California’s giant new batteries kept the lights on during the heat wave | Hacker News Reader

California’s giant new batteries kept the lights on during the heat wave

latimes.com

73 pointsgamblor95615 comments

> None of this happened by accident. California began investing in solar power more than 20 years ago and passed Assembly Bill 2514, the nation’s first legislative grid energy storage mandate, in 2010. Gov. Gavin Newsom has also pushed to get more clean energy assets on the state’s grid. These long-term efforts are paying off for California — and have shown the world what’s possible.

This puts the "California banned non-EVs and their grid collapsed" takes into perspective. 12 years ago grid energy storage was seen as a bit odd, 12 years later (i.e. today) it's kind of obvious, what will we think in 2035 when we can no longer buy new ICE Vehicles?

Another way to think about it: by 2035, any new vehicle sold in California must also double as electricity storage.

There were some Texans who rather appreciated having an EV during the February 2021 deep freeze driven blackout. Not great for long distance driving, amazing for keeping warm and charging phones: https://electrek.co/2021/03/05/electric-cars-texas-blackout/

I agree with the benefits you cite, but isn’t the problem that EVs are still too expensive for most people?

Additionally, what is the plan to build a grid that can actually support mass EV adoption? There seems to be very little talk about this.

The people for whom they're too expensive will do what people who can't afford/stomach the price of buying new already do: buy used. Those are allowed to be ICEs even after 2035. They might drive used car demand from neighboring states or other parts of the country for a few years. The old saying "it loses 20% of its value when you drive it off the lot" may be over longer than just the current supply chain crunch.

I've never bought a new car, and I'm a well-paid software engineer (by German standards) married to an engineering manager, who has also never bought a new car, or any car that cost more than 17k EUR (post-baby, lightly-used station wagon, August 2021).

EVs have come down in price and grown in variety over the past decade; I expect that our next vehicle will be a used EV, or at least a plug-in hybrid.

Many EU countries have set similar deadlines for new ICE sales. I imagine that countries with 2035 deadlines will still have some public gas pumps around throughout the 2040's - pumps providing the 50:2 mix Trabants need are still around at some filling stations in the former East Germany, and those haven't been made since the early 90s.

A very great deal of solar and wind generating capacity will need to be built out in any case.

EVs get cheaper all the time.

Related article that provides more detail about the grid storage buildout: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-grid-operator-en...

Tangentially... Most California solar farms under construction today are sited, rather stupidly, in deserts. Why stupidly? Because deserts are hot and dusty, conditions that curtail output and shorten panel life. Why build there anyway? Ignorant investors still think it's a great idea.

Siting over water, though, really is a great idea. Healdsburg, near Santa Rosa, floated a big array very successfully. Construction on a canal near Modesto has begun; official estimate is that solar built out on California canals would yield 12 GW, save millions of gallons lost to evaporation, cut biofouling, and provide protected habitat for wildlife underneath.

Singapore is well ahead on this.

Sacramento delta "islands" could be easily converted to floating solar farms, eliminating the major ecological threat of failing dikes, and resuming sequestration of carbon in peat bogs underneath.

Storage, the actual topic, seems to generate confusion on the level of the investors favoring desert solar farms. Most of California's "batteries" are not batteries, but reservoirs high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, built starting in the 1920s, connected to water wheels at the bottom of penstocks thousands of feet below. They are turned into storage simply by attaching an electric pump to the penstock. Of course you can float solar on those reservoirs, too.

Chemical batteries are the expensive storage alternative. There won't be very much of that, except in cars, because they are expensive; or anyway will be until new and much cheaper chemistry matures. Promising chemistries include zinc/bromine, antimony/calcium, and iron/air, all of which are at the stage where manufacturing capacity is being built out.

There are plenty of other storage alternatives, of varying maturity. Compressed air storage is deployed at industrial scale successfully, and is extremely mature technology. Liquified air is similar; efficient air liquidation had a long industrial pedigree before its adoption for storage. Synthesizing hydrogen to keep underground is somewhat less mature, but that mainly means conversion efficiency (E => H2) is soaring, and lately exceeded 90%. Ammonia synthesis is attractive because tankage is cheap and very transportable, and it may be burned in already paid-for combined-cycle turbines. Expect solar and wind farms in favorable spots to produce industrially huge stocks of ammonia for export, eliminating need for any seasonal storage.

Underground and underwater gravitic storage is still in prototyping phase, but the tech involved is centuries old, involving winches and water pumps. One especially promising relies on buoyancy, winching floats down to seabed-mounted pulleys.

Land is cheap in the desert, there's often only a small town or two in the vicinity to deal with as far as limitations on directions you can build infra in, and no one moved to the desert for the view (Yes yes, someone's going to chime in that they did but in the real world it's the people moving close to the sea who are doing it for the view typically). So even if panels wear out faster in the desert there's a lot of appealing factors still.

In the desert, you typically have to build expensive transmission lines out to the site to get the power to where you actually want it.

So, (1) you have to acquire single-use land, (2) the panels produce half as much power as they could because of heat and dust, (4) the panels' life is curtailed by the high temperature, and (4) you have to build a long transmission line back to someplace populated.

There is no question but that panels in the desert can work. But it is a poor use of a panel that could produce much more power, more cheaply, longer.

Lately, I have only read about how the system was about to collapse and we should be ready for rolling blackouts. I'm happy to read this article since it's some of the best news I've read for a while. It gives me an understanding that there's a way to move forward. I'm glad to know that there are people that are managing the grid and are looking forward to see what might come. They aren't just waiting until the system falls a part. Thanks for posting.

I think California tends to be consciousness of supplying enough electricity to it's population because electrical outages were probably the deciding factor in sending governor Gray Davis home early. This sent a very clear message to the government as to what the population actually wants. Keep the lights on. (as opposed to what they think they want, leading to the buffoonery found in most California bills)

There were news stories a few years ago critical of how California had way too much generating capacity. My thoughts at the time were similar, the people had spoken very emphatically 15 years earlier that they want the power to be kept on, the excessive generating capacity was the government doing that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis

Manufactured electrical outages were used to remove Gray Davis from office.

The crooked system they used ran up a fake bill of $80+ billion, which Davis refused to pay. Schwarzenegger made the state pay it, which he must have promised in exchange for being made governor.

Manufactured electrical outages were used to remove Gray Davis from office.

i.e. manufactured by energy-traders, primarily at Enron[0], as described on the Wikipedia page about this California electricity crisis[1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

Sounds like we are going to need more Lithium mines.

You know what I love? When I’m reading an article and the site throws a pop up in my face. No wait I hate that.

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