> 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:
> 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.
Yep. The previous high was in 2006(!). Overall, statewide energy consumption seems to be flat or declining.
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.
Equipment dies and needs to be replaced. When that happens a more energy efficient unit is usually available and is often the best option for replacement.
That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.
Statewide grid demand is somewhat declining because distributed small-scale solar is massive. It now has an aggregate capacity of 20GW. This is usually ignored by people who are only looking at ERCOT v. CAISO grid statistics. Texas basically doesn't have any small-scale solar.
Are you saying Texas doesn't have much rooftop solar? That's surprising. I suppose largely due to low electricity costs making the investment not worth it? (And, I suspect, secondarily, utilities not really incentivizing it)
I never thought about the impact of Texas hail storms on solar energy. Is there an industry standard practice to shield the panels during hail storms? Or do they use stronger glass? I am curious to learn more.
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.
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.
Electricity prices are set by the French government not the wholesale cost or cost of production. Which is why EDF - the operator of the French nuclear fleet - regularly posts massive losses. Like the €18 billion loss in 2023.
It should be noted that most of EDF's massive losses are due to the ARENH.
The European Union insists that EDF must sell energy at very discounted prices, so that third-party "providers" can make an entry on the energy market. The idea was that they would eventually sell their own energy supply, but most just pocketed the difference between the dirt-cheap energy & what they charged customers, then ran away the moment there was any hint of change on the horizon.
Or, to put it in simpler, blunter terms: in the name of "competition", EDF was forced to heavily subsidize companies that turned out to be nothing more than rent-seekers that only sought to, effectively, grab free subsidy money.
So that's an European thing? huh. We have this in Romania - a couple years back when the war in Ukraine started just as the green deal took effect, the gov started spending like crazy on subsidizing energy. But they did it in a convoluted way with a layer of intermediaries that basically were allowed to invoice the state for price differences from arbitrary price levels. Almost "I'd like to sell at twice the price but you're not letting me, so gimme the difference" - if not exactly that.
I'm not sure if I'm feeling better or worse that it's a EU invention. Either way, it's hellof a corrupt practice.
To make matters worse gas peaker plants cost approximately €1mln/MW as well, so at the cost of that plant you could have massively overprovisioned solar, backup gas plants and plenty of money for fuel to spare which you wouldn't be spending immediately, so it could be invested instead.
Hydro does rule. Top 8 power stations are hydro right now. And the top power station has been a hydro for over a hundred years now. Very cool! Three Gorges has capacity of 22.5 GW.
I really hope nothing bad happens at the three gorges dam. There's nearly half a billion people that would have to be evacuated, and tens of millions who likely wouldn't be able to evacuate in time due to proximity.
I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.
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 generation and solar with storage, at least until we get fusion figured out.
Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices.
The future is solar simply because these electricity catchers from the sky fusion are mass producible goods that you can just keep pumping and pointing it to the sky in matter of days at dirt cheap prices.
also because it is modular which really works for the Global south, it can be taken to demand centers and demand adjusted to the supply to a small extent (e.g. irrigation pumps)
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.
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.
Flow batteries aren't any good for seasonal shifting; the capex per kWh-capacity is much too high. Granted, ordinary batteries aren't good for that either.
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?
LG Energy Solution supplied the lithium-ion battery racks/modules (TR1300 using LG JH4 NMC cells) for Vistra’s initial 300 MW/1,200 MWh Moss Landing system; Fluence was the system integrator/GC.
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.
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 farms, on which black lithium smoke settled all over , over the course of several days/weeks in the middle of the summer.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when outlets talk about energy storage exclusively in terms of output and neglect to mention capacity. Does 15.7 gigawatts of storage mean 15.7 GWh? Capacity is as important, if not more important, than output.
As someone who's interested in all this, I agree it would be nice to have more precision around capacity. Especially as it relates to longer term storage. But! In this context, output is more salient than capacity. You'll see a lot of stories about grid-scale storage that use output. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/854999 offers a fuller explanation than what I'll give here.)
This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.
Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.
Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)
Based on the following sentences from the article, it's probably 4 to 6 times more than 15.7 GWh (60 to 90 GWh, apparently):
"Battery energy storage is not without challenges, however. Lithium-ion batteries — the most common type used for energy storage — typically have about four to six hours of capacity. It’s enough to support the grid during peak hours as the sun sets, but can still leave some gaps to be filled by natural gas."
I haven't had a rolling blackout in our particular grid in several years. The battery energy storage has been a great benefit. Our home battery energy storage system has been fantastic as well for localized unplanned outages.
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.
While Sodium Ion may be the future of grid batteries, it's not the present. As long as LFP is cheaper, there is no reason to go with Sodium.
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.
CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh. If that ends up even partway true it'll completely change the economics of power storage.
> CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.
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.
That's plain wrong, they have not announced that price target anywhere. There is speculation that it could be there target internally for the long term, but there is basically zero chance they'll start at that price and no guarantees they'll ever reach it.
dumping doesn't depend on profit or loss. Also the legal definition of dumping is less-than-the-"normal value." (see Article VI ANTI-DUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTIES of GATT 1994).
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.
Relatedly, CA utilities have begun offering hourly variable priced rate plans, which will allow consumers with batteries to theoretically achieve lower average rates if your batteries can rate-follow. It's still not available for net metering plans, though.
When they say their battery storage capacity is 15,000 MW, do they mean MWh? Because watts are time-independent, or rather, they're like speed to Joule's (watt-hour's) distance.
I struggle to understand why journalists consistently failed to use Wh as a unit of power. People generally can understand it because it is how they are billed and how appliances are rated.
Even on HN people will defend not using Wh because there is some grid or city in the USA that bills differently.
Because American literacy in math and hard sciences has only declined over the decades since the post-Sputnik spurt that benefited my generation. Journalism as practiced today doesn't require scientific literacy or rigor, or at least, they are secondary to the purposes of the writers' employers.
Later, they say “lithium ion batteries only have 4 to 6 hours of capacity”, which again, what? But maybe that implies that the actual capacity rating is their “capacity” x 4-6.
Uh... "Wh" is not a unit of power. Watts are units of power. Watt-hours measure energy. Probably journalists are getting this wrong for the same reason you are.
The commenter was right that the correct unit is Wh, then slipped up. Does gasoline contain power? Do "high-power" Li-ion batteries? In common parlance, power and energy are used interchangeably. I believe people writing about science should hold themselves to a higher standard, but there is always something more important.
I do not know why this particular one gets engineers so annoyed. Energy and power are synonymous in conversation with normal people. There is very little real world scenarios where people would be exposed to the precise meanings -of course everyone gets it wrong.
No, you were right on the money. Just idly thinking out loud why this is even an issue. Muggles get technical details wrong all the time. Yet any article about energy is going to get a few people riled up when the units are wrong.
Utilities are used using MW when discussing supply and demand. Because balancing that is critical. So power is what they care about when discussing grid connections.
The billing side and customers are concerned with total energy. So kwh.
Journalists typically don't know the difference. Which is why they list storage capacity in watts. They don't know any better and they don't care.
Far as I can tell multiply the watts by 4 hours to get watt hours.
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.
>I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.
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.
It’s a capitalist run power grid in CA. It’s a publicly traded company. Nothing more capitalist than making my own power when the competition sucks ass.
If you think power infrastructure and supplying the electrons that jiggle on it are any sort of example of free market capitalism I have a bridge to sell you.
PG&E is a public utility. Everything they do down to department budgets are decided by state regulators. I imagine almost everyone on this board already knew that PG&E was a publicly traded company. But just because they are a publicly traded company, that doesn't mean that they get to do anything they want. It just means their stock can be bought and sold by others, in the case of PG&E its mostly owned by public sector union pension funds. So it is a quasi-public utility owned by government workers in a highly regulated market. The idea its some sort of paragon of capitalism is absurd. Just about anything they do can be traced back to a decision made by an appointed state government body.
Well the faster you get off the grid, the cheaper it'll be for the rest of us. All PGE's problems are caused by running powerlines for you through fire-prone kindling wilderness.
We could have had atomic energy generated right here in the Bay Area (Sonoma). You can actually go visit the “hole in Bodega Head” where PG&E started digging the reactor pit before being made to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
PG&E's problems are caused by malcompliance and the rules being written by a public traded company instead of by an accountable government. There are plenty of people living in the woods in other states that aren't causing massive wildfires that cover the US in smoke every season.
It’s a public company, not run directly by the government. It has a monopoly dictated by the CA government.
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
PG&E is a utility. The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators. And the idea that PG&E buys CA politicians is laughable. The state worker's unions pension funds control CA state politics. They are the ones that donate the most money, PG&E doesn't even get a seat at the metaphorical table.
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.
PG&E's corruption is laid bare by Silicon Valley Power, which serves the town of Santa Clara, charging less than half what PG&E does for the house a few blocks over [1].
I will only put this down once because I repeat it in many threads and I'm sure people are tired of hearing it, but the reason that isolated municipal utilities are offering great prices locally is that they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought.
How do you think SVP buys energy from its contracted generators? They don't own transmission from those places (unlike SMUD which, to an incomplete extent, actually does own its generating assets and transmission lines). SVP pays regulated wholesale distribution rates to PG&E to get access to their contracted generators. But the process determining such rates ignores the way that wildfire liability is assigned to PG&E, which is a significant part of current PG&E retail rates. It also ignores mandates such as rural electrification. PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out, while SVP and other MUDs contribute nothing to rural electrification mandates.
I'm hungry for good news about technical solutions working - especially right now when Trump just killed the US's largest solar project (6.2 GW in Nevada), ended USDA solar support for farms, and posted "We will not approve...Solar". So I wanted to check if California's battery story holds up.
The data is actually encouraging. Peak demand hit 48,323 MW in 2024 - higher than the 2020 blackout year's 47,121 MW [1]. Weather was severe: 2023 broke 358 California temperature records, 2024 saw valleys top 110°F during multiple heat waves [2][3]. Battery discharge reached 5-7 GW during Sept 2024 peaks, offsetting ~16% of demand [4]. That's real.
Fair caveat: 2020 had compounding failures (imports fell 3,000 MW short, gas plants failed, planning issues [5]), and recent years benefited from better coordination and wet winters. But batteries were clearly the biggest new factor - going from 500 MW in 2020 to 15,700 MW today is massive buildout, and it performed when tested.
Nice to see an existence proof that we can make progress on adapting to climate change's second-order effects, maybe even progress on root causes - through technology, at scale, in the United States of 2025.
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.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.
> 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.
Considering how much the Texas state government has been illegally trampling its own residents’ rights recently, mostly for the sake of private corruption, and backed by incredibly bad faith anti-social rhetoric, perhaps reflexive anti-Texas-elected-officials-ism is a reasonable baseline position.
I don't think their comment was either ignorant or anti-Texan. Essentially all of the conclusions in the FERC report on the February 2021 events were those of regulatory failure. Generating assets did not have winterization plans that state inspectors actually enforced, most of the failed assets failed at temperatures above their design minima, natural gas delivery system were totally deregulated at the state level, ERCOT winter forecast practices were poor, etc.
The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.
Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC + industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.
CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.
Can you be a bit more explicit? Do you have a specific person in mind as a model of this "guy in the desert" that people keep calling a "dumb yokel" but who actually a power-grid savant or whatever? Aside: alongside your hero, there are some extremely kooky people living out in the CA desert.
> Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units
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.
By my estimate (GPT5) Tesla has up to 17% of all front and behind the meter battery storage in CA, and is also the vendor growing the fastest in CA. The California battery storage story is also a Tesla story, but based on the positive tone of the article, it clearly made more sense to leave Tesla out of it.
You know treating a thing that makes stuff up as a source of truth is the same thing as making stuff up right? You might as well have written By my estimate (as revealed to me in a dream)
> That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid
This is a good opportunity to calibrate your sense of truth.
The LA Times is owned by this South African-born immigrant [1]. (Himself the the son of "Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation.") He is, like Elon, pro-Trump (after, like Musk, supporting Democrats when they were in power) [2]. And he, like Elon, has censored his publication to reflect his views, including by opposing anti-Musk content [3].
If you're reading an article in the LA Times and, being upset it isn't mentioning Tesla, concluding it's part of an anti-Musk conspiracy, you're dead wrong. But you're probably also wrong about other adjacent hypotheses.
What narrative? If you're saying even a pro-Trump pro-Elon newspaper whose owner has a history of weighing in for Musk has a bias against him, you're saying Elon's massively lost not only standing but also sympathy across the aisle.
If that's true, his companies are toast. That doesn't seem to be the case. So maybe revisit the hypothesis when the data reject it.
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.
Much as I have problems with current administration, Chris Wright is doing an outstanding job working with industry to push forward next-gen nuclear. I have a lot of well-founded hope for huge progress assuming the next Secretary of Energy continues with this and the NRC backs off just a little.
China is adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity by the end of next year, or 180GW. These new installations don't replace old coal plants -- in H1 2025, China decomissioned only about 1GW.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. OT but 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.
Renewables are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Also unless california has gone for lots of redundancy the would also be displacing fossil fuel power plants. Again i'm not trashing renewables, because what's wrong with free energy. What i am doing automatically is wondering why batteries are a better option then traditional power stations.
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.
Adelaide, Australia used to have constant rolling blackouts, including a state wide blackout once. After that, Tesla (pre insanity era) built a grid battery storage system which essentially fixed the problem. I'm sure there were other improvements to the grid at the same time. But these days the grid is incredibly stable while also being majority solar and wind powered. The battery is able to buy and sell power daily and profit on the difference between high and low demand times. And if there's an equipment fault somewhere, it can respond fast enough to cover the time between a generator going offline, and the backup ones starting up.
By the time that blackout occurred, the grid was already quite stable and rolling blackouts were a thing of the past. The state-wide blackout was the result of a severe storm, which included lightning, gale-force winds and three tornadoes, taking out critical transmission lines, combined with inadequate protection circuits not set up to account for lightning strikes. When the state failed over to the Victoria interconnect, the interconnect shut down because the load was too high. So although the grid was stable, it had some failure points that were exposed during this severe and unusual storm.
The battery array was just one measure taken to increase grid resilience in such a scenario. The general idea was to have an instantly dispatchable electricity supply ready to go at any time while bringing gas-powered electricity online. A nice side effect of the battery is that it flattens out wholesale price spikes and makes a bit of money for itself in the process.
>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 do not do regular maintenance on their lines, it doesn't bode well for the batteries.
and there was a huge fire at the moss landing plant which left heavy metals and god knows what else raining down onto sensitive marine mammal habitat. kayak up elkhorn slough and you'll encounter dozens of otters, seals... less than a kilometer from the battery plant.
I don't think we're going to be appreciating the environmental consequences of that accident for years. heavy metals don't decay, they'll be there forever.
a pox on david brouwer and his faux environmentalism, and the politics and economic machinations that ever proposed solar and batteries as an alternate to baseload fission plants. (in fact brouwer did his damage long before solar was ever practical, so he has even less ground to stand on)
> they burn extremely hot and cannot be extinguished with water, which can trigger a violent chemical reaction. The blaze emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
> In the first six months of this year, CAISO’s grid was powered by 100% clean energy for an average of almost seven hours each day.
emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
While virtually no technology is clean if you count "what happens if it catches on fire"; I think it's still likely that this is much better than the status quo.
> 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:
> 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.
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.
https://www.publicadvocates.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cal-advocate... has some data.
Yep. The previous high was in 2006(!). Overall, statewide energy consumption seems to be flat or declining.
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...
Equipment dies and needs to be replaced. When that happens a more energy efficient unit is usually available and is often the best option for replacement.
That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.
Statewide grid demand is somewhat declining because distributed small-scale solar is massive. It now has an aggregate capacity of 20GW. This is usually ignored by people who are only looking at ERCOT v. CAISO grid statistics. Texas basically doesn't have any small-scale solar.
Are you saying Texas doesn't have much rooftop solar? That's surprising. I suppose largely due to low electricity costs making the investment not worth it? (And, I suspect, secondarily, utilities not really incentivizing it)
And the hail, I suppose.
I never thought about the impact of Texas hail storms on solar energy. Is there an industry standard practice to shield the panels during hail storms? Or do they use stronger glass? I am curious to learn more.
UL has a standard, this article goes into some details https://www.ul.com/news/manufacturers-say-hail-yes-solar-pan...
> the URL slug
when will it replace the headline in editorial importance?
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.
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.
With current technology getting through long days of sunshine linked demand is not an achievement worthy of celebration.
> sunshine linked demand
The demand lags the sunshine which is why it's a non-trivial problem.
With a lot of overlap though. The correlation with sunshine is still helpful.
The electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California:
- France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly
- California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year...
And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan:
- https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh.
Nuclear power rules.
Electricity prices are set by the French government not the wholesale cost or cost of production. Which is why EDF - the operator of the French nuclear fleet - regularly posts massive losses. Like the €18 billion loss in 2023.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...
It should be noted that most of EDF's massive losses are due to the ARENH.
The European Union insists that EDF must sell energy at very discounted prices, so that third-party "providers" can make an entry on the energy market. The idea was that they would eventually sell their own energy supply, but most just pocketed the difference between the dirt-cheap energy & what they charged customers, then ran away the moment there was any hint of change on the horizon.
Or, to put it in simpler, blunter terms: in the name of "competition", EDF was forced to heavily subsidize companies that turned out to be nothing more than rent-seekers that only sought to, effectively, grab free subsidy money.
Here are some articles about it:
2022: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/10/edf-sues-fr... 2023: https://www.ft.com/content/e2fc3abf-4803-4561-8ef2-0c77fd2d0... 2024: https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/europes-under-radar-ind...
So that's an European thing? huh. We have this in Romania - a couple years back when the war in Ukraine started just as the green deal took effect, the gov started spending like crazy on subsidizing energy. But they did it in a convoluted way with a layer of intermediaries that basically were allowed to invoice the state for price differences from arbitrary price levels. Almost "I'd like to sell at twice the price but you're not letting me, so gimme the difference" - if not exactly that.
I'm not sure if I'm feeling better or worse that it's a EU invention. Either way, it's hellof a corrupt practice.
2022, not 2023. That was due to one time effect of corrosion repairs.
For 2023 and 2024 EDF was profitable, with net income of those two years exceeding that 2022 loss.
And I’m generally a nuclear proponent but one of the worst investments the French utility made was investing in the UKs reactor debacle at Hinkley C.
Per wiki, cost midrange is now 45 BEUR. That's ~14 MEUR/MW capacity (v. solar @ ~1MEUR/MW).
Ouch!
To make matters worse gas peaker plants cost approximately €1mln/MW as well, so at the cost of that plant you could have massively overprovisioned solar, backup gas plants and plenty of money for fuel to spare which you wouldn't be spending immediately, so it could be invested instead.
Quebec has them both beat. Hydro rules!
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-QC/5y/yearly
(To be transparent, there's controversy around calling hydroelectric renewable.)
Hydro does rule. Top 8 power stations are hydro right now. And the top power station has been a hydro for over a hundred years now. Very cool! Three Gorges has capacity of 22.5 GW.
I really hope nothing bad happens at the three gorges dam. There's nearly half a billion people that would have to be evacuated, and tens of millions who likely wouldn't be able to evacuate in time due to proximity.
I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.
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 generation and solar with storage, at least until we get fusion figured out.
These maps are such a cool resource, thanks for sharing!
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices.
The future is solar simply because these electricity catchers from the sky fusion are mass producible goods that you can just keep pumping and pointing it to the sky in matter of days at dirt cheap prices.
also because it is modular which really works for the Global south, it can be taken to demand centers and demand adjusted to the supply to a small extent (e.g. irrigation pumps)
> Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices.
Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns..
> 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?
> Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?
France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.
'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.
China https://x.com/bataille_chris/status/1981476968202752109
And still even China is adding as much solar as their total nuclear capacity on a yearly basis.
Nothing to be proud of. Dangerous ancient reactors owned by an almost bankrupt company about to be nationalized.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long...
https://archive.ph/RQxKM
>almost bankrupt company
"Published on February 3, 2023"
Since then, in 2023 and 2024 EDF posted over 10 billion a year profits.
if they can run them safely they should. is ASN not trustworthy?
they are doing reviews every 10 year, and as they get older they can increase the frequency of reviews.
also the article mentions no dangers with regards to the reactors.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.
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.
I suspect for extremely large batteries or seasonal shifting (summer->winter) flow batteries will still have a place, but I could be wrong.
Thermal batteries make more sense for that, but they need to be super-cheap. One possibility:
https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
Flow batteries aren't any good for seasonal shifting; the capex per kWh-capacity is much too high. Granted, ordinary batteries aren't good for that either.
"Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today"
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?
LG Energy Solution supplied the lithium-ion battery racks/modules (TR1300 using LG JH4 NMC cells) for Vistra’s initial 300 MW/1,200 MWh Moss Landing system; Fluence was the system integrator/GC.
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...
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 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
One of my biggest pet peeves is when outlets talk about energy storage exclusively in terms of output and neglect to mention capacity. Does 15.7 gigawatts of storage mean 15.7 GWh? Capacity is as important, if not more important, than output.
As someone who's interested in all this, I agree it would be nice to have more precision around capacity. Especially as it relates to longer term storage. But! In this context, output is more salient than capacity. You'll see a lot of stories about grid-scale storage that use output. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/854999 offers a fuller explanation than what I'll give here.)
This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.
Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.
Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)
Hope this helps ease the peeve!
Based on the following sentences from the article, it's probably 4 to 6 times more than 15.7 GWh (60 to 90 GWh, apparently):
"Battery energy storage is not without challenges, however. Lithium-ion batteries — the most common type used for energy storage — typically have about four to six hours of capacity. It’s enough to support the grid during peak hours as the sun sets, but can still leave some gaps to be filled by natural gas."
This also greatly annoyed me. 4 hours is the standard for grid storage batteries in California.
The ratio for LiFePO4 is between 1:3 and 1:4.
So rated power will give you that for about 3 to 4 hours.
I haven't had a rolling blackout in our particular grid in several years. The battery energy storage has been a great benefit. Our home battery energy storage system has been fantastic as well for localized unplanned outages.
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.
While Sodium Ion may be the future of grid batteries, it's not the present. As long as LFP is cheaper, there is no reason to go with Sodium.
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.
CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh. If that ends up even partway true it'll completely change the economics of power storage.
> CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.
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
That's plain wrong, they have not announced that price target anywhere. There is speculation that it could be there target internally for the long term, but there is basically zero chance they'll start at that price and no guarantees they'll ever reach it.
CATL is just dumping
CATL had a profit of $2.6B last quarter on sales of $15B. That indicates they're pricing well above cost rather than below it.
dumping doesn't depend on profit or loss. Also the legal definition of dumping is less-than-the-"normal value." (see Article VI ANTI-DUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTIES of GATT 1994).
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.
What makes you say that? I don’t know this space very well
Dumping batteries is yet another strategy to take control of global energy infrastructure and destabilize petrodollar
Oh yeah I get what you’re saying but is that a thing? Like CATL has had lines before that aren’t making a profit?
> It looks like it's relevant part of China's strategy
For grid storage? Source?
https://www.energy-storage.news/world-first-grid-scale-sodiu...
Also in US https://www.peakenergy.com/news
Relatedly, CA utilities have begun offering hourly variable priced rate plans, which will allow consumers with batteries to theoretically achieve lower average rates if your batteries can rate-follow. It's still not available for net metering plans, though.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
Funny to read this today. I live in San Francisco, and we had a blackout today.
When they say their battery storage capacity is 15,000 MW, do they mean MWh? Because watts are time-independent, or rather, they're like speed to Joule's (watt-hour's) distance.
I struggle to understand why journalists consistently failed to use Wh as a unit of power. People generally can understand it because it is how they are billed and how appliances are rated.
Even on HN people will defend not using Wh because there is some grid or city in the USA that bills differently.
Because American literacy in math and hard sciences has only declined over the decades since the post-Sputnik spurt that benefited my generation. Journalism as practiced today doesn't require scientific literacy or rigor, or at least, they are secondary to the purposes of the writers' employers.
Later, they say “lithium ion batteries only have 4 to 6 hours of capacity”, which again, what? But maybe that implies that the actual capacity rating is their “capacity” x 4-6.
Uh... "Wh" is not a unit of power. Watts are units of power. Watt-hours measure energy. Probably journalists are getting this wrong for the same reason you are.
The commenter was right that the correct unit is Wh, then slipped up. Does gasoline contain power? Do "high-power" Li-ion batteries? In common parlance, power and energy are used interchangeably. I believe people writing about science should hold themselves to a higher standard, but there is always something more important.
I do not know why this particular one gets engineers so annoyed. Energy and power are synonymous in conversation with normal people. There is very little real world scenarios where people would be exposed to the precise meanings -of course everyone gets it wrong.
But the premise of the comment I was replying to was exasperation that journalists got it wrong!
No, you were right on the money. Just idly thinking out loud why this is even an issue. Muggles get technical details wrong all the time. Yet any article about energy is going to get a few people riled up when the units are wrong.
CAISO's own documents quote battery capacity in MW. So I don't think you can just blame journalists.
"Battery storage capacity grew from about 500 MW in 2020 to 13,000 MW in December 2024"
https://www.caiso.com/documents/2024-special-report-on-batte...
As another commenter notes, utilities are interested in "capacity on call" i.e. instant power generation.
Utilities are used using MW when discussing supply and demand. Because balancing that is critical. So power is what they care about when discussing grid connections.
The billing side and customers are concerned with total energy. So kwh.
Journalists typically don't know the difference. Which is why they list storage capacity in watts. They don't know any better and they don't care.
Far as I can tell multiply the watts by 4 hours to get watt hours.
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...
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.
>I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.
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.
It’s a capitalist run power grid in CA. It’s a publicly traded company. Nothing more capitalist than making my own power when the competition sucks ass.
If you think power infrastructure and supplying the electrons that jiggle on it are any sort of example of free market capitalism I have a bridge to sell you.
It's a publicly traded company. Feel free to do your research.
PG&E is a public utility. Everything they do down to department budgets are decided by state regulators. I imagine almost everyone on this board already knew that PG&E was a publicly traded company. But just because they are a publicly traded company, that doesn't mean that they get to do anything they want. It just means their stock can be bought and sold by others, in the case of PG&E its mostly owned by public sector union pension funds. So it is a quasi-public utility owned by government workers in a highly regulated market. The idea its some sort of paragon of capitalism is absurd. Just about anything they do can be traced back to a decision made by an appointed state government body.
Well the faster you get off the grid, the cheaper it'll be for the rest of us. All PGE's problems are caused by running powerlines for you through fire-prone kindling wilderness.
We could have had atomic energy generated right here in the Bay Area (Sonoma). You can actually go visit the “hole in Bodega Head” where PG&E started digging the reactor pit before being made to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
PG&E's problems are caused by malcompliance and the rules being written by a public traded company instead of by an accountable government. There are plenty of people living in the woods in other states that aren't causing massive wildfires that cover the US in smoke every season.
Why is PG&E so poorly run? I don't live there, just follow the news and their name comes up constantly in negative press.
Greed and no competition.
It’s a public company, not run directly by the government. It has a monopoly dictated by the CA government.
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
PG&E is a utility. The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators. And the idea that PG&E buys CA politicians is laughable. The state worker's unions pension funds control CA state politics. They are the ones that donate the most money, PG&E doesn't even get a seat at the metaphorical table.
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.
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This. Electricity costs are almost 5x the cost in Nevada.
PG&E's corruption is laid bare by Silicon Valley Power, which serves the town of Santa Clara, charging less than half what PG&E does for the house a few blocks over [1].
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
I will only put this down once because I repeat it in many threads and I'm sure people are tired of hearing it, but the reason that isolated municipal utilities are offering great prices locally is that they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought.
> they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought
Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?
How do you think SVP buys energy from its contracted generators? They don't own transmission from those places (unlike SMUD which, to an incomplete extent, actually does own its generating assets and transmission lines). SVP pays regulated wholesale distribution rates to PG&E to get access to their contracted generators. But the process determining such rates ignores the way that wildfire liability is assigned to PG&E, which is a significant part of current PG&E retail rates. It also ignores mandates such as rural electrification. PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out, while SVP and other MUDs contribute nothing to rural electrification mandates.
> PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out
Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?
The Financial Times has a much better article: https://ig.ft.com/mega-batteries/
I'm hungry for good news about technical solutions working - especially right now when Trump just killed the US's largest solar project (6.2 GW in Nevada), ended USDA solar support for farms, and posted "We will not approve...Solar". So I wanted to check if California's battery story holds up.
The data is actually encouraging. Peak demand hit 48,323 MW in 2024 - higher than the 2020 blackout year's 47,121 MW [1]. Weather was severe: 2023 broke 358 California temperature records, 2024 saw valleys top 110°F during multiple heat waves [2][3]. Battery discharge reached 5-7 GW during Sept 2024 peaks, offsetting ~16% of demand [4]. That's real.
Fair caveat: 2020 had compounding failures (imports fell 3,000 MW short, gas plants failed, planning issues [5]), and recent years benefited from better coordination and wet winters. But batteries were clearly the biggest new factor - going from 500 MW in 2020 to 15,700 MW today is massive buildout, and it performed when tested.
Nice to see an existence proof that we can make progress on adapting to climate change's second-order effects, maybe even progress on root causes - through technology, at scale, in the United States of 2025.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
[2] https://news.caloes.ca.gov/extreme-heat-breaking-records-at-...
[3] https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/california-...
[4] https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/
[5] https://calmatters.org/environment/2020/08/california-2020-r...
Does it make the electricity price go down or up? It seems to me that the electricity price never goes down.
What does it mean saying California hasn’t done a Flex Alert since 2022? PG&E issued 3-4 in September/October this year. Is that different?
> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.
And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to lack of regulations.
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.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.
> 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.
Considering how much the Texas state government has been illegally trampling its own residents’ rights recently, mostly for the sake of private corruption, and backed by incredibly bad faith anti-social rhetoric, perhaps reflexive anti-Texas-elected-officials-ism is a reasonable baseline position.
I don't think their comment was either ignorant or anti-Texan. Essentially all of the conclusions in the FERC report on the February 2021 events were those of regulatory failure. Generating assets did not have winterization plans that state inspectors actually enforced, most of the failed assets failed at temperatures above their design minima, natural gas delivery system were totally deregulated at the state level, ERCOT winter forecast practices were poor, etc.
The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.
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Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC + industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.
CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.
Can you be a bit more explicit? Do you have a specific person in mind as a model of this "guy in the desert" that people keep calling a "dumb yokel" but who actually a power-grid savant or whatever? Aside: alongside your hero, there are some extremely kooky people living out in the CA desert.
What's some examples of this that Texas doesn't have?
CA has strange pockets of pretty well setup infra. Like Carlsbad has a desalination plant, and a modern standby ng power plant
I wish we’d put some desal plants in the north of the state and start feeding into the CA aqueduct and unlocking more Central Valley farmland
farming with desal water is insane. even with abundant power.
Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units (LFP chemistry) manufactured at Tesla’s Lathrop, CA “Megafactory.”
> Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units
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.
By my estimate (GPT5) Tesla has up to 17% of all front and behind the meter battery storage in CA, and is also the vendor growing the fastest in CA. The California battery storage story is also a Tesla story, but based on the positive tone of the article, it clearly made more sense to leave Tesla out of it.
> By my estimate (GPT5)
Please don't do this.
What's your source?
Are you asking Criscross if they have a source for your statement?
> By my estimate (GPT5)
You know treating a thing that makes stuff up as a source of truth is the same thing as making stuff up right? You might as well have written By my estimate (as revealed to me in a dream)
If you google any article about eland it literally says they use tesla batteries that were built here in the US
i think tesla has built MOST of the capacity
Interesting how the only dollar figure mentioned in the article is about money the Trump administration has put up to refurbish coal plants.
That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid.
How do you know that's the reason?
> How do you know that's the reason?
Just noticed that their profile basically taunts that they're a troll [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hagbard_c
> That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid
This is a good opportunity to calibrate your sense of truth.
The LA Times is owned by this South African-born immigrant [1]. (Himself the the son of "Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation.") He is, like Elon, pro-Trump (after, like Musk, supporting Democrats when they were in power) [2]. And he, like Elon, has censored his publication to reflect his views, including by opposing anti-Musk content [3].
If you're reading an article in the LA Times and, being upset it isn't mentioning Tesla, concluding it's part of an anti-Musk conspiracy, you're dead wrong. But you're probably also wrong about other adjacent hypotheses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Soon-Shiong
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/13/la-times-owner-mane...
[3] https://www.status.news/p/los-angeles-times-patrick-soon-shi...
It does mention another battery manufacturer, Spark. Where do they fit in to the narrative?
> Where do they fit in to the narrative?
What narrative? If you're saying even a pro-Trump pro-Elon newspaper whose owner has a history of weighing in for Musk has a bias against him, you're saying Elon's massively lost not only standing but also sympathy across the aisle.
If that's true, his companies are toast. That doesn't seem to be the case. So maybe revisit the hypothesis when the data reject it.
We're still going to have rolling blackouts because PGE turns the power off.
Okay but literally there haven't been in years
This is the way. It's become standard practice in China, which now leads to the world with half of all battery installations.
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.
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-...
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.
The US system of decades of environmental review before any energy project can maybe proceed can also be considered a form of oppression.
Much as I have problems with current administration, Chris Wright is doing an outstanding job working with industry to push forward next-gen nuclear. I have a lot of well-founded hope for huge progress assuming the next Secretary of Energy continues with this and the NRC backs off just a little.
Just because they built it doesn't mean it gets used: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
China is adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity by the end of next year, or 180GW. These new installations don't replace old coal plants -- in H1 2025, China decomissioned only about 1GW.
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
Not sure why you are downvoted. Theres bot rings everywhere on the internet that downvote anything that mentions Chinese emissions
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.
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.
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.
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...
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. OT but 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.
What does rolling blackouts in California have to do with renewables? Opposite, really.
Renewables are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Also unless california has gone for lots of redundancy the would also be displacing fossil fuel power plants. Again i'm not trashing renewables, because what's wrong with free energy. What i am doing automatically is wondering why batteries are a better option then traditional power stations.
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.
You are being contradictory.
Solar is not intermittent (the sun shines every day). Making your grid reliable is expensive, thus drives costs.
A lot depends on long term planning but the planning better be right. In my opinion, the markets are much better than planning.
> ...leaving rolling blackouts behind
This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"
"leaving rolling blackouts behind..." I'll take this bet CA blackouts aren't over.
Adelaide, Australia used to have constant rolling blackouts, including a state wide blackout once. After that, Tesla (pre insanity era) built a grid battery storage system which essentially fixed the problem. I'm sure there were other improvements to the grid at the same time. But these days the grid is incredibly stable while also being majority solar and wind powered. The battery is able to buy and sell power daily and profit on the difference between high and low demand times. And if there's an equipment fault somewhere, it can respond fast enough to cover the time between a generator going offline, and the backup ones starting up.
By the time that blackout occurred, the grid was already quite stable and rolling blackouts were a thing of the past. The state-wide blackout was the result of a severe storm, which included lightning, gale-force winds and three tornadoes, taking out critical transmission lines, combined with inadequate protection circuits not set up to account for lightning strikes. When the state failed over to the Victoria interconnect, the interconnect shut down because the load was too high. So although the grid was stable, it had some failure points that were exposed during this severe and unusual storm.
The battery array was just one measure taken to increase grid resilience in such a scenario. The general idea was to have an instantly dispatchable electricity supply ready to go at any time while bringing gas-powered electricity online. A nice side effect of the battery is that it flattens out wholesale price spikes and makes a bit of money for itself in the process.
You'll lose. Combined with solar, batteries are perfect. They cover the time of day when solar wanes, but air conditioning is still needed.
Yeah I mean, aren't most of the blackouts controlled?
Not the lack of supply but shutdown on purpose due to the risk of power lines causing fires?
Seems burying them would be a more effective use of money if you're trying to solve blackouts.
No, more coal and gas is the only way. /S
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<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 do not do regular maintenance on their lines, it doesn't bode well for the batteries.
To be fair, they were all valid points to make. The gonorrhea thing just kind of set the tone wrong.
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and there was a huge fire at the moss landing plant which left heavy metals and god knows what else raining down onto sensitive marine mammal habitat. kayak up elkhorn slough and you'll encounter dozens of otters, seals... less than a kilometer from the battery plant.
I don't think we're going to be appreciating the environmental consequences of that accident for years. heavy metals don't decay, they'll be there forever.
a pox on david brouwer and his faux environmentalism, and the politics and economic machinations that ever proposed solar and batteries as an alternate to baseload fission plants. (in fact brouwer did his damage long before solar was ever practical, so he has even less ground to stand on)
> they burn extremely hot and cannot be extinguished with water, which can trigger a violent chemical reaction. The blaze emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
> In the first six months of this year, CAISO’s grid was powered by 100% clean energy for an average of almost seven hours each day.
emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese
100% clean energy
While virtually no technology is clean if you count "what happens if it catches on fire"; I think it's still likely that this is much better than the status quo.
>100% clean energy
Who said that?