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No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage (yahoo.com) 200

Posted by EditorDavid from the solar-flair dept.
"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage." These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances.

During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available....

According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 — the same year it has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality. That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits.

In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources — such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower — which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California's grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state's electrical system weather this year's long-lasting heat.
"Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees..."

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage More | Reply

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage

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  • Summer vs Winter (Score:2, Informative)

    by firewrought ( 36952 )

    Summer loads typically peak mid-day and follow solar generation closely... batteries help make managing supply and demand easier, but huge capacity isn't necessarily needed or helpful.

    By contrast, it's winter loads that experience the morning/evening "double peak". That's where these large capacities come into play... the sun directly warms houses during the middle of the day (cutting the need for heating) and the batteries soak up excess dollar generation, which then gets spent as the sun sets and in the m

    • Re:Summer vs Winter (Score:5, Informative)

      by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @12:38PM (#66337372)
      CAISO daily data shows that hot season demand in California peaks around 6 PM: the "duck curve". Batteries here help to cover that demand peak as solar fades.
    • Clearly you have not been to San Francisco. Summers are mild, many days it's chilly; and rarely do temperatures in the Bay Area exceed 80 in coastal areas or 90 inland. Sometimes in the summer I turn the heat on around 8pm going overnight. The 4th of july was fairly cold this year and I wore a thick jacket.

      • Re: Summer vs Winter (Score:4, Informative)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:30PM (#66337452) Homepage Journal

        Last week it was high-90's and low 100's along the central coast (Santa Cruz & Monterey). It cooled down at night, but I also don't have A/C because I almost never need it, maybe for 3-5 days every 3-4 years it would be appreciated.

        San Francisco is its own particularly bizarre climate compared to the rest of California or even the Bay Area. Just going from the tip of the peninsula to the South Bay can add +20F degrees to the temperature. It can be 75F in SF and 95F-105F in San Jose. Sometimes SF gets to 90F weather most years, specially downtown, even while the Outer Sunset is buried in fog by the next morning.

        But last week had some parts hitting high 90's in most of the City, and it was 100F in The Castro and Corona Heights I am told. Very few residential buildings have A/C in SF. Not central air and not even a window unit. With mini-splits getting cheaper and easy to retrofit to old buildings, we're going to see more SF residence adopt A/C to deal with the hotter weather that has become more frequent.

        • I do have new mini splits for HVAC and the air conditioning is used at most for two to three days a year, for a few hours on those days. Those days usually coincide with lots of sun hitting my solar panels, so I'm using very little grid power during those times anyway. Also it tends to heat up here in September as ocean temperature rises, while at the same time SoCal is using less air conditioning, so the OPs perspective on time of day doesn't quite map here.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

        Wait what?

        The nighttime lows in SF were 12C. That's think jacket weather???

        I think Americans now spend so much time in climate controlled buildings that they've forgotten what weather is like.

        • The nighttime lows in SF were 12C. That's think jacket weather???
          Yes.
          Are you really such a retard, or are you a 2m 200kg fat guy who has 20cm fat cover all over the body?

          What exactly would you wear below 20C if not a Jacket of various thickness?

        • Just reading the temperature from Europe won't tell you how it feels. On July 4, a thick soupy fog rolled in along with a bunch of wind, causing significant chill in the humid air so it felt much cooler. A French friend of mine once said to me "In New York in the winter, I am not as cold as I am at night in San Francisco in the summer." When you feel it for yourself, you'll understand. I saw unprepared European tourists by the waterfront desperately wrapping themselves in blankets. It feels MUCH colder t

          • I've been to both.

            Windy and 0degrees f in a NY winter is much colder.

            Which isn't to say that temperatures in the 50s (especially after a sunny day) aren't light jacket weather. But NY winters are brutal. I've never felt the cold of sleety 35 degree day with high winds in San Francisco. To say nothing of a windy sub zero night.

            • I grew up in New York, when winters were even colder like the infamous Blizzard of 96, and lived in SF for over 15 years. I can say it's very different at first l, I didn't have the wind chill and fog tolerance so evenings in summer made me chillier than in NY in late autumn. But there's nothing in SF like fullon scarf/gloves/thermal underwear weather which would be much of Dec-Feb in NY. The thing is it's moderately warm during the day in SF until the fog rolls in, so people (especially visitors) are unp

              • A tourist to San Francisco probably thinks it's like LA since that's the majority of what we see in media too (Hollywood being there and all).

                Of all you've seen is surfing, beaches, and partying in open courtyards: San Francisco can definitely be a shock.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by ukoda ( 537183 )
                  Many years ago my first time in SF and that was exactly what I had found. I was expecting it to be warmer based on TV and LA. I was disappointed to find it was as about cold as back home. Not a problem, just disappointing.

        • The southern half of the United States shares latitude with northern Africa, not Europe. We've been in heat for the past 5 months that apparently has killed 35k Europeans [theguardian.com]. For us that's a Tuesday.

          Yes I am putting on a hoodie when it's 53F out. I won't be shamed about that. Just like I wouldn't ever shame you about installing AC, it's glorious.

        • There's a famous quote, so famous I can't remember who said it ;) about how the coldest winter they ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

          We have an Arctic current that's colder in summer, and a deep trench right off the coast.

          • Apocryphal to Mark Twain, true origin unsubstantiated. If I'm near the coast, I always have a sweater or jacket and a watch cap in the car.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ukoda ( 537183 )

          Wait what?

          The nighttime lows in SF were 12C. That's think jacket weather???

          I have found this very much depends on where people grew up. I had one coworker who wore a full on thermal puffer jacket etc when the temperature was in the low 20's C outside. He was from the middle east and was used to temperatures over 30C all of the time. On the other hand I had a coworker from Minneapolis who claimed that above 0C was tee shirt and shorts weather.

          • Spent decades in North Dakota and Alaska.
            Yes, 0C was still T-Shirt and Shorts weather until I got over 45 or so.
            Went back to college, saw a dude still in shorts and tshirt at ~-20F, which is getting close to -20C.

            I've now spent ~4 years in Florida, have worn pants like once.

      • Clearly you have not been to San Francisco. Summers are mild, many days it's chilly;

        Absolutely true for SF proper and anything to the west of the coastal range or right on the bay.

        and rarely do temperatures in the Bay Area exceed...90 inland.

        Not sure where you are, friend, but in San Jose and anything not actually on the water, 90+ in the summer is quite common. Most summers have at least a handful of 100+ days (especially places like Gilroy or Livermore).

        FWIW, I've worked in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, generally between 101 and the bay, and live in south San Jose.

        • You are absolutely right about the inland South Bay and I stand corrected. I admit to spending most of my time in SF, Marin, Oakland/Berkeley and sometimes down to about Mountain View but rarely spend time in the South Bay/San Jose area. I do recall going to Antioch once and thinking it was so hot they must have exploded the namesake Holy Hand Grenade here.

      • rarely do temperatures in the Bay Area exceed 80 in coastal areas or 90 inland

        The Bay Area is famous for extreme microclimates. While San Francisco may be on the chilly side, Livermore in the East Bay is the opposite. In the past month of August, it experienced 15 days of 90+ weather, plus another 5 days of 88-89 weather. That's not that unusual for the East Bay.

    • Current battery capacity only last a few hours after sunset, and starts charging at sunrise. There's a nice graph in this article [substack.com] that shows about a 4 hour coverage with batteries.

      Better than nothing, but the shorter daylight hours of winter tends to highlight the limitations we currently have with our battery capacity.

      • CA has cut gas usage during the duck curve in half in just 5 years.

        With the advent of sodium ion batteries for grid scale storage, capacity won't likely be an issue for more than a decade.

        More energy hits the earth as solar in an hour than the human race uses, in all forms, in a year (at least before hyperscale data centers anyway).

        An 8000:1 surplus. And that's *just* solar.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shilly ( 142940 )

          Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Sodium helps solve for intraday storage. It does not suddenly lower costs to the point where, eg, the UK could get through a winter lull lasting a week. But that’s ok, because that’s the last and hardest 10% of decarbonisation of electricity, and we can focus on the other 90% first, including the massive expansions needed as we electrify transport and heat.

    • Says the guy who has no clue how power grids work.

      Hint: there is a load curve. The power people draw from the net. Which is "kind of" random.

      It changes constantly, in milli seconds.

      A battery helps to smooth that out. Easy. More easy than pumped storage or a gas turbine.

    • That's no longer true.

      People getting home from work and cranking up the AC tends to be more demand than daytime in modern times.

    • I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong... that'd be 17 terawatts... 'spose 17,000 MW sounds better and more impressive on paper.

      I bet those arc welders and arc furnaces run just fine on a bunch of batteries. How about a string of cloudy days or a string of days without wind? It does, in fact, happen (although, with the way the weather is going, it's anyone's guess). And, I bet that solar and wind powered battery system is backed with a NatGas power plant or three that are just pumping out pollution... th

  • TFA has no supporting data (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rta ( 559125 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @12:23PM (#66337346)

    No reason to doubt it, but there's no supporting or illustrating operational data in TFA.

    Like they mention battery capacity added over 5 years... and better grid interconnects with other regions. But don't show what role specifically either of these played in peak usage scenarios.

    like where's the before and after that shows x KW was transferred and allowed higher peak usage with no degradation?

    Also, these changes were added over the past 5 years... so why weren't there rolling blackouts in 2021 or 2022? does that mean that everything after that point, which is probably the bulk of the battery storage, was unnecessary?

    • Re:TFA has no supporting data (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:46PM (#66337474)
      The California State government deserves many of it's very legitimate critiques, but in this case it did something right.

      You're right the article is light on details. They did install 17,000 MW worth of batteries; ~13,500 was grid-scale storage and the rest was residential supported through rebates. The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours. So about 15-20% was residential people incentivized to use their home batteries as storage and the rest was grid storage.

      The article doesn't point out that California also added 27,000 MW of generation capacity also but good news it was almost entirely renewables, wind and solar mostly; natural gas power generation has been flat in it's power generation capacity. They still need the NG to help deal with the hourly volatility of the grid, but they didn't need to add any and overall usage is down around 50%.

      And to your point, the other thing they did in the interim periods is halfway through this (2022) they asked people to voluntarily use less power via these Flex Alerts, sending the population alerts to limit usage. 2023 it was a colder year on average so they didn't have to go that path.

      So overall it is a pretty good success story.

      • I got this link from a Slashdot poster years ago and have been fascinated with it ever since.

        https://www.gridstatus.io/live... [gridstatus.io]

        California is CAISO as noted by parent post. There are frequently days where the sun is shining but temps are not too high or for wind where it is windy, but again temps not so high. In both cases there is a certain amount of electricity that simply cannot be added to the grid because there is no demand. The operators basically turn those off** and that is called curtailment.

        • Yep, curtailment is just future battery storage.

          It would be stupid to build a bazillion GWh of storage without the generation to fill it. Both are happening at increasing speed.

        • Everybody's mad at PG&E or DWP or Edison, but they're all caught in a tough place.
          They have so many above ground lines, and they've had multiple settlements. Which need to be paid, and generally are paid by raising rates-- though they're limited by law in their rates.
          Paying these leaves them with less money to fund the line refurbs which would stop the fires that they're settling on.
           

          • Everyone's mad at them because they are fucking monsters.

            They are so tightly regulated in what they can charge today because they charged people abusively so many times.

            PGE made their own bed and now they can die in it.

      • The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours.

        Is this actually a substantial amount of energy? I'm in Utah (Rocky Mountain Power) and RMP also pays me to use my batteries... but the amount of energy they draw is tiny. 8-10 times per week they draw on my batteries, but it's like 4 kW peak draw (my batteries can sustain 20 kW), and generally for less than 30 seconds, so in any given week I'm only contributing like 0.2 kWh. As I understand it, this is because RMP uses my batteries not really to "serve loads", per se, but just as grid stabilization; bri

        • Some utilities use batteries for stabilization, California also uses it heavily for demand shifting. Stabilization can be for the grid, or even more local needs with switching transients and the like.

          RMP likely has excess generation and doesn't want to pay customers for energy.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rta ( 559125 )

          There's a YT guy who just posted his 2 year breakdown on his Massachusetts green house (electric everything, heat pumps, solar + batteries) a few days ago.
          There it seems the utility makes heavier usage of his batteries than yours, but decreasing.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          channel: "undecided with Matt Farrell". vid title "The Hidden Problem With Home Batteries" is a bit click baity, in that he's quite bullish on the whole thing, basically he's saying he just roundtrip loses 20% of the electric

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rta ( 559125 )

            (nm on the $207/month isn't right. it's 207/year but just for the electricity roundtrip loss. has nothing to do with the capital costs etc.)

    • Re:TFA has no supporting data (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:12PM (#66337516)

      You're not wrong!

      Rolling blackouts used to be far more common and the government would issue a Flex Alert [ca.gov] to indicate that rolling blackouts would be used. California has CAISO which manage electric related stuff and they have a PDF of grid emergencies since 1998 [caiso.com] which include flex alerts. Spoiler, there hasn't been any since 2022 which is shown in this bar graph of flex alerts by year [brightspotcdn.com].

      So now that we have established that rolling blackout haven't happened since at least 2022, the question is why.
      Here is a bit [utilitydive.com] more info [publicpower.org] but the TL;DR version is that in 2022 CA passed law to create the Strategic Reliability Reserve [ca.gov] which has multiple programs aimed at preventing power outages, including that distributed energy grid system that was featured on here a while back.

      However, is it really batteries that preventing outages? Well, it's already been shown that battery systems react much faster than normal energy production methods which prevents your power from "blinking" when a source goes offline. Also, here's a graph from 2024 that shows when battery power is being used and how much [gridstatus.io] (noticed it's very negative when charging from solar). The point here being that the energy stores are substantial and can be discharged ad hoc. It's not definitive evidence but I'm sure if you dig into some of the stats on https://www.caiso.com/ [caiso.com] that you could find you seek.

      • the CASIO site clearly shows batteries providing 30% of grid supply in the evenings just yesterday.

        Batteries allow the time shift of midday solar energy surplus to when there's a deficit in the evenings. CA has cut gas peaker usage in the evenings by over 50% in just 5 years.

    • Also California population peaked in 2020 and has not gone higher so less people using electricity

  • MW is not storage! (Score:3)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @12:33PM (#66337364)

    Why can't these journos get that right? Either they're talking about 17000 MW of max power delivery rate, or they're talking about 17000 MW/h of storage. Either can be true and each have separate importance and both valuable figures to quote. But it's unlikely both the MW max power rate and MW/h storage capacity are the same values.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      Oops! MW-h, not WM/h. That was pure dyslexic typing.

      • Oops! MW-h, not WM/h. That was pure dyslexic typing.

        It looks like Muphry's Law applies even when correcting your own posts!

    • I believe that is actually the normal industry nomenclature practice: rating the storage in power available, not energy stored. I guess the rationale is that the power is usually not needed for a long time. I think the rating is for a specific period, maybe 3 hours.

      • There is no single use case (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SubmergedInTech ( 7710960 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:29PM (#66337450)

        I believe that is actually the normal industry nomenclature practice: rating the storage in power available, not energy stored. I guess the rationale is that the power is usually not needed for a long time. I think the rating is for a specific period, maybe 3 hours.

        There isn't an industry standard. That's because power storage is used for many different things:

        1) Grid stabilization for load swings. Timescale = minutes.

        2) Daily load smoothing. Timescale = hours.

        3) Load smoothing over cloudy days. Timescale = days to weeks. (I can show you graphs from the last 10 years of my solar panels if you want...)

        We could have plenty of MW for grid stabilization and the first half of the evening duck curve, and still not enough for the same on a cloudy day, especially if we turn off other sources of baseline or peaker power like nuclear and natural gas.

        It's like your car battery. It can run your bluetooth speaker for days. Your headlights for hours. And cranking your engine will drain it in minutes. It's rated in "cold cranking amps", which doesn't tell you anything about how long it can do any of those things.

  • They just turn off your water heater. New heaters in CA must be grid capable. and soon will also need to be a heat pump unit killing any resemblance of reliability.

  • Power lines triggering wildfires were part of the reason for previous blackouts, no?

    • Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), there is one going on almost every week in some part of the state. I get maybe two a year, if it is going to be a windy day and it is fairly dry they'll cut my power for 6-12 hours typically.
      There's several PSPS going on in the Sacramento valley and northern Sierra because it's dry and windy right now. (September 9th to 14th). PG&E has about 1000 people working on it right now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      If they're smart, they'll put batteries near the loads. And then when the wind blows, they can de-energize lines and keep peoples lights on.

      Except people aren't smart. I don't know about California, but here in Washington State, communities in the woods out on the fringes of the grid are fighting a battery installation. Because Teslas catch fire. Teslas have batteries. So everything with batteries will catch fire.

      You can build a fire break around a battery substation. Not so much around a garage with an E

  • Oh, yeah, that makes up for all the taxes and gas prices. I bet AI datacenters won't come ruin it. Anyway, wait until that new plug-in solar panel law gets passed! Let's say 3% of 40 million people put one up and it's 200W average. That's 1.2 MW for around 9 hours a day depending on mounting.

  • Renewable+storage = reliable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:04PM (#66337504)

    It's ironic that some people still keep claiming we can't switch to renewables because they aren't reliable. The facts keep showing the opposite. When a drought causes rivers to fall too low to cool your nuclear power plants, renewables keep on working. When someone starts a war that shuts down oil shipments in the middle east, renewables keep on working. When demand spikes and transmission lines get overloaded, distributed solar and batteries are your best friend. They produce energy right where it's needed and keep it off the grid.

    • Re:Renewable+storage = reliable (Score:4, Informative)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:35PM (#66337554) Journal

      It's ironic that some people still keep claiming we can't switch to renewables because they aren't reliable.

      It's an Astroturf campaign designed to benefit fossil fuel companies. The same companies that donated heavily to Trump's last Presidential campaign.

      "You all are wealthy enough, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House," -- Trump to oil companies.

      • It's ironic that some people still keep claiming we can't switch to renewables because they aren't reliable.

        It's an Astroturf campaign designed to benefit fossil fuel companies. The same companies that donated heavily to Trump's last Presidential campaign.

        "You all are wealthy enough, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House," -- Trump to oil companies.

        Assuming that's true, then explain why Texas produces 151,526 GWh of Solar/Wind compared to California's 83,972 GWh. So one of the redest states, that's just completely full of MAGA and fossil fuel companies, and has 20% less population produces almost twice as much solar/wind. Doesn't really fit that narritive does it? What does you ask? Well they aren't fossil fuel companies anymore, and haven't been for ages. They are energy companies. And if any form of energy generation can make them money, they

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by evanh ( 627108 )

          That's called hypocrisy ... do as I say, not as I do. A political strategy to weaken competitors, if that's your thing. Tell everyone else to do the wrong thing while doing it right yourself. In other words lying, and doing it with a smirk.

          • True that's one possibility, and may very well be what the political class is doing. The other is capitalism, which is more likely what the actual businessmen are doing. They are making a profit on solar / wind, as a nice hedge investment for the next time the price of oil drops below production costs, as it always does eventually for one reason or another. Diversified investments aren't just for stocks after all, and even 'oil compaines' have learned that having all your eggs in the fossil fuel market

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jezwel ( 2451108 )
              Happening in Australia also - the energy companies are backing renewables as the cheapest new generation systems, but conservative governments are throwing $$$ at keeping old coal plants running, so they'll take those dollars as well.

              We've also got gas in the mix for peaker plants but batteries are reducing their spot prices considerably...

    • Nah, what is ironic is a one in a century snow blizzard.

      • Are you thinking of the 2021 Texas winter storm, when renewables held up great but production from gas and coal collapsed? Of course, the governor then lied about it and tried to claim the opposite [wikipedia.org]:

        State officials, including Republican governor Greg Abbott, initially incorrectly blamed the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. Data showed that failure to winterize traditional power sources, principally natural gas infrastructure but also, to a lesser extent, wind turbines, had caused the grid failure, with a drop in power production from natural gas more than five times greater than that from wind turbines.

    • Batteries that are cost effective largely solve the intermittent renewable problem. Lithium batteries aren’t even suited to anything more than very short term storage of minutes to a few hours, lithium was developed for energy and power density, able to sustain vibration and impacts without damage (such as being dropped without dents), and the cost can be relatively high as these are mobile device requirements like for laptops, power tools, and EV.

      Grid storage is almost diametrically opposed. Ener

    • Transmission lines do not get overloaded.

      Do you think a grid operator does not know what his grid can handle?

      • PGE didn't have any clue how much most of their lines could carry until recently when they hung temperature sensors on them. You can bet there are still a lot of parts of the line which are unmonitored because PGE is a gigantic shitfest. I thought you knew stuff about power distribution, or you thought so anyway, why didn't you know this?

      • Horseshit: Blackout of 1996. [nwcouncil.org] Memory of this is acute, having flown into Los Angeles while it was happening.

    • It's ironic that some people still keep claiming we can't switch to renewables because they aren't reliable.

      Eh, I think it's been well known that renewables without batteries would have troubles. That's one of the things which always bothered me about early green energy proponents: they touted the cost of solar/wind deployments but didn't include the storage necessary to make it more than a complement to traditional generation.

      Up until the last few years, no one was deploying utility scale batteries, first because the technology didn't exist and more recently because it was really expensive. California is known f

      • Utility scale solar could do a lot of work even without batteries, because if you orient the panels correctly they match the demand curve fairly well, albeit not perfectly. So you're mad at people who don't deserve it, and also with no good reason.

  • Good: no rolling power outages since 2020 due to lack of capacity.
    Bad: Large increase in geographic power outages due to windy fire danger.

  • There's gotta be a battery nerd on here that can shed some light on this.
    What's the lifespan/num cycles or whichever metric is relevant to these types of batteries before they have to be replaced?

    • They're typically Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP), good for 5000+ cycles before they degrade enough to be a problem. So charging every day they're good for about 10 to 15 years.

      In practice, they'll have a site with multiple generations of batteries. So they're always extending their capacity and keeping old batteries in service. Eventually replacing degraded packs with new equipment when it is cheaper (in terms of storage capacity vs cost) to swap out the equipment than to simply add new.

      • Curious, sounds like you are in the industry. Are you seeing sodium based starting to get installed? I thought one of the big advantages of sodium was more cycles. Also surprised no one has mentioned, TX has 22GWh of storage now. I noted this morning was a big charge cycle with a 10GW charge peak. I imagine in prep for this evening. Its 100 again, so there will be a sizable discharge tonight.

      • Unfortunately a lot of them are NCM still. The BESS at Moss Landing which infamously went up in flames was. It used NCM batteries from LG made out of cells [poorly] designed for EVs.

  • Is considered an accomplishment? We really need to raise our expectations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      We really need to raise our expectations.

      It's California. They get a gold star for being California.

    • This is America, if we're ever in a situation where we have to choose between a business or data center having power 24/7 with 99.99% reliability (1 hour or less) and residential customers having some reduced level like 99.9% (8 hours of outage a year) then you can be certain that's how it's going to play out.

      Where we draw the line is really the only debate. Like 95% is more like having 36 hours a month with an outage. Maybe even rolling blackouts every week, so some people don't have power on the same day

      • And don't forget, we'll make sure the cheapest place to buy solar panels has the highest amount of tariffs so we can essentially force people to "buy American", regardless of which panels might actually be better.

        While I understand the desire to buy American, if definitely feels like the social contract between consumer and supplier fell apart. We're suppose to buy America and they are suppose to fucking hire Americans for the jobs. Now, we're forced to buy America and they still won't hire us unless they a

  • Compared to when? Hoover Dam, in 1936? The Four Corners Generating plant in New Mexico since 1963? The Pacific DC Intertie since 1970?

    California has a long and storied history of integrating everyone else's power for years to feed their air conditioning, hot tubs and motorized sex toys. It's almost as if they have been all on their own, running on San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Poor little things.

    • Badly written, but additional interties have come online with several GW capacity. The meaningful part of it is greater bi-directional capacity leaving fewer stranded renewable on resources.

  • Sounds like an improvement.
    However, most people on the planet do not know what a "rotating power outage" is.

  • Again the people pay for infrastructure that companies should pay for from their massive profits
  • Two days in a row, my full Powerwalls became part of the virtual power station. We did have an outage, because of a branch or something on our rural road. Otherwise, disaster averted. Hurray for batteries.
  • Or they could have not shut down the 2GW San Onofre nuclear plant.

  • Energy rates have increased 70% over the same time. Good job California.

  • tldr but some google ai questions turned up this data, could be wrong but interesting.

    -Cali grid storage: Total of 25 GW. Of that, 3.9 GW is hydro and 21.1 GW is battery. Battery includes 16 GW in-state utility, 2 GW imports from other states, and 3.1 GW home/commercial setups (Tesla).
    Of the battery storage, apparently 70-80% is actually running on batteries from Chinese manufacturers like CATL and BYD. And BYD is either sold through someone else or is actually the vendor too, with #1 in reliability.
    https:/ [byd.com]

  • It is wild to imagine that a headline of continuous power-supply is seen as positive and celebratory when it rather is the absolute minimum to even begin to be considered as civilized first world, next to running water and proper sewage.
    Must feel nice to pay all these crazy taxes in CA and only in 2026 you dont need candles anymore to keep the light on.

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