Charging doesn't show up as curtailment, that is mostly due to grid congestion, as transmission lines reach their maximum capacity and physically can't get all the solar power to loads that need it. Also, nuclear plants can't be turned on and off very quickly so they stay on all the time, and some number of natural gas plants must stay running during the day so they are able to quickly ramp up when the sun goes down.

So on a nice sunny day that isn't too hot there is a lot of solar power that physically cannot be used and so has to be curtailed. In peak summer when ACs are blasting you'll see less curtailment, and in the future as they keep building out battery storage you'll probably see less curtailment in general.

Genuine question: If CA is mostly getting its energy from Solar why is my energy bill so high especially during winters? Or does solar energy while clean does not necessarily mean cheap?

One Next Energy does:

ONE said yesterday (15 May) it was launching US-manufactured 314Ah lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, an ‘Aries Grid Module’, and a battery management system (BMS), all designed for the battery energy storage system (BESS) market.

"ONE Launches U.S. Manufactured Grid Products: LFP Cells, Modules and Battery Management Systems"

https://one.ai/one-launches-u-s-manufactured-grid-products-l...

https://one.ai/manufacturing

In October 2023, the first LFP cells rolled off ONE’s 10 MWh customer validation line at ONE Circle in Van Buren Township, Michigan. In April of 2023, we started producing Aries LFP modules at Piston Automotive, also in Michigan.

Tesla Powerwall 3 is LFP - do they make that in the US? (I'm not sure if you call it large but Tesla also does large installations).

A123 started out of mit. Who cares if China invests in it.

LMR looks like a better fit for the American market.

There was a company in Australia called Redflow making these too. They were liquidated end of last year.

Much as a like the idea of niche and diversified battery technologies, it seems like there isn't enough motivation to move too far away from Lithium-based solutions (no pun intended).

Vanadium flow batteries are better in the economics.

Natural gas is perfect for peaking as it can spin up quickly and costs little when not burning fuel. Natural gas especially newer more efficient installations will probably be profitable for a while because as renewables become a bigger proportion of generation there will be less GWh delivered from gas but at higher prices. Or to reverse that, if you need the natural gas to be available, you have to pay what it costs to keep it around, regardless if that's for 10%, 1%, or 0.1% of the time that it's actually generating. But as that number drops - because of storage and overcapacity of renewables - you reduce emissions even if you don't reduce cost.

Fans of nuclear claim that sceptics are either radical leftists who want to reduce energy use, or anti-environmentalists don't care about emissions. But I see the pragmatic, diversified way of drastically cutting emissions being renewables + storage + gas turbines.

Isn’t natgas basically a waste product? As in no one is setting out to produce it, it just shows up when you produce other hydrocarbons?

So either it’s going to get released, flared off, or something useful will get done with it even if it goes to $0.

I am no expert on this, but my understanding was natural gas is useful for its flexibility and efficency to handle gaps in supply. The big batteries are amazing but they can't (yet) cover longer gaps the same way natural gas can.

If the "we" means California, that that also includes me, and it's pretty clear that we don't have high costs because of the generation side, but because CPUC keeps on approving massive rate increases for grid costs.

It costs ~$0.13/kWh to generate the electricity (which includes any battery costs), but $0.25-$0.50/kWh to deliver the energy across the grid.

The utilities get guaranteed profits from rate-basing all the grid stuff, but the generation side is a more competitive market.

Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures...

I just love paying higher rates to cover the fines for all the fires that have been started.

I'm paying 13 cents per kWh in the MISO/Entergy region. Moving across a certain invisible line in Texas can cut your electric bill in half or better.

Yes. My energy costs have exploded over the last decade.

But if we can figure out how people can live inside batteries, the housing problem is solved!

The 400 MWh scale project started operating here in NZ last week. Total project cost $537 USD (900 NZD) per kWh.

Current FIR/SIR cost seems to linger around $0.2 NZD / MWh. No idea how do calculate payback on this.

That unit seems off? Should that not be read is kW?

Because kWh is for energy, not power?

This is a perfect example of why complaining about grammar is so stupid. Got is correct in UK English, it just sounds wrong in US English.

Different dialects do things differently.

Thank you, thought I was going crazy. Maybe this is the new thing, adding grammatical errors so people won't think the content was written by AI.

I have to agree.

I was going to say, just plain grammatically incorrect.

At first I though this had to be a truncation for the purpose of the HN subject line, but no, it's the actual title of the article.

Could this be a difference between English and American?

I came here to say exactly this. I feel like I learned the proper way to write this before first grade, and that was in rural Iowa. How are the editors of a historically respected publication allowing this through?

Back in the Second Millennium when I used to hang out at Radio Shack, their ad slogan was "You've Got Questions; We've Got Answers!"

And I made friends with one fellow tending the store there, and I would overhear him answering the store's phone: "Thank you for calling Radio Shack! You have questions; we have answers!"

And I would be mildly amused that he steadfastly held to the rules of grammar in verbal discourse, but I was also a bit disappointed; a loyal Radio Shack employee would lean into the dissonance and take one for the team.

I myself would gladly say the line, with a big grin on my face every time. I would, however, welcome my telephone persona being replaced by an A.I.

It's that they're not economical to replace baseload generation. Those four hours they provide are during the time when demand most outstrips supply, i.e. after solar stops generating but before the load trails off for the evening. The price per kWh is highest then, which is what makes battery storage economical then but not necessarily at other times of day.

At this point I wonder if the environmental impact from a lithium battery fire would eclipse the impact from a worst case scenario at a modern nuclear power plant.

There is far far more in terms of containment in the nuke plant, but, the stuff inside is much more dangerous and longer lasting.

I live close to this and the event is proving the horseshoe political theory very very correct.

You get the lefty RFK Jr. anti-science types becoming very anti-batteries, collaborating with the extreme-right-wing coalition of mountain hermits, rednecks, and extremely wealthy Monterey peninsula types.

We are a community that is easily spooked, but the batteries have really brought out the crazies.

I honestly have no idea whether you are right or whether that county supervisor has merit to what they said. That is why we need journalists to actually be people who want to seek truth and inform their audience of that truth rather than just being a public stenographer. A good journalist should have skepticism towards what they are told by public figures and needs to consider whether what they are told is accurate before repeating it without any qualification.

But then again, there doesn't even appear to be a byline on this article, so who knows who actually wrote it. If no one is willing to stand behind these words, maybe it wasn't even a human who wrote them. Maybe that quote from some unnamed person is a complete hallucination of some AI. I guess it's up to the reader to do their own research, which makes you wonder what role the journalist is even serving in this instance.

> some guy yelling "fire" in a crowded theater

to be fair, there really was a fire, and it was a bad one. You can't just lose 80% of the capacity at one of the largest battery storage facilities in the US in a multi-day fire and hand-wave it away as some kind of conspiracy theory.

This event demonstrated that battery systems need to be designed, like any engineering system, such that any failure is not catastrophic. They failed on this battery plant, and regulations were put in place to prevent that for future plants.

I know you are trolling based on listening to fossil fuel funded Fox News et al, but one of the key advantages of batteries is that they can switch on/off (aka are "dispatchable" in power jargon) on the millisecond level basis, and as such, make the grid much more stable than old-school energy sources like natural gas which has dispatch times in the hours.

The free-market is proving your conspiracy theory wrong. Texas is also deploying absolutely massive amounts of batteries, and it's private investors doing it because it lets them deliver cheaper energy and profit.

Batteries are a cost-saving grid asset. Journalists are under-reporting this fact, not over-reporting.

Why would Musk get any credit for this?

There are, relatively speaking, not significant data centers in California.

Batteries can be recycled, just like solar panels can.

Maybe not as easy as metals or glass, but can be recycled nonetheless