Supply Chain Issues Delaying US Grid Batteries' Installation (latimes.com) 47
Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America's grids "are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in," with supplies straining for the necessary equipment.
Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by data centers' booming energy needs and increasing electrification. It's also getting harder to get them connected to power grids... As those upgrades get delayed, storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast. For example, Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, says over the last two years the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300%... "The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked," said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory...
Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab's research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015. The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years...
[Shortages in key equipment] have driven up construction costs and time lines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down... In California, PG&E Corp., the state's largest utility, told regulators in January that a key driver of delays was long lead times for specialized equipment. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload compared to prior years. In Northern California, for example, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades to a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, according to PG&E.
Last year New York's Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects will push power demand and strain infrastructure. But that also drew criticism: According to a survey conducted by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), the new methodology raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, according to the group. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.
Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab's research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015. The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years...
[Shortages in key equipment] have driven up construction costs and time lines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down... In California, PG&E Corp., the state's largest utility, told regulators in January that a key driver of delays was long lead times for specialized equipment. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload compared to prior years. In Northern California, for example, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades to a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, according to PG&E.
Last year New York's Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects will push power demand and strain infrastructure. But that also drew criticism: According to a survey conducted by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), the new methodology raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, according to the group. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.
Empty slogans. (Score:3)
Just think how much of this alleviated by Made in America being more than a slogan?
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(TFA)
"By storing electricity when prices are low and renewables are abundant, and discharging it when demand rises, batteries can help reduce consumer power bills, decarbonize electricity use and reduce strain on the grid. That makes them especially useful on hot summer days when consumers blast their air conditioners."
They got that all screwed up... prices are low at night when renewables are definitely not abundant... demand is highest during the day when prices are high _and_ renewables are abundant.
We w
Time dependent demand [Re:Great Scott!] (Score:2)
(TFA): "By storing electricity when prices are low and renewables are abundant, and discharging it when demand rises, batteries can help reduce consumer power bills, decarbonize electricity use and reduce strain on the grid. That makes them especially useful on hot summer days when consumers blast their air conditioners."
They got that all screwed up... prices are low at night when renewables are definitely not abundant... demand is highest during the day when prices are high _and_ renewables are abundant.
No, it's partly right. Air conditioning loads tend to peak in the late afternoon, when solar power is still available (but not at its peak), but have another peak when people get home from work, which continues on into the evening and loads typically only drop below average around midnight, when solar is not abundant. Look up "duck curve"> [mgathermal.com].
This could, in principle, be easily solved-- air conditioners could easily store coolness. Water has a high heat capacity, and you could cool water during the solar
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Water storage is very inefficient in terms of weight and volume. Ice storage is better, since the heat of fusion is much greater than the heat capacity for a reasonable temperature difference, so I've seen ice storage used in a few large projects. Still a typical house has maybe a 3-T
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Interesting calculation. I think the efficiency loss in trying to cool all the way down to ice is probably not worth the benefit of a lower amount of water used.
Water heat capacity is about 4.2 kJ/kg per degree, so if we cool the water, say, ten degrees (C), for 4 kW of cooling for 12 hours we'd need about 4 tons of water (*). Seems like a lot, but water is cheap, and the tank would be a cylinder .64 meters radius at the base by 2 meters high, bigger than a home water heater, but still not too huge to put i
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Wrong conclusion. (Score:5, Interesting)
A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down...
Given that we live in a "market-driven" society, the correct conclusion is that companies are refusing to properly compensate skilled workers. As for the cause, the only rational conclusion is that there is insufficient competition in the energy distribution market. To encourage competition, the correct move would be to start breaking up large energy distribution companies like PG&E.
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Given that we live in a "market-driven" society, the correct conclusion is that companies are refusing to properly compensate skilled workers.
With executive pay at all time highs and the gap between executive and workers larger than ever, I would agree. This is a failure in the system where boards of directors are not holding executives accountable. The system can't hold for long.
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That's because of all of the inbreeding. A is the CEO at one place where B sits on the board. Next door, B is the CEO and A sits on the board...
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Re:Wrong conclusion. (Score:4, Interesting)
In a free market, business owners would be free to decide how much land to set aside for parking for their customers, just as restaurant owners decide how many tables and chairs to set out. Right now, parking requirements are set by cities and are "closer to sorcery than to science." [dallascityhall.com]
Let's do it. Because we all value freedom here, right?
The external costs of oil also need to be priced in if the market is going to make decisions. One example of these costs are the damage to our lungs caused by emissions. [slashdot.org] We could price in that external cost by adding a fee on top of the price of oil and use the revenue to pay medical costs and lost income to people affected by air pollution. I think that would be fair.
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Ah, this again. Are you being paid by oil companies, who want to do anything possible to stop electrical vehicles?
No. The main pollution is not tire particulates, and electric cars are not particularly harder on tires than any American SUV. There turn out to be incentives to making cars larger and heavier. Eliminating these incentives would help, but (spoiler alert) it's not electric cars that are the problem.
Re: Wrong conclusion. (Score:2)
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I'm not aware of any brownouts caused by people charging their EVs at inopportune times.
In the USA, the real threat to the grid is people arriving home and starting up their air conditioners when the sun is low and their solar panels are no longer producing electricity. Having more EVs with V2G will help to prevent brownouts in that situation.
Re: Wrong conclusion. (Score:2)
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There doesn't seem to be as much money in green energy than there is in, lets say, oil.
It's a bit more specific. The money in oil goes to a specific group of, typically quite corrupt (because it involves land purchase and government permits) businessmen. There is less money in renewables (which is why they are cheaper for the consumer) however the money goes either to sophisticated engineering such as turbine and solar panel production or to the local owners of the solar systems.
That means that where oil tends to damage the local economy (look at very oil rich countries, like Venezuela and Ni
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It's not just the companies, the whole educational system including parental brainwashing from the media has been harping on "you have to go to college" for years.
Way back in the '70s my high school had a wood shop, gas and arc welding, machine shop and an auto shop. The girls admittedly got a much smaller variety of hands on things to choose from.
Do modern high schools offer similar options?
By the way, I did take arc welding and two semesters of machine shop but then I wasn't planning to go to college, tha
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Yes. Every single one of them has this. Also they are all encouraging people to not go to college and to become a trades person. Literally on opening day of every freshman orientation the local principal tells every student that they are unlikely to go to college. It is honestly a shame.
But yes every school has these things, and they all want to act like it is some new achievement, when they renovate them, but they have all had them always.
There is no shortage of people that can take these jobs, there is
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If the purpose of a system is the results it produces, education is not the purpose of K-12 schools in the US.
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It's not the funding level.
In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).
https://nces.ed.gov/p [ed.gov]
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My high school didn't have half of those things and it is a highly desirable charter high school that people want to get into in my region. Unless they've turned around and added those things back in, they didn't exist in 2000.
I live in San Diego by the way, so not exactly no where.
Also, they've been banging the college drum for decades, not years.
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My electric company is owned by a few international conglomerates.
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More important than breaking up PGE, we should nationalize the distribution infrastructure. PGE has demonstrated time and again that they lack the necessary responsibility. I refer again to burning down much of Paradise, CA by skipping maintenance, as the fire was caused by a line falling because a hook wore through due to being in service for 99 years. Surely they could have caught that with an inspection any time over several decades as the wear would have been easily visible long before failure, if only
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It might not just be a lack of appropriate compensation, although that is chronic in my country. It takes time to train people in this technology, and there is sometimes no substitute for experience. There are lots of different people needed too - some to install the batteries, some to handle the electrical side at the local level, and some to deal with them at the grid level. There can be delays anywhere along the chain.
If you look at how China did it, the government said that adding battery capacity shoul
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It's not just compensation. Compensation for electricians is quite high already - the problem is the ramp up to those levels is long tedious and hard.
Pay for apprentices is abysmally low - honestly, it's not much above McDonalds, and the physical strain and effort of the work is similar, if not more. (Which is why "join a trade" is not quite a solution - most trades are physically demanding jobs and unless you start in your 20s, you won't be able to do it in your 40s. But by then you should have enough to e
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Given that we live in a "market-driven" society, the correct conclusion is that companies are refusing to properly compensate skilled workers
Dig one level deeper. If selling power is how PG&E makes money, and there's more power to sell if these projects to complete, why is PG&E, being a greedy company, not hiring people in droves to complete them? We've seen other companies, e.g. the AI companies, pay outrageous rates to get good people to complete projects. Why is PG&E (and friends) different?
One obvious difference is the energy distribution companies are regulated monopolies. PG&E, for example, can't just make investments willy
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Utilities are heavily regulated because they need to be. They have demonstrated it time and again. PGE in particular has proven it several well-publicized times that you surely have heard of.
The upshot of these regulations is that utilities including PGE only really make money from new generation projects, so they certainly would like to engage in them. But the longer they run, the more they cost, and the more PGE can charge as a result. This also motivates them to build the least cost-effective options.
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Given that we live in a "market-driven" society, the correct conclusion is that companies are refusing to properly compensate skilled workers.
Of course they could just try and outbid each other, the end result would be a spike in pay, an over correction, and millions of workers finding themselves unable to cover loan repayments when they realise they were in fact exposed to a bubble.
Everyone could pay a fortune more today. It won't change anything for at least 3+ years, as that's the duration it takes to get skilled workers through their training system and into the market. Do you like what's happening with DRAM pricing? Did you like what happene
Non sequitur (Score:2)
Why should the fact that batteries have gotten more expensive mean data centres should be able to foist their costs of unprecedented expansion speed on existing grid users? Likely the batteries are still cheaper than solving it with interconnect and generation, so pay up or fuck off.
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Exactly, that's $21 million per project they were going to foist on the existing rate payers.
Is an extra $21 million turns you AI project from profit to loss then it wasn't going to ever make money anyway. AI is either going to go bust or become a commodity. Either way the highest cost data centers will go broke and be abandoned in place. The county should be charging reclamation fees as well. Get the cash for clean up up front because you won't be getting after the bankruptcy filing.
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Why should the fact that batteries have gotten more expensive
The first line of the summary:
It's not the batteries that are the bottleneck. It is the equipment to connect them into the net, and the skilled labor to do so.
... mean data centres should be able to foist their costs of unprecedented expansion speed on existing grid users?
"Should" is not really a useful word in economic analysis. The cost of expanding capacity is a cost that has to be paid now, while the income from selling electricity is an income that occurs in the future. If this were an unregulated free market, if the data centers are offeri
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It's going to get nasty when home batteries and solar really start to become the norm and being totally reliant on the grid gets much more expensive. It's inevitable as the cost of solar and batteries keeps falling, while the cost of distribution stays the same or rises due to climate change. As ever, it will be expensive to be poor and not be able to make the up-front investment.
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Why should the fact that batteries have gotten more expensive mean data centres should be able to foist their costs of unprecedented expansion speed on existing grid users?
Are they not paying? The impression I get is AI companies are expanding as fast as possible (it's a virtual land grab right now) and cost is not the primary concern. Or in other words, if I'm springing for a $10B data center, I can pay $100M to build a transmission line.
If allowed, I'm pretty sure most AI companies would happily pay to build transmission lines and power plants if (a) it got done sooner and (b) they got assurance they'd get the power they need when they need it. They're talking about buildin
Now, not later [Re:Non sequitur] (Score:2)
Are they not paying? The impression I get is AI companies are expanding as fast as possible (it's a virtual land grab right now) and cost is not the primary concern. Or in other words, if I'm springing for a $10B data center, I can pay $100M to build a transmission line. If allowed, I'm pretty sure most AI companies would happily pay to build transmission lines and power plants if (a) it got done sooner
Ay, there's the rub. They can put up data centers quickly. Electrical capacity expansion takes time.
They want the electricity now, not "when the electrical utilities get to it."
...
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They want the electricity now, not "when the electrical utilities get to it."
Yeah, that is the issue, isn't it? If PG&E and Anthropic were free to negotiate a plan, I'm pretty sure the agreement would be "In exchange for these large bags of money, PG&E will deliver power next week." That two self-interested/greedy companies don't reach that agreement makes me wonder what's stopping them.
Shortages of people and components are the sorts of problems markets are really good at fixing, maybe not today but in a year or so. If it's not getting resolved, something is keeping the ma
Interesting (Score:2)
This means despite all the assholes and all the idiots there, even the US is slowly going to green energy, fore purely economic reasons.
Shift storage to consumers (Score:3)
These "grid scale" batteries... don't scale. It is far more effective to push storage to the consumer (especially large consumers) for operation below 35kV, and ideally below 5kV. Otherwise you just end up with a more expensive grid with excess complexity that is difficult to model reliably.
Supply Chain LOL (Score:2)
The idiots in charge did this to themselves when they let China become damn near the SOLE supplier
for any and all materials necessary in the first place.
When you put all your eggs into one basket, you are at the mercy of the one holding said basket. :|