They mention it here, but then don't talk about whether similar
| circumstances have been faced since. Don't get me wrong, this is
| encouraging, but the article invited this kind of reaction by
| putting "leaving rolling blackouts behind" in the title.
|
| Funny enough, if you look at the article's original title via the
| URL slug, it was much more measured: california-
| made-it-through-another-summer-without-a-flex-alert
| vondur wrote:
| Yeah, I think you are correct, 2022 was a hot summer with a
| September heat wave which broke some records for power demand.
| Also keep in mind that there was a big increase in hydropower
| generation in 2023 and 2024 due to the really wet/snowy winter
| seasons.
| khuey wrote:
| > 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 AC even if
| they wouldn't have otherwise.)
|
| This is underselling it, if anything. The multi-day heatwave
| around Labor Day 2022 extended across most of the western US,
| not just California. The electricity demand during that event
| set what was at the time the all time record for the entire
| Western Interconnection (since surpassed in 2024) and set what
| is still today the all time record for CAISO.
| mh- wrote:
| I didn't want to overstate it given I wasn't bringing any
| data to the conversation, but your account matches my
| recollection as well.
| chaostheory wrote:
| There's also the more forgiving fire season in some areas. This
| is relevant since a lot of the power transmission goes through
| forests and nature preserves.
| blitzar wrote:
| With current technology getting through long days of sunshine
| linked demand is not an achievement worthy of celebration.
| standardUser wrote:
| This is the way. It's become standard practice in China, which
| now leads to the world with half of all battery installations.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| 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-...
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Less mixed than the states, more manufacturing and install
| momentum for renewables and far lower kwh install costs.
|
| So many people told me 10 years ago we shouldn't even bother
| trying to reduce global emissions because China would burn us
| all to the ground. So many brain dead takes.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Now I just think about where those takes started and all
| roads always lead back to the same culprits. Your parents
| and the hillbillies don't come up with these takes on their
| own, they always starts somewhere and benefit the person
| whispering it in their ear.
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-
| piv...
|
| > The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of
| its electricity coming from renewables by late summer.
|
| > This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry,
| which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of
| centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the
| oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground.
| (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of
| over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the
| dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this
| must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and
| astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate
| change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest,
| those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as
| stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land
| rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of
| dollars.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Just because they built it doesn't mean it gets used:
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-
| bu...
| tootie wrote:
| That's 2023. As of today they are expected to hit peak fossil
| fuel usage and start declining within the year.
|
| https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/09/china-on-
| course...
| standardUser wrote:
| The expectation being that they should instead endure energy
| shortages for the common good until their renewable
| installations catch up with demand? A high bar, especially
| for a nation with a greater share of its electricity from
| renewables than most US states.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| And smashing everything in Nuclear, whilst America turns to
| fossil fuels.
|
| Much as I am against autocracy and oppression, china is doing
| very well at improving their energy sector.
| Herring wrote:
| They installed so much wind and solar their CO2 emissions
| actually peaked in ~2024 (way ahead of the official 2030
| target) and have been declining ever since.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Much as i dislike China i feel they are pragmatic. I don't know
| if it's justified but i always give them the benefit of the
| doubt that they don't do stupid things for no good reason.
| Unlike Western nations who have to please voters and look good,
| China has no such constraints and are far more transactional.
| They don't care about climate emissions. At all. If they think
| something will be good for them and their economy, they will do
| it. Another thing is that they take big risks, again they are
| beholden to nobody so they can. I think the way forward is to
| be realistic and honest. If renewables are cheaper we should go
| for them, why not? It's free. If not, not. Frankly having
| rolling blackouts in california is not a great argument for
| having more renewables, unless i'm missing something. It might
| be something for politicians to boast about next time they jet
| acrosss the world to attend self serving climate summits, but
| it doesn't help ordinary people. More fossil power plants would
| be more reliable then renewables. Trump has a special dislike
| for green energy and i don't understand why, but it's obvious
| that if it can't compete, or come at least close to fossil
| fuels and nuclear then that should be fully acknowledged.
|
| If i'm wrong about China and competely misreading the situation
| in california please let me know.
| labrador wrote:
| 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 County,
| Calif.) caught fire."
|
| - The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion
| batteries. - About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by
| the fire.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/ca/moss-landing-vistra-battery-fire
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I thought the prospects for flow batteries were becoming
| fairly dire due to the decline in cost of Li-ion cells.
|
| LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion
| technologies, I think.
| amitav1 wrote:
| "Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today"
| jonlucc wrote:
| This is an inherent problem with storing power. There's a
| massive battery in Missouri known as the Taum Sauk
| hydroelectric dam. During the night, they pump water up the
| hill into the upper reservoir, and in the day, they let the
| water run downhill through turbines to generate electricity.
| In 2005, the wall of the upper reservoir failed.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| The reports I read said this was an older installation - was
| that one setup in the same way as a modern plant would be done?
| That is to say - was there anything unique about this failure
| scenario?
|
| The pictures I saw was that the Moss batteries were located
| inside a building. My mental image of battery storage is
| freight-sized containers offset from each other - presumably to
| minimize fire risk. Or was this plant a common dense
| configuration that is done in areas where they are heavily
| space constrained?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The moss landing project has been expanded through several
| iterations. It started construction back in 2019 which is
| near ancient in terms of how fast the BESS industry has
| evolved.
|
| Utilizing NMC cells which were popular at the time instead of
| the more stable LFP variety making up the vast majority of
| storage projects today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Landing_Power_Plant#Batte.
| ..
| NedF wrote:
| California reduces gonorrhea in 7 years olds to all time lows?
|
| A band-aid on a problem non-existent in first world countries
| like China or 1990's California /hyperbole
|
| Come back in 5 years time when the batteries are 10 years old and
| failing like the bridges and schools and universities.
|
| We are in time of plenty and blowing the chance to set ourselves
| up for the future with infrastructure and saving eco-systems.
| Learn Chinese.
|
| State electricity costs - https://www.energybot.com/electricity-
| rates/#:~:text=Highest...
| dylan604 wrote:
| <snip>random whacko comments</snip>
|
| >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 the cost of battery
| replacement. Based on how companies like PG &E not do regular
| maintenance on their lines, it doesn't bode well for the
| batteries.
| stavros wrote:
| To be fair, they were all valid points to make. The gonorrhea
| thing just kind of set the tone wrong.
| random3 wrote:
| 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 most
| relevant aspect wrt to the future of battery-based storage.
| Lammy wrote:
| I don't really care if the power stays on for five-nines as long
| as I'm still paying 61C//kW-h for it :/
|
| https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
| blindriver wrote:
| This. Electricity costs are almost 5x the cost in Nevada.
| bradlys wrote:
| Criminally overpriced. We're not getting shit for it either.
|
| God forbid you live in any of the more woody parts of
| California either. You'll have to have your own battery or
| generator anyway. As someone who plans to live in the Santa
| Cruz Mountains long term, I will be going completely off grid
| as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.
| qaq wrote:
| CA has strange pockets of pretty well setup infra. Like Carlsbad
| has a desalination plant, and a modern standby ng power plant
| delabay wrote:
| Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack
| 2 XL units (LFP chemistry) manufactured at Tesla's Lathrop, CA
| "Megafactory."
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