California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/california-electrici...
Calling SONGS-2 or 3 functional is a stretch given their steam generator problems.
Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.
As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.
It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.
Last time I checked, 11 states received the majority of their electricity from renewable sources, and 10/11 had cheaper rates than the national average, with California being the exception.
1: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/texas-wi...
The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.
Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.
Other parts of California pay pretty normal rates.
Solar is great, but IMO we should be somehow encouraging rooftop solar (which, yes, is more expensive!) in order to reduce pressure on wilderness and agriculture.
Before someone jumps in with the efficient market hypothesis, fundamentally the problem is that wilderness services aren't easily priced correctly, but solar has suddenly made chopping down wilderness (more) easily monetizable.
Other plusses are that they are close to electric demand (business, homes, and EVs), and people prefer to park in shade.
The downside is there's no existing structure to install the panels, so that's more steel used to mount the panels.
In addition to the sibling comments, another better approach is to blend solar with farming, to grow shade-loving crops and reduce evaporation. They'll still use pesticides, no doubt, but not more than ordinary farming.
https://theconversation.com/how-shading-crops-with-solar-pan...
That wilderness isn’t going to be there anyway if we don’t address climate change as fast as we can.
Unless you have some weird quirk where you think it's impossible for manmade objects to be beautiful
We have the same issue around me with people chaining themselves to bulldozers and pushing for animal sanctuary designations just so they can avoid having to see windmills on the horizon.
Gigajoules were right there!
Grid scale batteries are treated as alternate supplies of energy, but yes, they are storage, and cannot indefinitely run at a constant output.
That's the confusion. Directly comparing them is not useful, except when describing a finite time span.
Gigajoules doesn't really help clarify the confusion, because it doesn't change that they're not directly comparable.
It's talking about the ability to supply power to the grid, not how long it can supply that power. It's arguable how useful a measure that is but they're certainly using it correctly. IMO they're also talking about it in a reasonable way- capacity and power are pretty closely related for batteries, and the ability to pick up demand is critical to handling instability.
Watts are SI, hours are used all over metric countries. I don't see how watt hours aren't metric?
I have, however, seen fellow laypeople regularly confuse power with energy (describing kW when they mean kWh and vis-a-versa) as OP thought the quote did. I'm not sure if sticking to kW and kJ would actually fix that.
3600 seconds in an hour. 39.3700787402 inches in a meter.
Next you'll be telling me pounds are more convenient than kilograms.
https://www.costco.ca/coffee-tea.html?sortBy=item_location_p...
I'm no expert on shit coffee. But even Folgers is $6.3 lb. And is Folgers even 100% real coffee?
It tastes like it was extracted once before and freeze dried and something added to it.
Plus Costco might be subsidizing their coffee the way they do their rotisserie chicken.
And just wait until you hear about chocolate.
(The truth is the cost probably needs to rise to handle humane labor conditions, but supply shock is also an issue.)
Article claims that between 2021 and 2023 (a span of 3 years) these regions experienced "Too-hot conditions", prior it was too cold.
Ideal regions have climate similar to Hawaii, where it fluctuates between 16 and 28 degrees celsius, all year round.
Assuming I take the articles seriously:
Using your last 3 data points to make sweeping projections, when they counter the previous year's data doesn't seem like very good science.
I'm considering adding solar to my existing inverter/battery setup.
I had to read this several times before I understood... The grid is so unstable that batteries were installed even before any PV panels. We western people have the luxury of reasoning the other way around.
I'm by no means implying that you're do anything wrong btw, I'm genuinely curious how this is affecting things. In the US I've wondered what the impact would be but it's too early to tell.
On the one hand, private solar does lessen the burden on the grid. We currently have had a good few weeks without load shedding, one major contributing factor of which (acknowledged by Eskom themselves) has been a combination of good weather and off-grid solar households. But on the other hand, Eskom is increasingly deprived of the rates to pay for the large capital investments needed to upgrade the grid. Eskom has continually hiked those rates (which means more people are incentivized to go solar - it is a vicious cycle perhaps).
Our government is finally moving forward with a policy of allowing private enterprise to contribute to the grid. I think this will definitely help. But realistically, I think South Africa will have to deal with load shedding for a good few years.
Case in point: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/01/11/eskom-poisoning...
I lived for 3 years with 1040 watts of solar, traveling around the US in a motorhome. I really did not even feel like I was compromising on anything to save power, I had a tower PC, I watched movies with television + stereo system, etc. 1 kW of solar is tiny by residential solar standards. It's not hard to go solarpunk and live off of just solar, once you let go of large homes.
Anecdote (but interesting): Channel 5's recent coverage of homeless populations living in the Las Vegas tunnels highlighted that they have electricity in there! A single cracked panel (salved from the trash!) provides more than enough juice to charge phones and even power TVs.
The household paying the latter just installed 15kW of solar panels and a battery bank to cut their costs to the $16/mo hookup fee and it's not even the height of summer yet. It's almost to the point where their backup propane generator is cheaper to run than pay for utility power! The solar/battery installation will pay for itself in under five years assuming no price increases (hah!).
Everyone is building it at every level of the producer/consumer curve.
I have installed 21 solar panels and I have a propane powered generator. My intention is to eventually move to batteries as well so I can be as independent of PgE as possible.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.
https://acespace.org/blog/2024/01/12/top-10-oil-and-gas-indu...
https://www.miningreview.com/coal/the-top-10-coal-mines-of-t...
It should be noted that if an electric vehicle has 70 KWh of batteries in it, then electrifying the 283 million motor vehicles in the US would need 20 TWh of batteries. This is considerably more than would be needed to convert the US grid to 100% renewables (assuming proper use of non-battery storage technologies as well for longer term storage). The implication here is that if BEVs win, then a renewable grid is not a big additional step.
This is a very odd belief to have when it comes to batteries, because we are nowhere close to even discovering how much, say, lithium we have easily available, and more deposits are discovered all the time these days. Nobody bothered to identify them in the past, so we are looking now.
Also, batteries will be far more recycled than, say, your furniture or all the other things in the house. They are expecting >90% recovery of the materials, and in the 10-20 years of use, battery technology advances so much that when they get remade into more batteries, that 90% recovery will store even more electricity than the 100% of materials did the first time.
While I'm glad people are having these concerns, in general, they should be concerns about all aspects of consumed goods, not just the goods that are already doing the most to reduce environmental impact.
What is striking about this is that usable Sodium Ion is just entering the market in volume. It should:
- push any and all electric-battery platforms under ICE equivalents by substantial margins, possibly 30-50% price reductions. Tools, Cars, Trucks, etc
- that will enable lithium chemistries to get cheaper, because they don't need to be used where their density isn't needed.
Sodium-Sulfur, which hopefully becomes viable in 5 years (might be dependent on commercial graphene so....), offers even more potential.
If you have the option, the best time to charge your car would be during the day when there is abundant solar.
You can't figure out who's good online, interview the local companies. Locals will also get you through the permitting and code compliance process too.
With a battery and minimal software, you can buy low, sell high, keep enough for yourself, factor in EV charging, solar generation, etc etc.
Battery pays for itself in 5 years, and with enough takers, the grid gets superb smoothing, delaying the need for central infra upgrades.
Homeowner still benefits from reduced bills, and the grid gains massive distribution diversification. Win win.
The problem with used EV batteries is that they've started to degrade, and they degrade in chaotic ways, so you can't offer a predictable product made from old cells. Some cells may have shorts internally, others may have evaporated some electrolyte, or the electrodes may have degraded. Right now, lithium recovery is quite primitive from used cells. I've tried to reuse used batteries myself for storage, and the unpredictable wear made me give up.
Also, EV batteries, which are optimized for power density, may not be the best choice for home storage, where you want the ability to deep cycle to buffer power usage as the NYT article describes. The NMC cells common in EV's don't like to sit at above 90% state of charge (this cutoff is arbitrary, but > 90% results in fast breakdown), and they don't like to go below 20%, so you have a useful range of 70% of the capacity. You can over-provision by 30% or you can use lithium-iron-phosphate cells, which are less power dense, but much more tolerant of deep cycling.
I set my home up like this a long time ago. I use 100% of my solar and export nothing to the CA grid due to batteries. It's not cost effective to do this given the cost of storage when I set this up, but it's really neat to someone of my nerdy predisposition. My goals originally were to have solar based backup power, because I lose power quite a lot despite living in silicon valley, and it's worked great for that too.
I'd be interested in seeing an estimate of the battery costs to the grid, and also next winter's data. but if battery costs and material requirements are reasonable, and this deployment is not the result of an overinvestment in renewables, this is probably the first significant example of renewables getting a reasonable deployment plan.
That’s why it’s a strategic plus to go for electric vehicles build upon lithium to have a certain amount available locally for the recycling process.
If I have to explain the natsec implications and dangers of that... Let's just say its "unwise" at best, and suspicious at worst.
They pitched me and tried to recruit me.
I turned them down, in part for that and for other anti-patterns they demonstrated.
"battery storage capacity on the nation’s grids has grown tenfold, to 16,000 megawatts"
"California now has 10,000 megawatts of battery capacity on the grid"
After reading all of the comments below, i only find tangential reference to the fact that MW (or any kind of Watts) is not a measure of capacity. Even the tangential comment, that MWh is not MKS, doesn't highlight that the article never mentions MWh, everything is described in terms of MW, which is obviously power, not energy.
It seems even the referenced state reports make the same error:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
And the governor's office:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-...
As an actual lefty (not a woke-nut (or a wing-nut)) I'm not a fan of Gov Gavin. But the article wasn't really political, whereas the overwhelming majority of comments here are.
It doesn't shine a favorable light on the HN community in terms of being technically focused...
