California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries
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thinc.blog
For grid storage second hand batteries might be fine. If taking them out of a scrapped car is feasible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqlOlqK_ot8
2nd life use cases for cheap, mass produced batteries like this are more common than you think.
- Removed EV subsidy
- Scrapped Lake Onslow seasonal pumped hydro storage
- Removed generational smoking ban (made it to 18yo like most countries)
- Gave 50% discount to heated tobacco products (aka IQOS)
- Gave a tip whose projects will be fast tracked
- Reduced housing insulation minimums
- Terminated new inter-island ferry project to replace aging ferries (tbh this one was getting out of proportion)
- Reintroduced tax interest write-off for landlords who rent their houses
- Removed free school launches for poorest country schools
Their goal was to end government spending, but giving $2b+ to countries richest people seems opposite.
And to give them credit here's couple of good things that will definitely help property market:
- Ability to import abroad-certified building supplies (atm there's a building supply monomopoly)
- Ability to build up 60sqm backyard homes without consent
- Densification plans
The first location I looked at (link is not working :(), it relies on building two dams on rivers (which is something we tend to do less not more) and would flood some houses ...
And there is supposedly a price estimate, but it's just an A, B, C, D or E ranking could not find some costs to make comparison with battery storage for example.
Bear lake Idaho has been talking about putting in pumped storage since the 2000s. On paper, it's pretty much the perfect geography for it. However, various concerns from the impact on local fishing to the impacts on the lakebed have ground that process to a halt. It's a 20+ year project that's gone nowhere.
That's why I'm largely negative on pumped hydro. On paper it seems nice, in practice it's almost impossible to get off the ground. Batteries, on the other hand, take almost no effort to install.
Yup. It might be possible to overbuild solar/wind to solve the problem (just need enough juice to offset the night). Won't be possible with current chemistries to have enough power to cover cloudy days or snow-covered solar panels.
> it seems while folks have been gnashing teeth on how expensive they are
This to me seems like a fixed perception based on outdated information. Batteries were quite expensive and required loads of rare earth/horrible chemicals to produce... 30 years ago when NiCd was fairly prominent. Now they are dirt cheap and due to get even cheaper with sodium ion coming to market. We are already manufacturing TWh of batteries yearly. Enough that we could theoretically have a full day backup everywhere in 10 to 20 years without any growth in manufacturing capacity.
Do you mean peak powerplants will become obsolete? As far as I know, in many places peak powerplants are hydroelectric, which in the future, aided by local batteries, will allow filling the reservoir lakes to higher limits and covering greater peaks - eg. malfunctions - which in turn will make grids more stable.
The big unknown, as far as I understand, is whether or not we have enough rare minerals to cover enough TWh of the daily peaks of energy-demands so we can have a flat daily curve. I'm sure in 10-15 years time the "renewables" will look a bit different than what we expect them today.
Who are the major players in industry grade solutions for this?
Tesla? BYD? Hitachi? Siemens?
Sungrow and CATL as examples.
https://www.power-eng.com/energy-storage/batteries/spearmint...
https://en.sungrowpower.com/newsDetail/2127/sungrow-supplies...
If you have a couple of brown field acres of land next to an existing substation you can just buy and install containerized batteries. And you don't need specialized contractors to handle the job either. Pour concrete pads, forklift operators to take batteries off the truck and put them on the pad. And then standard HV techs to hook them up.
And the permitting and environmental review is nil. Go ahead try and get a pumped storage system permitted somewhere.
A fun one. Three gorges dam. You could replace the whole thing with solar and batteries for the cost it took to build it. And the area covered by solar panels would be the same as the lake behind the dam. Except you can put the solar panels on some ecologically and economically low value land where ever.
Another win is that you can put something below the solar panels, even grow shade-preferring plants below them. This is being done in many places. Otherwise it could be a storage area, a light industrial facility, a shopping mall, even a sports field. And for all the battery storage you can afford, of course.
There is a whole interest in agrivoltaics as it's become apparent that the land under the solar panels remains productive. In the western US there is a lot of completely unproductive land to put solar panels on. But in the east and midwest being able to continue to use the land for agriculture is a win.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/agrivoltaics-solar-and-agr...
Random thought about fallow land under solar panels is the soil probably absorbs carbon over time.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/calif...
Edit: just saw this is only for April of each year. But similar question: can we extrapolate from April to say November or not?
Keeping peaker plants around and having them ready year round for just a few days use is going to feel expensive; but decommissioning the plants too early has its own risks.
As expected, California peaks in July because there's more demand for cooling than heating. But what's a little surprising is that July is peak demand for every region.
There are many reasons why solar is so attractive as a power source, including:
1. It's the only form of power with direct electricty generation. There's no heating water to turn a turbine;
2. Solar basically has no moving parts. You can point panels towards the Sun to increase efficiency but the panel itself and transmission has no moving parts;
3. Solar panels continue to massively reduce in price and increase in efficiency and it's not clear where this ends;
4. Obviously solar generates its pwower when the Sun is shining. This conincides with when most power is usedk. Adding solar to the power generation mix reduces the peak load required to generate from other sources;
5. Solar installations can be really small, including on individual houses, reducing the transmission capacity required for last-mile and regional power transport.
Batteries are just one method to store excess power for variable (renewable) energy sources. Another is carbon sequestration to create fuel directly, called Carbon Capture and Storage ("CCS") [2]. This isn't economic yet. But it may have applications in, say, cold climates where battery performance noticeably degrades.
Solar power is the future.
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
[2]: https://www.iisd.org/articles/deep-dive/why-carbon-capture-s...
Majority of homes use natural gas for heating in the winter. If they used electric heat instead, the difference would be enormous.
If you only need to do that at night, you're another 2x ahead.
If you then remember that wind, hydro, nuclear and (the main subject of this discussion) batteries exist, further reducing the times you need to use this displaced gas, it's an overwhelming win.
Examples like this is why electrification becomes more important than decarbonizing the last few percent of grid electricity, if the goal is to reduce carbon emisions and/or money.
Coming out ahead by a few percent still means you need to displace the large majority of the current heating load with some form of electrical generation that can reliably supply a large amount of power at night.
> If you only need to do that at night, you're another 2x ahead.
You're not, because the significant majority of heating load is at night, because it's colder at night. Also, the night is longer than the day in the coldest parts of winter, and that's the time you need to spec the grid to be able to handle.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't electrify heating, but it means we're probably better off generating that electricity with nuclear, which is reliable and generates power at all times, than trying to somehow use solar to supply nighttime power in winter.
> 2. Solar basically has no moving parts. You can point panels towards the Sun to increase efficiency but the panel itself and transmission has no moving parts;
This is kind of it's own problem, the fact that both solar and wind don't have moving parts that are directly connected to the grid and rotate at grid frequency necessitates a lot of other equipment to bring frequency stability back.
Some old power plants are being converted into synchronous condensers - the turbines replaced with giant flywheels - for this reason.
It appears that the batteries are 4 hour batteries. Two questions: is there excess solar capacity in the winter to charge the batteries? How do the batteries perform in the winter - total storage capacity and discharge rate?
It is misleading to compare a battery array that lasts for 4 hours to a nuclear powered electric plant that supplies energy at a constant 24/7.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/california-crosses-10...
"Developers plan to add 6,813 MW of battery projects in the California Independent System Operator's (CAISO) domain this year, dominated by four-hour lithium-ion systems, roughly double their additions in 2023, according to an analysis of S&P Global Market Intelligence data."
It is misleading to compare the two:
* One has no risk of a nuclear meltdown in a very earthquake prone area (California).
* One does not have 60+ year long successful history of lobbying governments and establishing regulatory capture (note I wrote 'successful')
* one does have issue where they do not reprocess spent fuel adding billions of risk of nuclear fuel leaking into the environment; or if they do recycle, risk creating material for nuclear weapons.
* one would struggle with it's strong baseline, yet inflexible power generation without batteries to handle afternoon peaks
Keeping hearing random arguments for nuclear fission power (why not tidal?) and yet the regulatory capture and earthquake issue is still present in the US. We moved away from nuclear power after Japan's meltdown for a reason. With recent Supreme Court decisions and fracking causing earthquakes in Nebraska it has only gotten worse. I do not trust the industry with nuclear power. California spent a lot of money to establish a working grid that can be used for sustainable power until we get useful fusion (or that big supervolcano hits). Nuclear power is more needed in Texas right now, with it's broken grid, than California.
More information on reprocessing nuclear waste: https://www.projectoptimist.us/why-us-doesnt-recycle-spent-n... https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/recycle-everything-america-e...
"Arizona farmers turn to solar panels to shade crops, save water and generate power"
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2024/07/08/arizona-drought-so...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services_(electric_p...
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/01/12/Tesla%20BESS%20G...
Gambit Energy, owned by Tesla in Texas. Megapack supports grid forming in production (Hawaii and South Australia installations as well). “Virtual Machine Mode.”
It is solved, which shouldn’t be controversial considering Tesla’s power control maturity.
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/14/new-grid-forming-invert...
https://observablehq.com/@jwb/caiso-battery-discharge-histor...
Peak shaving (i.e. the thing storage is best at) is essentially the opposite of baseload. It gets you over the hump where the demand peak is after sunset but you don't want to have a 100% nuclear grid overbuilt to meet the peak demand that occurs when solar generation is zero, and you also want to stop using natural gas.
You still need something to generate power when the load is back to baseline and the peak shaving batteries are dry but it's 8 more hours until sunrise. Especially if we're going to electrify heating loads that currently use fossil fuels, which are higher at night and higher during the part of the year when solar generation is lowest.
> The sum of a bunch of intermittent sources is sufficient.
That only works if the intermittent sources are independent. In winter, solar output is going to be lower during the day than in summer, zero at night, you will have more hours of night, and heating load is both higher in winter and higher at night. There aren't going to be panels on one solar farm where this is the case and others that produce more, it will be true for the entire hemisphere for the entire season.
You're then left relying on wind if you don't want to use nuclear, but wind costs more than solar, and now you're lacking independence again. Weather is regional. There will be days when it's still and cold across a thousand square miles. Even batteries that could hypothetically take the load for a night are not going to have anything left by the end of a week of that, so you either need baseload generation methods or some currently unproven/uneconomical ultra high capacity long-term storage system or the week when that happens the power will go out and people will freeze.
They are claiming that a 100% renewable system would be CHEAPER than a fossil fuel system. If that doesn’t stink like some grade A bullshit to you I have nothing more to add.
> ‘Firming costs’ is a term often used to describe the investments needed to make variable renewables a reliable source of electricity for our power system. In the GenCost report our preferred term is ‘integration costs’.
> Integration costs include investments in storage, peaking generation, transmission and system security devices such as synchronous condensers. Modelling determines the most cost-effective combination of these investments.
> ... renewables were still found to have the lowest cost range of any new build technology.
> For more detail go to the GenCost 2023-24 report section 5.2.1 Framework for calculating variable renewable integration costs on page 65.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/gen...
Anti-nuclear environmentalists’ first choice would be to let people freeze to death. That being politically untenable their second choice is to continue using fossil fuels as the baseload and offset it as much as possible with renewables. They think nuclear is “an excuse” to continue the “business as usual” of affordable energy. They want energy to be unavailable and expensive. They oppose human progress and economic development as itself evil, even if the environmental impact is zero. Making energy expensive is their goal, not something they reluctantly accept. All the counter productive positions and bad arguments make perfect sense when you realize that they simply have a totally different goal from you.
I suggest we call the periods that solar/wind/hydro/batteries can cover "baseload", as apparantly if you do so, you can pretend that the other energy being generated at non-baseload times does not matter, and simply declare victory with a job half done.
But this presents a different problem: Instead of having to maintain several hundred GW of natural gas plants that you use on a daily basis, you now have to amortize the same cost even though they're only being used five days a year. At which point the incremental cost of building the same capacity in nuclear, which generates power 100% of the time and allows you to avoid not only the natural gas plants but that amount of solar and storage, is looking pretty good.
First video on the page. I'm guessing this is probably a news report, right?
(As a californian) It's especially annoying coming from anyone californian, the state of Enron and PGE wildfires. Like we are so caught up in the vanity of comparison that we quickly rush to forgive our past sins while condemning the mistakes of others for forever and ever.
How about as technologists, we just focus on innovating (which is not a zero sum game) and we don't compare ourselves to people who aren't doing as well.
California is under Federal regulation and has significant problems where PG&E hasn't invested enough in reliability.
If California just breezed through every natural disaster with no power outages and lower than Texas energy prices it would truly be a no brainer.
But Texas has retail power rates in the $0.10-$0.20/kwh range. From what I understand $0.20 would be an absolute bargain in California and that $0.30-$0.50 per kwh is more what folks out there pay.
It's not so compelling in that case. Of course I could have missed something. Please do let me know if I have.
Look at airlines: rather strict and reasonably good safety regulations made flying the safest form of transportation, safer than driving and maybe even walking. Nevertheless, we don't see exorbitant prices either; if anything, the cost of air travel is surprisingly low, often competitive with rail, even in EU.
Of course, unreasonable regulations are a bane, see the leaded fuel situation in general aviation, or the whole nuclear industry.
If a few decades of trying to use rationality have failed, I'm all for calling attention to their own local failures. If "dunking" on them is in bad faith, it is only because good faith arguments have failed so consistently.
I don’t see the world in stark terms except where appropriate. You do believe cases exist where such views are warranted right? I happen to think that Texas qualifies.
You may be right that there are generic problems at work, but when the protagonist insists that they aren’t like others, it’s not a surprise that people don’t think that way.
[1] If this sounds like sarcasm, try living in coastal San Diego for a few years. You really acclimate to the perfect weather and 78 really does feel awfully hot. To say nothing of those freezes where it dips into the 60s. I’ve seen bar patios turn the heaters on then.
> Palmdale and Lancaster on Tuesday experienced a record sixth straight day of temperatures at or above 110 degrees, surpassing the prior record of three days for both Antelope Valley cities. But wait, there’s more — officials say the streak is expected to continue the rest of the week, with highs forecast over 110 until Friday.
> Las Vegas on Sunday smashed its record high temperature by three degrees, hitting 120 for the first time since record-keeping began in 1937.
> Las Vegas is also expected to break its all-time record for consecutive days at or above 110 degrees, on its way there with six days in a row Tuesday. It’s forecast to remain just as hot through next week, which would beat the prior 10-day streak.
> Palm Springs on Friday hit 124 degrees, its highest temperature in recorded history.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/temperat...