All this talk about energy independence and not a word on where are the solar cells, batteries and wind turbines made. If your grid is standing on components with short life time and which you can't manufacture at scale, you are not independent. You have just traded one dependence for another.
> 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.
This definitely plays a huge factor. Even people who get airco for the first time are already beginning with a different mindset. They also tend to run the units very conservatively because they aren’t used to living in an air conditioned space and often find it uncomfortable after a certain point.
I moved to Western Europe from a US state where airco is mandatory. I purchased a split unit here and on the worst summer weeks, it still only cost me €10 to run the unit on its coldest setting for a week (almost continuously since I was using it with a fan to blow cooler air around the rest of the house). Back in the US, I had summer electricity bills of hundreds of dollars every year.
Sure, the weather is a bit more mild here, but there have been heat waves, and I’m definitely an outlier when it comes to usage. But that just goes to show how efficient these new units are!
That happens on a larger scale too. When an energy-intensive facility reaches some sort of lifetime limit, it too is replaced with something more efficient -- but also it will be replaced in a location where costs, including energy costs, are lower. So over time such facilities will tend to migrate to places where energy costs aren't too high.
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)
Texas has rooftop solar, but it doesn't have the same incentives as California, and in fact, the Texas grid itself has a million little different franchises that repackage Centerpoint and/or Texas and New Mexico Power generated electricity with different usage plans you have to renew annually to semi-annually.
Our dear leader has been busy decimating small businesses that rely on federal incentives to build renewable power generation lately. This hit particularly hard in Texas.
The boss move is buying a plan with cheap to free electricity at night in exchange for a ludicrous day rate, bonus points for buying batteries to self-consume and/or change at night as needed.
Going strictly by the numbers, it's a judgment call as to whether it's "worth it" or not, but the power independence for doing so is fantastic IMO YMMV. My Maslow hierarchy may not match yours.
In Dallas where I grew up, it wasn’t necessarily rare but it wasn’t a given by any stretch. Maybe 10% of homes the last time I lived there (2022)? The neighborhood also made a difference.
Where I live now in the Netherlands, it feels like 30-40% of private homes have solar and 80%+ of business and government buildings that use more energy during the daylight hours so the payoff is much more realizable.
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.
Fascinating, the first .gov website I've seen since the shutdown that has no obviously partisan "them democrats took ur gubmint down!!!"-style message in a top banner.
While usage of aircon during heatwaves stressing the grid is a valid concern, I think massive increase in solar could offset it. Solar will also generate maximum energy during sunny days with minimal cloud cover, meaning there shouldn’t be a shortage of energy if there’s enough solar.
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.
It doesn't solve the problem- its the end of the day when solar has ramped down that the crises happens. Its the duck curve. Where its still hot and air conditioning is still running hard.
Solar depresses the energy demand during the middle of the day. Energy storage smooths out the load profile.
Knowing about the duck curve and taking advantage of the essentially zero marginal cost of solar, can't most folks just crank down their AC temps at 11 or noon such that there's no end-of-day demand ramp?
I know folks in Phoenix who are on a time-of-day plan and they max out the AC overnight and then barely use it during the day (same goal, just they don't have solar)
I feel like the additional unstated context is that nothing has changed.
Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.
I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.
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.
Usually slug, headline and teaser are all considered important parts to optimize. My wife works for a big online news company and while news journalists write headline and teaser, they have editors in chief who edit those again and a separate SEO team who will assign slugs.
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.
It is only very recently that California started trying to decarbonize.
When France did their amazing nuclear build, it was for energy independence, not for decarbonization purposes. It was a very forward thinking move, even if it wasn't as cheap initially imagined and ended up being stopped before fully completed. It was a national security project.
However nuclear is cheap when the high upfront capital costs have been paid off, and it's down to just the operating expenses. Building it is oppressively expensive, however, especially as labor costs have risen in the many decades since the 1970s while.
As France's nuclear fleet ages out and needs to be replaced, it seems unlikely that they will be able to pull off a build of a second fleet. Their efforts at prototyping the next design, the EPR, have been fairly disastrous, with builds at Flamanville and in Finland going very poorly.
I suspect that Germany & California's current route to decarbonization through renewables will be followed by France in the coming decades.
I will counter this. I think theres going to be a significant work to push down the costs of re-powering the aging nuclear fleet.
Renewables will continue to be a force and work around the edges. Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence. Potentially but not certain future where other people are also purchasing nuclear assets which pushes down maintenance / manufacturing costs. Risk is that China deploys globally and is the operator. France isn't known for high quality - reasonably costed items - fast time line products.
As well - unspoken part of renewable is in case of a security incident in Europe (see Russia) - nuclear is much more stable work load then solar (could easily scatter bomb solar assets). I know that sounds unintuitive given peoples concern about Nuclear - but there is a such a common good to protect nuclear assets due to fallout where solar assets are localized.
Germany de-carbonization path (shutting down their nuclear plants) was a massive mistake and have seriously hindered their economic long run competitiveness. Its been a black eye for them.
> Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence.
If the goal is energy independence, renewables will provide that more cheaply. If the goals are the other side effects of nuclear power: isotopes, national pride (Curie!), workforce augmentation for nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, then these goals also require far fewer reactors than enough to power the entire country.
I do not doubt that there may be some level of nuclear power in the future. But I would take a long bet that in 2050, France is closer to 0% nuclear power than it is to the current level. (That phrasing is confusing, but I think the fraction of nuclear power will be less than half its current amount)
> But I would take a long bet that in 2050, France is closer to 0% nuclear power than it is to the current level.
Maybe, but I think the corollary goal is to have nuclear power be a bigger part of the remaining non-renewables. So if (exaggerating grossly) it's 90% renewable, 9% nuclear, and 1% other, that's arguably still better than the current state.
> I think theres going to be a significant work to push down the costs of re-powering the aging nuclear fleet.
The EPR2 costs just keeps spiraling. They haven't even started building yet or been able to agree on how to finance the subsidies.
This is the same France that less than a month ago had another government collapse due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem and being unable to agree on how to fix it.
A massive handout to the nuclear industry sounds like just the right plan!
It is also funny that you mention Russia. You do know that the EU despite 19 sanction packages haven't been able to agree on sanctions for the Russian nuclear industry. We still are too reliant on it.
Germany was able to quickly phase out Russian fossil gas, while france keeps being EUs no. 1 importer of Russian LNG.
But I do love blaming everything on Germany. So much easier.
I'm sure they also did it for the nuclear weapons program.
My own country never wanted nukes and they discovered large deposits of natural gas so that was it. After all nuclear energy was never as cheap as they envisioned in the 1950s.
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.
EDF is generally highly profitable while at the same time delivering cheap, reliable power. 2023 was the one exception, due to the energy crisis and its interaction with the ARENH program that forces EDF to sell power from nuclear at a fixed low price (usually way below market).
Even if it needs that power itself.
So in 2022, it still had to sell this power at 4 cent/kWh, and then had to buy that same power back from the market at up to €1/kWh.
What strikes me is the fact that nuclear power has received an incredible amount of backslash after the Chernobyl incident (a few thousands deaths) and the Fukushima incident (one disputed death), but hydroelectric power is considered a "good" source of energy despite a few incredibly deadly incidents:
- Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]
- Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]
In Quebec, most of the dams are in the middle of nowhere, but your point still stands.
There are costs/risks for most forms of power. If you're in an environment where wind and solar can make economical sense, go for it. For reliable base loads, I still think order of preference should be:
- geothermal (very rare and hard to do at scale, though)
- hydro
- nuclear
- natural gas
- oil/diesel (at very small, localized levels eg remote villages)
I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
As you say, dams are a net positive, and while failures do happen, these days we tend to be wiser about where we put PHES in particular.
I guess I’m surprised it isn’t more of an option for California - the U.K. uses Snowdonia as a giant battery, and afaik there’s been one failure of a dam that wiped half of trefriw off the map a century ago - which wasn’t hard as it’s a speck of a place. Since then the lakes have pretty reliably and safely provided somewhere to stick excess energy, and now are largely pumped by the offshore wind arrays nearby.
California has big mountains, but I’m not sure if the geology or terrain is right for PHES.
Does that really matter? The cleanup costs are still socialized.
It is time we move on from the fossil tradition of socialized losses on private profits [1] and instead let the nuclear industry bear their true insurance cost.
If a nuclear reactor was bombed during the war, would the resulting deaths be counted as a nuclear disaster and used as argument against it, or just another war crime? Depends who you ask I'd say.
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.
This shouldn't be confused for an argument to build new nuclear power in the year 2025 when far cheaper alternatives exist. It is an observation that nuclear works really well if it already exists and the fixed costs have been paid for, and that nuclear was the best choice a few decades ago.
The only reason nuclear is more expensive than any alternative are absurd regulations, reporting duties, the practice of financing these projects on borrowed money with high interests and that many of the companies running these projects are career parking spots and accelerators for the social circles around politicians and the bureaucratic aristocracy.
Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.
The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox.
This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the average for a combined cycle gas plant is about 60 FTE.
And nuclear fission produces low-grade heat - around 320°C - compared to coal (around 550°C) or natural gas (over 1300°C). Thus are less thermally efficient and require huge cooling towers and much larger turbines to extract the thermal energy. Which, of course, are more expensive and complex to build and maintain.
Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too).
So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.
The batteries mentioned in the article have only a few hours of capacity, and are designed to smooth the peak usage intraday. I think many people are confused and seem to think batteries are a viable way to address the volatility of wind, where you may deal with weeks with no/low wind, or solar, which in countries with cold winters is of little help.
I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal with that volatility. Hydro perhaps in a handful of smaller, mountainous countries (and if you are not too regarding of the environmental damages). Right now the UK is using LNG to compensate wind.
Long-form storage is inherently unprofitable - a battery that's used daily will make 365x the sales of a battery that's used only once a year.
So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.
In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.
Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.
You don't need batteries with longer capacity in terms of power:energy ratio, you simply need more batteries.
Getting to France's level of nuclear decarbonization with batteries is cheap and easy with current prices. Using existing thermal plants for a few weeks a year and renewables for the rest is quite similar overall to France's mix.
What's challenging is the final 10%, 5%, and 1%. But it will take 15-20 years of deployment of our current cheap renewables+storage technology before we need to solve those final percents. In that time, technology will have advanced tremendously and we don't know what the cheapest solution will be, just that it will be cheaper than current tech. Plus it would take much longer than 15 years to even build nuclear in any significant quantity! France said a few years ago that they would be building handful of new reactors but I still have not seen progress!
The UK uses far more gas to heat homes than to generate electricity, and uses some for industrial purposes so it seems weird to attribute LNG use to wind, the technology that more than any other has reduced gas usage in the UK.
The increase in use of wind, being intermittent and non-dispatchable means there has to be 1-for-1 back up wind generation. That is gas.
We also have periods in the winter (so solar of little to no use), where we can have a week or two of no wind.
As the gas generators are not run constantly, they're more expensive than if they were. There are various (at least 3) UK "gridwatch" sites available, offering real time and historical generation mix. Maybe have a look.
From memory, so probably flawed, we still tend to depend upon nuclear and gas for around 40 - 50 % of our generation (nuke being low - say between 5 and 10).
It illustrates both the volatility of wind (which regularly goes to zero for at least a week), and how it is currently pretty much 100% offset with gas.
Normally this would be handled by a wider synchronized network. The EU has a continent wide synchronized network and the UK isn’t part of it.
There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.
The interconnectors between UK and the continent are HVDC.
As such they are essentially massive switching-mode PSUs, and there is no possibility of having a synchronised connection, as the AC has to be synthesised, following the local spinning iron.
But also europe isn't that large. When there is no wind in the UK, there is no wind in France or Italy. Which means not only do they not provide diversification, they will import at the same time.
France is increasing its nuclear output. And planning to build new plants. (Expanding nuclear generation was prohibited by law up until March of 2023).
The added renewables help to make the nuclear plants more efficient and profitable, by taking up a good amount of the variable demand.
Renewables are non dispatchable and thus have a hard time picking up variable demand. They’re very good at providing free energy on sunny or windy days and are increasingly forcing nuclear plants to reduce output during those times, directly cutting into nuclear profits.
France currently doesn't have any reactors under construction. Its annual nuclear generation peaked in 2005:
~/git/iaea-pris % sqlite3 pris_data.db
sqlite> select year, sum(electricity_supplied_gwh) from reactor_statistics, reactor_operating_history where reactor_statistics.reactor_id=reactor_operating_history.reactor_id and country_code='FR' and year > '1999' group by year;
year sum(electricity_supplied_gwh)
---- -----------------------------
2000 395392.3
2001 401256.49
2002 415110.33
2003 421028.62
2004 428040.69
2005 431179.56
2006 429819.63
2007 420129.49
2008 419800.32
2009 391752.97
2010 410086.42
2011 423509.48
2012 407437.88
2013 405898.51
2014 418001.4
2015 419035.02
2016 386452.88
2017 381846.02
2018 395908.34
2019 382402.75
2020 338735.78
2021 363394.15
2022 282093.23
2023 323773.23
2024 364390.78
France is planning new EPR2 reactors, but no construction is expected to start before 2027 and none would run before the 2030s, even if construction does not encounter delays. I put little trust in announcements of future plans without actual construction work, whether the plans are for nuclear reactors, wind farms, data centers, or any other major investment.
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
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.
$0.5B is a tiny rounding error in the cost of standing up the first GW of a new tech. If SMRs could be built for $10/W, which is overly optimistic, that would be $10B. Much more likely is $30B-$50B for that first GW. And SMRs are not even going to start getting to a halfway competitive cost until at least several
GW in. If they can eventually get to $5/W they might have a chance at competing for a fraction of the grid.
All this is to say that if there are high costs imposed by regulation, it's not the regulatory process it's in the cost of building the final design.
However, the "regulations make nuclear expensive" folks never seem to be able to propose the changes that might make nuclear cheaper, or by how much. The only concrete proposals I have heard are from people skeptical that nuclear can ever be cost competitive!
Does anyone have actual numbers on what France’s nuclear fleet cost? I thought it was somewhat shrouded in mystery due to government and national security subsidies.
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.
3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
It was always a public/nationalized company. It started 100% owned by the government. In the 2000s, around 15% were sold to pension funds, so way over 80% in the hands of the state, which by EU rules (and common sense) makes it a state company.
The floating shares were bought back in order to facilitate the nuclear expansion plans.
The losses in 2022 were largely due to the energy crisis because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which interacted rather nastily with the French ARENH program that requires EDF to sell 25% of its power output for 4 cents/kWh, no matter what the market rates. And no matter if it needs that power itself.
When the energy crunch hit in 2022, wholesale electricity rates rose up to €1 / kWh. So EDF had to sell its electricity for 4 cents, then buy it back at 25x markup for €1.
Oh, and the government actually increased the ARENH quotas to more than 25%, because it used EDF to subsidize consumer/industry energy prices, something that was done by the states directly in other countries.
The problems with a part of the fleet, largely due to deferred maintenance during COVID, also didn't help.
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.
> Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over
Its unlikley, they are a massive pain to manage compared to lithium, expensive and have poor round trip efficiency. Oh and terrible energy density.
I'm not saying its impossible, but I'd be surprised.
I think the biggest two factors that play against them is that they round trip efficiency is something like 70-80% compared to 90%+. but the real pain in the arse is the charge managment. From what I understand, you need to charge them to full, and then discharge them fully. I don't believe that you can charge from halfway.
Most power markets work in 30miunute chunks, so managing charging/discharging would be really hard.
>> 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.
Correct, it wasn't the Central Valley, it was Moss Landing.
Though there were lots of fears about the fire, the biggest risk was that the battery was destroyed. There has been ongoing soil testing and not much found, in this worst case situation of a battery fire.
It is definitely fueling fears, however! A few highly motivated individuals put up big hand painted signs in their neighborhoods decrying the evils of batteries, and the terrible fires they cause. It's enough fear mongering that visitors to popular beaches 20 miles upwind, were imagining metallic tastes in the air months afterwards.
Did they test the air or just the soil? You mentioned they imagined the taste of the air but didn’t mention if they actually tested the air. And who tests it?
As with all testing of this sort that I've ever seen, third parties do the testing and analysis.
I mention the air as an example of fear getting out waaaaaay in front of any risks. Testing the air would be pointless, 20 miles upwind. The metallic taste was either from other sources or psychosomatic.
The health risks of battery fires have been mostly evaluated in the context of fire fighting, where, air metals are a concern, but only in confined spaces. Nickel is the primary concern there. After reading about these, my only fears were for the workers for nickel production.
I am very very concerned about air quality, but the real risk there is from car traffic, specifically the tire microplastics and brake dust. There are big and measurable health effects from that, where even reducing traffic near schools by 10% could actually impact lives. However because people drive cars and are used to the bad health effects, nobody is scared of the negative health from cars. Instead the human mind focuses on new things because they are new, not because of the relative risk. For decades there were natural gas smokestacks pouring exhaust over the strawberry fields, the batteries that replaced them (to make use of the big power lines) are a huge improvement to human health, even with the fire.
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.
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."
The original sin was using watts not joules. Humans hear watts as “gallons” and “watt hours” as “gallons per hour” and all the rest of this confusion in every article about EVs/fast chargers/distribution/solar/everything all trace back to “X-Hours” and “X” incorrectly sounding like a rate and a count, not a count and a rate.
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.
A normal value for a highly competitive commodity part like a battery is about 3% above cost. CATL charges over 20% above cost. So you might have an argument that CATL has monopoly pricing power and is gouging its customers.
IOW that they're illegally charging too much, not that they are illegally charging too little.
Sodium ion production is only recently starting to ramp up. It will take a few years for that to put a dent into LFP marketshare (both for grid storage and EVs). China is a bit ahead of course. CATL just announced they are starting mass production of their second generation battery in December. It will take a while for that factory to get to full speed production. And if they are building more factories, that will also take a while. Think 10s of ghw production short term.
The US only recently got volume production of LFP working. A lot of the battery production there is still older chemistries based on NMC. Companies like Peak Energy are indeed experimenting with sodium ion and are looking pretty good right now. But they don't have any mass production facilities yet. That's years away at best.
I expect there may be some licensing deals with Chinese manufacturers down the line to address this. Sodium ion might become a lot more dominant from 2030 onward. Until then, LFP should remain dominant.
And with LFP being quite decent already, there's no need to wait until the 2030s with large scale grid storage deployments. This stuff works right now. That's why adoption is so high and rapid around the world.
Ultimately the California Legislature and the CPUC (and therefore the governor who appoints them) are at-fault for rates. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, and in-theory the regulators are supposed to drive value for ratepayers. But our regulators simply do not care and do not perform. The legislature has larded a bunch of redistribution onto rates, and burdened the regulator with a bunch of conflicting goals.
The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.
Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
The regulators also fail to force proper long term maintenance.
IMO the issue is the board is appointed, and it’s just full of political allies.
We should fill boards like this with experts. For example, make a majority of the board be tenured professors of engineering and finance from the university of California with no financial connections to the industry.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators
Which set things up so the money PG&E makes is a linear function in the money PG&E wastes. -- the regulations set a fixed profit margin, so to make more money PG&E need simply waste more money and pass the cost onto the public which is exactly what they are doing.
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.
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.
Battery storage is always measured in the amount of power that can be delivered (Watts). Secondarily it’s measured in the number of hours that power can be delivered (hours, which is almost always about 4.) To get MWh you multiply watts times hours. This is standard in the industry and has nothing to do with reporters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you sure you're not thinking of "SmartDay" days that are part of the SmartRate program?
Flex Alerts are CAISO and ultimately about grid stability. SmartRate/SmartDay are ultimately about marginal cost of production on PG&E. The two are certainly correlated -- at the very least, a Flex Alert day is almost guaranteed to be a SmartDay.
Notably, the SmartRate program is capped at 15 days per year, and in practice PG&E will keep a few in reserve for surprise late season events, but even if there are no Flex Alert days they're still going to be called on electricity-is-expensive-even-if-the-grid-is-stable days.
Current legal setups generally actively encourage people to waste water that they have property rights to. It would be infinitely better return on investment to reform that and put proper incentives in place, rather than work around it with technology.
> 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.
The LA Times famously a left leaning publication and its stories are written and edited by the employees who are likely to be anti Musk, Trump hating woke types. The owner is a business man and will let the editors write for the audience's biases.
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 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
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.
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.
The sun does not shine 24 hours a day. Therefore, if you want to run a power grid 24 hours a day, you need expensive batteries to hold energy collected during peak production. Fossil fuels can be burned continuously, lessening the need for energy storage
>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.
Unless all batteries are installed at once and will fail after a fixed duration it won't be a big issue. After 10-20 year 2-5% batteries will fail and will have to be replaced, along with any new capacity addition. We can emphasise on diversifying the supply chain or having multiple technologies so that a Covid like scenario doesn't completely conks the system, but it isn't much different from any other system we use. And in case of battery, we actually get a real-time info about its health and so can easily calculate capacity of the system. Batteries go from 90% to 0% in extremely rare case.
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)
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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...
That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.
I moved to Western Europe from a US state where airco is mandatory. I purchased a split unit here and on the worst summer weeks, it still only cost me €10 to run the unit on its coldest setting for a week (almost continuously since I was using it with a fan to blow cooler air around the rest of the house). Back in the US, I had summer electricity bills of hundreds of dollars every year.
Sure, the weather is a bit more mild here, but there have been heat waves, and I’m definitely an outlier when it comes to usage. But that just goes to show how efficient these new units are!
Our dear leader has been busy decimating small businesses that rely on federal incentives to build renewable power generation lately. This hit particularly hard in Texas.
The boss move is buying a plan with cheap to free electricity at night in exchange for a ludicrous day rate, bonus points for buying batteries to self-consume and/or change at night as needed.
Going strictly by the numbers, it's a judgment call as to whether it's "worth it" or not, but the power independence for doing so is fantastic IMO YMMV. My Maslow hierarchy may not match yours.
Where I live now in the Netherlands, it feels like 30-40% of private homes have solar and 80%+ of business and government buildings that use more energy during the daylight hours so the payoff is much more realizable.
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/femp/hail-damage-mitigation-solar-pho...
Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.
Solar depresses the energy demand during the middle of the day. Energy storage smooths out the load profile.
I know folks in Phoenix who are on a time-of-day plan and they max out the AC overnight and then barely use it during the day (same goal, just they don't have solar)
Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.
I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.
when will it replace the headline in editorial importance?
The demand lags the sunshine which is why it's a non-trivial problem.
- 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.
https://www.pbssocal.org/news-community/l-a-s-long-troubled-...
It is only very recently that California started trying to decarbonize.
When France did their amazing nuclear build, it was for energy independence, not for decarbonization purposes. It was a very forward thinking move, even if it wasn't as cheap initially imagined and ended up being stopped before fully completed. It was a national security project.
However nuclear is cheap when the high upfront capital costs have been paid off, and it's down to just the operating expenses. Building it is oppressively expensive, however, especially as labor costs have risen in the many decades since the 1970s while.
As France's nuclear fleet ages out and needs to be replaced, it seems unlikely that they will be able to pull off a build of a second fleet. Their efforts at prototyping the next design, the EPR, have been fairly disastrous, with builds at Flamanville and in Finland going very poorly.
I suspect that Germany & California's current route to decarbonization through renewables will be followed by France in the coming decades.
Renewables will continue to be a force and work around the edges. Too much on the line to shut down nuclear for France. It will get subsidized and it provides energy independence. Potentially but not certain future where other people are also purchasing nuclear assets which pushes down maintenance / manufacturing costs. Risk is that China deploys globally and is the operator. France isn't known for high quality - reasonably costed items - fast time line products.
As well - unspoken part of renewable is in case of a security incident in Europe (see Russia) - nuclear is much more stable work load then solar (could easily scatter bomb solar assets). I know that sounds unintuitive given peoples concern about Nuclear - but there is a such a common good to protect nuclear assets due to fallout where solar assets are localized.
Germany de-carbonization path (shutting down their nuclear plants) was a massive mistake and have seriously hindered their economic long run competitiveness. Its been a black eye for them.
If the goal is energy independence, renewables will provide that more cheaply. If the goals are the other side effects of nuclear power: isotopes, national pride (Curie!), workforce augmentation for nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, then these goals also require far fewer reactors than enough to power the entire country.
I do not doubt that there may be some level of nuclear power in the future. But I would take a long bet that in 2050, France is closer to 0% nuclear power than it is to the current level. (That phrasing is confusing, but I think the fraction of nuclear power will be less than half its current amount)
Maybe, but I think the corollary goal is to have nuclear power be a bigger part of the remaining non-renewables. So if (exaggerating grossly) it's 90% renewable, 9% nuclear, and 1% other, that's arguably still better than the current state.
The EPR2 costs just keeps spiraling. They haven't even started building yet or been able to agree on how to finance the subsidies.
This is the same France that less than a month ago had another government collapse due to being underwater in debt with a spending problem and being unable to agree on how to fix it.
A massive handout to the nuclear industry sounds like just the right plan!
It is also funny that you mention Russia. You do know that the EU despite 19 sanction packages haven't been able to agree on sanctions for the Russian nuclear industry. We still are too reliant on it.
Germany was able to quickly phase out Russian fossil gas, while france keeps being EUs no. 1 importer of Russian LNG.
But I do love blaming everything on Germany. So much easier.
My own country never wanted nukes and they discovered large deposits of natural gas so that was it. After all nuclear energy was never as cheap as they envisioned in the 1950s.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...
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...
ARENH looks like a mechanism by which France wanted to entice competition in end customer sales (and distribution?) of electricity.
https://fsr.eui.eu/regulated-access-to-incumbent-nuclear-ele...
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.
For 2023 and 2024 EDF was profitable, with net income of those two years exceeding that 2022 loss.
Ouch!
EDF is generally highly profitable while at the same time delivering cheap, reliable power. 2023 was the one exception, due to the energy crisis and its interaction with the ARENH program that forces EDF to sell power from nuclear at a fixed low price (usually way below market).
Even if it needs that power itself.
So in 2022, it still had to sell this power at 4 cent/kWh, and then had to buy that same power back from the market at up to €1/kWh.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-QC/5y/yearly
(To be transparent, there's controversy around calling hydroelectric renewable.)
- Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]
- Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]
- Machchu (India, 1979): 5000 deaths [3]
- Vajont (Italy, 1963): 2000 deaths [4]
- Möhne dam (Germany, 1943): 1500 deaths [5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_failure
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hne_Reservoir
There are costs/risks for most forms of power. If you're in an environment where wind and solar can make economical sense, go for it. For reliable base loads, I still think order of preference should be:
- geothermal (very rare and hard to do at scale, though) - hydro
- nuclear
- natural gas
- oil/diesel (at very small, localized levels eg remote villages)
- burning live babies and cute animals
- coal
Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.
In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.
The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.
Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.
We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.
I guess I’m surprised it isn’t more of an option for California - the U.K. uses Snowdonia as a giant battery, and afaik there’s been one failure of a dam that wiped half of trefriw off the map a century ago - which wasn’t hard as it’s a speck of a place. Since then the lakes have pretty reliably and safely provided somewhere to stick excess energy, and now are largely pumped by the offshore wind arrays nearby.
California has big mountains, but I’m not sure if the geology or terrain is right for PHES.
It is time we move on from the fossil tradition of socialized losses on private profits [1] and instead let the nuclear industry bear their true insurance cost.
No externalizing of costs like today.
[1]: https://www.imo.org/en/about/conventions/pages/international...
I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.
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.
Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.
The plant and equipment required to maintain a stable nuclear reaction and extract its heat is far more complex than that required to control a coal or natural gas firebox.
This is reflected in the fact that to run 1GW of nuclear generation, on average (in the US) requires about 700 FTE to operate. The average for coal generation is about a third of that number. And the average for a combined cycle gas plant is about 60 FTE.
And nuclear fission produces low-grade heat - around 320°C - compared to coal (around 550°C) or natural gas (over 1300°C). Thus are less thermally efficient and require huge cooling towers and much larger turbines to extract the thermal energy. Which, of course, are more expensive and complex to build and maintain.
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.
I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal with that volatility. Hydro perhaps in a handful of smaller, mountainous countries (and if you are not too regarding of the environmental damages). Right now the UK is using LNG to compensate wind.
So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.
In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.
Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.
Getting to France's level of nuclear decarbonization with batteries is cheap and easy with current prices. Using existing thermal plants for a few weeks a year and renewables for the rest is quite similar overall to France's mix.
What's challenging is the final 10%, 5%, and 1%. But it will take 15-20 years of deployment of our current cheap renewables+storage technology before we need to solve those final percents. In that time, technology will have advanced tremendously and we don't know what the cheapest solution will be, just that it will be cheaper than current tech. Plus it would take much longer than 15 years to even build nuclear in any significant quantity! France said a few years ago that they would be building handful of new reactors but I still have not seen progress!
We also have periods in the winter (so solar of little to no use), where we can have a week or two of no wind.
As the gas generators are not run constantly, they're more expensive than if they were. There are various (at least 3) UK "gridwatch" sites available, offering real time and historical generation mix. Maybe have a look.
From memory, so probably flawed, we still tend to depend upon nuclear and gas for around 40 - 50 % of our generation (nuke being low - say between 5 and 10).
It illustrates both the volatility of wind (which regularly goes to zero for at least a week), and how it is currently pretty much 100% offset with gas.
There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.
As such they are essentially massive switching-mode PSUs, and there is no possibility of having a synchronised connection, as the AC has to be synthesised, following the local spinning iron.
France is increasing its nuclear output. And planning to build new plants. (Expanding nuclear generation was prohibited by law up until March of 2023).
The added renewables help to make the nuclear plants more efficient and profitable, by taking up a good amount of the variable demand.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
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.
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?
Does it really matter? There’s always a first country to do anything.
It makes no sense actual exposure to radiation is increasing because of the lack of nuclear plants…
All this is to say that if there are high costs imposed by regulation, it's not the regulatory process it's in the cost of building the final design.
However, the "regulations make nuclear expensive" folks never seem to be able to propose the changes that might make nuclear cheaper, or by how much. The only concrete proposals I have heard are from people skeptical that nuclear can ever be cost competitive!
France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland
The bit they always say quietly is that you need nuclear reactors to provide the material for nuclear weapons.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
China is barely building nuclear power. In terms of their grid mix it is backsliding.
Poland haven’t built any so noconfirmed numbers yet?
3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long...
"Published on February 3, 2023"
Since then, in 2023 and 2024 EDF posted over 10 billion a year profits.
It was always a public/nationalized company. It started 100% owned by the government. In the 2000s, around 15% were sold to pension funds, so way over 80% in the hands of the state, which by EU rules (and common sense) makes it a state company.
The floating shares were bought back in order to facilitate the nuclear expansion plans.
The losses in 2022 were largely due to the energy crisis because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which interacted rather nastily with the French ARENH program that requires EDF to sell 25% of its power output for 4 cents/kWh, no matter what the market rates. And no matter if it needs that power itself.
When the energy crunch hit in 2022, wholesale electricity rates rose up to €1 / kWh. So EDF had to sell its electricity for 4 cents, then buy it back at 25x markup for €1.
Oh, and the government actually increased the ARENH quotas to more than 25%, because it used EDF to subsidize consumer/industry energy prices, something that was done by the states directly in other countries.
The problems with a part of the fleet, largely due to deferred maintenance during COVID, also didn't help.
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.
"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
Its unlikley, they are a massive pain to manage compared to lithium, expensive and have poor round trip efficiency. Oh and terrible energy density.
I'm not saying its impossible, but I'd be surprised.
I think the biggest two factors that play against them is that they round trip efficiency is something like 70-80% compared to 90%+. but the real pain in the arse is the charge managment. From what I understand, you need to charge them to full, and then discharge them fully. I don't believe that you can charge from halfway.
Most power markets work in 30miunute chunks, so managing charging/discharging would be really hard.
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.
https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
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?
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...
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
Though there were lots of fears about the fire, the biggest risk was that the battery was destroyed. There has been ongoing soil testing and not much found, in this worst case situation of a battery fire.
It is definitely fueling fears, however! A few highly motivated individuals put up big hand painted signs in their neighborhoods decrying the evils of batteries, and the terrible fires they cause. It's enough fear mongering that visitors to popular beaches 20 miles upwind, were imagining metallic tastes in the air months afterwards.
https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land...
As with all testing of this sort that I've ever seen, third parties do the testing and analysis.
I mention the air as an example of fear getting out waaaaaay in front of any risks. Testing the air would be pointless, 20 miles upwind. The metallic taste was either from other sources or psychosomatic.
The health risks of battery fires have been mostly evaluated in the context of fire fighting, where, air metals are a concern, but only in confined spaces. Nickel is the primary concern there. After reading about these, my only fears were for the workers for nickel production.
I am very very concerned about air quality, but the real risk there is from car traffic, specifically the tire microplastics and brake dust. There are big and measurable health effects from that, where even reducing traffic near schools by 10% could actually impact lives. However because people drive cars and are used to the bad health effects, nobody is scared of the negative health from cars. Instead the human mind focuses on new things because they are new, not because of the relative risk. For decades there were natural gas smokestacks pouring exhaust over the strawberry fields, the batteries that replaced them (to make use of the big power lines) are a huge improvement to human health, even with the fire.
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
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!
"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."
So rated power will give you that for about 3 to 4 hours.
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.
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.
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
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.
IOW that they're illegally charging too much, not that they are illegally charging too little.
The US only recently got volume production of LFP working. A lot of the battery production there is still older chemistries based on NMC. Companies like Peak Energy are indeed experimenting with sodium ion and are looking pretty good right now. But they don't have any mass production facilities yet. That's years away at best.
I expect there may be some licensing deals with Chinese manufacturers down the line to address this. Sodium ion might become a lot more dominant from 2030 onward. Until then, LFP should remain dominant.
And with LFP being quite decent already, there's no need to wait until the 2030s with large scale grid storage deployments. This stuff works right now. That's why adoption is so high and rapid around the world.
For grid storage? Source?
Also in US https://www.peakenergy.com/news
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.
Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
IMO the issue is the board is appointed, and it’s just full of political allies.
We should fill boards like this with experts. For example, make a majority of the board be tenured professors of engineering and finance from the university of California with no financial connections to the industry.
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.
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.
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
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.
Which set things up so the money PG&E makes is a linear function in the money PG&E wastes. -- the regulations set a fixed profit margin, so to make more money PG&E need simply waste more money and pass the cost onto the public which is exactly what they are doing.
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?
Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?
"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.
Even on HN people will defend not using Wh because there is some grid or city in the USA that bills differently.
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.
My own country every m² is valuable.
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...
Why? I thought lithium ion batteries actually contained negligible amounts of lithium? Or is this for some other reason?
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.
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.
In PG&E land we have extraordinarily expensive (e.g. hitting over 0.60$/kwh) electricity that has outages more often than Texas.
High prices go hand in hand with low reliability because the same incompetence and corruption results in both.
Flex Alerts are CAISO and ultimately about grid stability. SmartRate/SmartDay are ultimately about marginal cost of production on PG&E. The two are certainly correlated -- at the very least, a Flex Alert day is almost guaranteed to be a SmartDay.
Notably, the SmartRate program is capped at 15 days per year, and in practice PG&E will keep a few in reserve for surprise late season events, but even if there are no Flex Alert days they're still going to be called on electricity-is-expensive-even-if-the-grid-is-stable days.
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.
Please don't do this.
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)
i think tesla has built MOST of the capacity
Just noticed that their profile basically taunts that they're a troll [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hagbard_c
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...
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.
This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
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
Much as I am against autocracy and oppression, china is doing very well at improving their energy sector.
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.
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.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/09/china-on-course...
If i'm wrong about China and competely misreading the situation in california please let me know.
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.
Solar is not intermittent (the sun shines every day). Making your grid reliable is expensive, thus drives costs.
https://www.earthtechproducts.com/ecoflow-delta-pro-ultra-30...
>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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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
Who said that?