California Invests in Battery Energy Storage, Leaving Rolling Blackouts Behind
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California's investment in battery energy storage has helped prevent rolling blackouts, but discussion highlights concerns about environmental impact, cost, and long-term reliability.
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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.gov/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.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. It's particularly easy when you have to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load. Retrofitting winterization is more expensive. If you build in support for winterization when you build the capacity in the first place (which is what happens with sane regulatory oversight), it's all quite inexpensive. It'd be one thing if the cold was a once a century surprise, but when you know you're going to have cold events multiple times over the lifetime of your equipment, it's really easy to do this right.
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.
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:
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.
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 and 2025 I didn't even bother installing it, the summers have been so mild.
https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...
That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.
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!
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/femp/hail-damage-mitigation-solar-pho...
Gardens and vinyl siding get shredded by hail and vehicles get smashed up, but solar panels generally do fine.
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.
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.
The demand lags the sunshine which is why it's a non-trivial problem.
when will it replace the headline in editorial importance?
Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.
I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.
If they are busy counting their profits instead of focusing on providing a safe, reliable service, then I think it's reasonable to be angry with them.
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.
Solar depresses the energy demand during the middle of the day. Energy storage smooths out the load profile.
I know folks in Phoenix who are on a time-of-day plan and they max out the AC overnight and then barely use it during the day (same goal, just they don't have solar)
I run the AC down to 64 overnight, and it's usually comfortable until well into the afternoon before it starts running at 73-74.
California did struggle with the duck curve but it’s less of a problem now. When the next heatwave comes, evening aircon demand won’t be a problem.
The point of my top-level comment was that we don't actually know that. Not yet.
I'll be thrilled if that's the case. I'll also be very surprised.
Will it handle an extended heatwave that also affects other states simultaneously? You’re right, we can’t know that with certainty until after it happens. But based on what I’ve read I’m confident it will.
It just has to help the problem.
Rooftop home solar+storage also doesn't have to SOLVE THE PROBLEM IN TOTALITY. It just has to help.
Energy is a cornucopia of solutions, which is a good thing. We aren't going to get everything from nuclear, it is far too expensive and can't function as a peaker (unless we had LFTR but oh well). Geothermal has a lot of potential, but it isn't perfect and probably investment heavy. Gas peaking is regrettable, but necessary currently. Solar and wind are by far the cheapest, but intermittent.
The goal should be stable, available, cheap energy. The path to that is solar + wind + battery + peaking + home solar/storage, but the grid monopolists aren't interested in cheap energy or the loss of control that home solar/storage comes with.
The fact that wind and solar are so cheap but grid prices are so expensive is an absolute SCANDAL.
Isn't that scenario a problem only when the output from solar is insufficient to meet the aggregate demand?
From a naive point of view, it looks like this issue would be easily mitigated if supply from solar was increased enough to allow energy to be stored during peak hours so that it could be introduced back in the grid during sunset. Why is this scenario being ignored in a thread on how California is investing in battery energy storage?
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
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.
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.
Much as I am against autocracy and oppression, china is doing very well at improving their energy sector.
Data, please?
China is also increasing their coal footprint outside China despite their pledge not to[1].
1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/09/china-on-course...
If i'm wrong about China and competely misreading the situation in california please let me know.
California does have much more expensive electricity then anywhere else, so it is reasonable for me to scrutinise their energy plans more closely and question whether their current strategy is really the best one.
Solar is not intermittent (the sun shines every day). Making your grid reliable is expensive, thus drives costs.
https://www.earthtechproducts.com/ecoflow-delta-pro-ultra-30...
"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
LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
LFP's thermal runaway threshold is higher than other lithium ion battery types, but once TR starts, LFP generates more hydrogen gas that can explode if not air-vented out fast enough.
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.
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?
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...
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 farms, on which black lithium smoke settled all over , over the course of several days/weeks in the middle of the summer.
Edit: maybe we are talking about the same fire? https://x.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1880277672393412848
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.
https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land...
As with all testing of this sort that I've ever seen, third parties do the testing and analysis.
I mention the air as an example of fear getting out waaaaaay in front of any risks. Testing the air would be pointless, 20 miles upwind. The metallic taste was either from other sources or psychosomatic.
The health risks of battery fires have been mostly evaluated in the context of fire fighting, where, air metals are a concern, but only in confined spaces. Nickel is the primary concern there. After reading about these, my only fears were for the workers for nickel production.
I am very very concerned about air quality, but the real risk there is from car traffic, specifically the tire microplastics and brake dust. There are big and measurable health effects from that, where even reducing traffic near schools by 10% could actually impact lives. However because people drive cars and are used to the bad health effects, nobody is scared of the negative health from cars. Instead the human mind focuses on new things because they are new, not because of the relative risk. For decades there were natural gas smokestacks pouring exhaust over the strawberry fields, the batteries that replaced them (to make use of the big power lines) are a huge improvement to human health, even with the fire.
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.
For grid storage? Source?
Also in US https://www.peakenergy.com/news
This calculus will probably change in 3-5 years, but today Sodium is more expensive and therefore has little demand without some form of discount or subsidy.
The switch will be rapid once the economics make sense, but they don't yet.
We are talking since early 2010 and on. And it's pretty much what everyone says they are: China has been breaking every trade/IP laws/agreements -- forced IP transfer/IP theft, ban foreign competition, illegal state subsidies to overcapacity, etc to get to where they are in the EV battery market.
But then China is a non-market-economy, so none of these rules apply in a hypothetical anti-dumping case -- ie, China's local price, or "normal value" doesn't matter.
IOW that they're illegally charging too much, not that they are illegally charging too little.
As explained, the price level or the cost of manufacture in China, the exporting country, is completely irrelevant as their local price/cost of manufacturer is artificially propped up by illegal state subsidies or other anti-market tactics to cripple foreign competition past 15 years. Again, China is a non-market-economy.
In those cases, trade regulators can use "undistorted" prices without gov't interference or use a market price in a similarly situated 3rd country as benchmark.
No need to pretend that Chinese EV/battery companies can compete on their own without the gov't protection or "illegal" subsidies.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-10-sodium-ion-battery-16505...
This got widely reported but there doesn't seem to be any source. I'll reference this video [1] to cover the claim along with a comparison to industry projections. Apologies for the video link but I don't have an article handy that addresses the topic as directly.
[1] https://youtu.be/KjiqqafD_0w?t=861
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-10-sodium-ion-battery-16505...
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.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
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.
They have no interest in doing good service but instead in making money. They don’t have to really answer to anyone. Supposedly the CA government could implement things to improve the lives of Californians that would influence how PG&E operates but CA politicians are bought off by this corporation. So, there we have it
PS The largest and 3rd largest holders of US equity are those CA public sector union pension funds. They have far deeper pockets than PG&E by at least 10x.
Which set things up so the money PG&E makes is a linear function in the money PG&E wastes. -- the regulations set a fixed profit margin, so to make more money PG&E need simply waste more money and pass the cost onto the public which is exactly what they are doing.
Depending on where you live you, your neighbors and/or your predecessors likely a) voted for people who wrote laws to make that illegal b) sneered at anyone who wouldn't want to be on the grid.
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?
You can both be right about this. PGE is subject to rural electrification mandates.
However, the way those mandates get satisfied can vary tremendously in cost, and because by regulation investor owned utilities are compensated as a % of their capex spend, there is an incentive to use more expensive solutions, especially when those solutions induce greater dependency on their transmission infrastructure.
Furthermore, apart from expensive bespoke off-grid setups, there is inherently no competition in transmission in distribution. It's a natural monopoly.
AFAIK, municipal utilities do not have any say over how IOU monopolies deploy capital, so why should they be subject to those costs?
If we feel that rural communities deserve electrical service (don't we all deserve it?), then perhaps those should be publicly owned/financed through taxes and a competitive bidding process by private entities, not shunted into uneven electricity rates.
I don't doubt that such people exist, but rural areas are also populated by people who are priced out of expensive urban centers. Furthermore, those two groups also probably have some overlap. I also agree that those people need to have skin in the game, but I don't see a way forward without compromise.
Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?
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.
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.
It's a story about California's battery storage. Tesla hasn't built all of that capacity.
For a Tesla (or other battery producer) press release? Sure. For an article about the general phenomenon? Irrelevant to the point that if it were included I'd be suspicious of the article being a plant.
Please don't do this.
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