Battery-Powered California Faces Lower Blackout Risk This Summer (mercurynews.com) 80
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California expects to avoid rolling blackouts this summer as new solar plants and large batteries plug into the state's grid at a rapid clip. The state's electricity system has been strained by years of drought, wildfires that knock out transmission lines and record-setting heat waves. But officials forecast Wednesday new resources added to the grid in the last four years would give California ample supplies for typical summer weather.
Since 2020, California has added 18.5 gigawatts of new resources. Of that, 6.6 gigawatts were batteries, 6.3 gigawatts were solar and 1.4 gigawatts were a combination of solar and storage. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. In addition, the state's hydropower plants will be a reliable source of electricity after two wet winters in a row ended California's most recent drought. Those supplies would hold even if California experiences another heat wave as severe as the one that triggered rolling blackouts across the state in August 2020, officials said in a briefing Wednesday. In the most dire circumstances, the state now has backup resources that can supply an extra 5 gigawatts of electricity, including gas-fired power plants that only run during emergencies.
Since 2020, California has added 18.5 gigawatts of new resources. Of that, 6.6 gigawatts were batteries, 6.3 gigawatts were solar and 1.4 gigawatts were a combination of solar and storage. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. In addition, the state's hydropower plants will be a reliable source of electricity after two wet winters in a row ended California's most recent drought. Those supplies would hold even if California experiences another heat wave as severe as the one that triggered rolling blackouts across the state in August 2020, officials said in a briefing Wednesday. In the most dire circumstances, the state now has backup resources that can supply an extra 5 gigawatts of electricity, including gas-fired power plants that only run during emergencies.
Just one problem.. (Score:1)
Re:Just one problem.. (Score:4, Informative)
READ.
"Lower risk", not "Adding batteries stops lines going down"
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The state's electricity system has been strained by years of drought,
Can we stop calling it a drought. The normal state of climate in California is long periods of dryness intermingled with bits of rain every few years.
Re:Just one problem.. (Score:5, Informative)
That depends on where the batteries are now doesn't it? Also more batteries could regulate the need for transmission and thus the heating of the lines that was the source of a few of those fires.
Re:Just one problem.. (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on where the batteries are now doesn't it? Also more batteries could regulate the need for transmission and thus the heating of the lines that was the source of a few of those fires.
Heating, no, arcing, yes. In high winds, the lines blow around and hit the tower or each other, creating showers of sparks. Those cause fires. Nothing short of completely de-energizing the line will solve that, and that's exactly what they do in high-wind periods.
The batteries, meanwhile, can provide additional power to mitigate the loss of those high-risk lines and the power they otherwise would have carried until such time as the winds have died down and it is safe to turn them back on.
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The Aussies use a system to detect shorts and dynamically cut power. It works a lot better than PG&E cutting power preemptively and leaving it off for hours at a time.
Re: Just one problem.. (Score:4, Insightful)
That costs money and reduces profits. We're winning at capitalism even as we are losing at civilization.
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PG&E? Winning at capitalism? Probably not.
Re: Just one problem.. (Score:2)
One coworker had his power cut off for 5 days in a so-called PSPS. I was lucky to be cut off for just 1 day. But found out in the middle of the night that a regular APC 1500 UPS only runs a CPAP for 4 hours.
Re: Just one problem.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't begin to tell you how much I dislike APC UPSes. They don't really provide proper specifications, like watt-hours, instead just giving you "VA" which is a mostly useless figure telling you the maximum amperage that the inverter will provide. (1500VA = 13.6 amps) But it doesn't really tell you nothing about how long it will power the load for. You could have a 1500VA UPS that can provide 1500VA for a week or for a minute, and it would still be a 1500VA UPS.
In practice, I think most APC 1500VA UPSes likely have two batteries totaling about 9 amp-hours at 24V, or about 216 watt hours. A CPAP machine typically draws anywhere from 30 to 100 watts. So after factoring in the inverter inefficiency, that means it would power such hardware anywhere from 2 to 6 hours or so. So four hours checks out.
And that's when the UPS battery is new. Unfortunately, instead of designing their UPSes to maximize battery longevity, APC apparently designs them to maximize runtime. That means the batteries are constantly getting topped up, and last only about three years. By the time it is three years old, you'll be lucky to get 10 minutes out of it at that load.
Assuming you only use the CPAP at night, you probably want to get at least 12 hours of battery life, assuming you also have a plan for dealing with charging it during the day somewhere else. Given that a 216 Wh pack crapped out at four hours, you'd need O(700) Wh for 12 hours of operation. You might consider picking up a Jackery Explorer 1000 at Lowe's. That would give you ~18 hours of CPAP power.
I haven't used that particular model, but I own its big brother (the 2000 Plus) as emergency power for a video production rig. It's a heavy beast, but it gets the job done. It's still easier to deal with than the APC 1500VA UPS and add-on external battery that I used to use, and it will run the rig for 6 hours instead of the roughly 60 minutes that the dual-tower APC rig can provide with one-third of a kW power consumption. Worth considering just for peace of mind.
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But it doesn't really tell you nothing about how long it will power the load for.
Eww. I edited that sentence so many times that I sound like I'm from where I'm actually from. ROFL.
I of course meant "But it tells you nothing ...".
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I edited that sentence so many times that I sound like I'm from where I'm actually from.
I'm dying laughing here. That's one of the more relatable quips I've ever come across.
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PG&E also has automatic systems to cut and restore power; some of which are faster than others. But I imagine they are not foolproof, because they require an anomaly to trip, and that anomaly could already have started a fire.
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Seems like they don't have much confidence in the systems then. Either that or there's inconsistent deployment.
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Heating causes expansion, and thus sagging. It's usually accounted for in the design and maintenance, unless the power company is a cheap bastard.
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Heating causes expansion, and thus sagging. It's usually accounted for in the design and maintenance, unless the power company is a cheap bastard.
I mean yes, sure. By my quick math, two towers 1500 feet apart with ACSR running at 85C (their maximum safe operating temperature) would end up with the wires 3 feet longer across that span. I've seen some folks giving numbers much higher than that, presumably for different types of wires or different spacing distance. And yes, that could definitely increase the odds of the wires hitting things. But even without the additional sagging, when you have three wires suspended from towers that are 1500 feet a
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Around here they have spacers keeping the lines far enough apart that they can never arc. They provide a large amount of physical separation anyway, so even if the spacers fail they still can't easily arc.
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Around here they have spacers keeping the lines far enough apart that they can never arc. They provide a large amount of physical separation anyway, so even if the spacers fail they still can't easily arc.
I don't know to what extent they do this, but this is PG&E we're talking about, the company whose idea of preventative maintenance is not inspecting gas lines until a neighborhood blows up. (The San Bruno pipeline that exploded had not inspected in the entire 50 years since its installation.) This is PG&E, the company that trims trees around power lines when they cause a fire or fall on the lines (and not before). And so on. There's a lot of stuff they're supposed to do. Assume that they do lit
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That is why sensible electricity grids are buried. Weather (heat, cold, rain or wind) is barely an issue in the Netherlands. The amount of lost productivity has been a lot lower because there is no need to shutdown lines. Yes, burying cables is expensive, but could be seen as upfront costs that is spent once.. The losses incurred by every necessary line shutdowns are continuously recurring costs as long as your grid consists of cables hanging on poles.
Lived a long time in the Netherlands, now living in Sout
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Also, downed lines arcing in contact with the ground.
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>> Nothing short of completely de-energizing the line will solve that, and that's exactly what they do in high-wind periods.
Hmm, not really.
you can built the transmission lines more resilient to wind (yeah, this costs more)
You can put the transmission lines underground (yeah, that costs even more)
>> The batteries, meanwhile, can provide additional power to mitigate the loss of those high-risk lines
That won't fly.
"high-risk lines" are smaller transmission lines on lower voltages (6, 12, 22kV)
Bat
Re: Just one problem.. (Score:2)
Yeah. I sure don't want them at my home in the hills, already in a wildfire area. Batteries would only add to the fire risk. I was concerned enough about our 2017 Chevy Bolt before the battery replacement.
I think local battery stations make sense, though, but not within wildfire areas.
Residential batteries cost far too much due to permitting and other local costs. 5-10x more per kWh than a larger scale development.
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Based on what I have seen locally, they want to locate battery farms near substations, thus making them independent of long distance transmission lines, and only dependent on local distribution.
That will probably work well if the battery farms themselves don't spontaneously combust, a real worry, as it has happened.
Meanwhile, this only increases the cost of electricity to the consumer.
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Unfortunately, that time has passed.
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I think it's a symptom of how strong political divides have gotten. There's an element of conservatives who seem desperate for California to fail in any way possible. It's essentially blue state target number one. You see it on the news with significant exaggerations of problems California is having and you see it here on Slashdot with willful ignorance like this
Re: Just one problem.. (Score:2)
That's a good point. The might be vulnerable to Vogon construction, too!
Re:Just one problem.. (Score:4, Funny)
You guys do realize that if the transmission lines are knocked out by fires, that, umm....the electricity is still going to be off, right?
You're just embarrassing yourself by announcing you didn't read TFA.
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It also helps that they've been regulating (Score:1)
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Well, Texas is performing a kind of experiment along these lines of running a minimally regulated grid with low barriers to entry. So far the performance hasn't been notably superior from a reliabiltiy standpoint, but to be fair it's the first of its kind. It isn't exactly untrammeled capitalism either, in that the grid is controlled by a non-profit corporation controlled by the state government.
Re: It also helps that they've been regulating (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but the CPUC is a woefully inept or corrupt institution. Or both. They have been "regulatory captured" by the 3 IOUs. This is not something to be proud of. The push back against solar in recent years has been consternating.
They should have turned all the assets of convicted felon PG&E to local governments, and leave the shareholders holding the bag.
Instead, the rates are at all time highs, and PG&E is reaping record profits.
Municipal utilities charge only 1/3 the rates of the IOUs on average.
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When you have the mess that is PG&E and SDGE, small wonder why. (shaking head)
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How? There's still a huge amount of griping against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Edison International-owned Southern California Edison and Sempre-owned San Diego Gas & Electric (SDGE). (shaking head)
Good thing I now in Sacramento, California, where Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) provides reasonable power without nosebleed costs (well, except in the summer months but that's understandable).
Re: Kalifornia sucks. (Score:2)
So are you spreading propaganda or just bored on a Friday night?
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I live in California and it's still great here. Let's not forget California has a lower homicide and drug overdose rate than Florida. It's better to be homeless in California than in a house in some other state.
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Don't tell them that!
We don't need more people in California. We definitely don't need more homeless people in California!
Everything is terrible here. Stay away.
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If only that worked. I've been crying for years that USA is dangerous and terrible and California is the worse of the worse and yet people still want to come to the USA and people are still coming to California (though plenty are leaving as well).
Apparently as bad as we are, the rest of the world is some how worse otherwise why would all these people STILL want to come here?
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lolwat? Being homeless in California most certainly is not better then in a house in another state. What an outrageous comment. I've no comment on the homicide stats and drug overdoses only affect people doing drugs. I don't care who kills themselves by abusing drugs. That's on the individual and not the state or it's politics.
I live in California as well. The weather is great. The politics are terrible. We're constantly being lied to about state goals. I'm sure this happens everywhere but I'm keenly aware
No mention of Diablo Canyon? (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure that keeping Diablo Canyon open will help keep the lights on and lower CO2 emissions. There's talk of keeping it running for another 20 years.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
Then is mention of nuclear power on a federal level:
https://www.power-eng.com/nucl... [power-eng.com]
I'd normally mock any mention of plans out to 20 years by politicians, even 2 years can be too much in many cases, but this is something of an exception. We are seeing Democrats say nice things about nuclear power, and that almost nev
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>> I'm pretty sure that keeping Diablo Canyon open will help keep the lights on and lower CO2 emissions.
Nah. That does not fly economically.
>> provide low CO2 energy on cloudy days and windless nights.
That is what hydro and wide interconnects are for.
Liberal arts majors... (Score:3)
6.6 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, or the batteries can supply 6.6 gigawatts for a whole minute?
Battery capacity depends on discharge rate, time matters.
Re:Liberal arts majors... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the rare times that I do this, BUTTTT, the article could actually be correct.
Not saying that they are or aren't. But they could be. It depends on the limiting factor. Is the limiting factor total energy? Or energy rate?
In an electrical grid, the rate of flow is CRITICAL. If you can produce 6 gigawatts (GW), but the grid is demanding more than 6 GW, then your frequency will start to drop from 60 Hz. The supply rate (in GW) MUST be able to keep up with demand rate in GW in order for stuff to generally work.
Back to the article, batteries could be part of a solution to provide a specific RATE of energy. And their ability to do it for how long is less relevant. ESPECIALLY since if your links can't keep up with 60 Hz due to too much demand, then you'll get out of sync with the rest of the grid and have to pop off, which only escalates all of your issues.
Re: Liberal arts majors... (Score:3)
Maybe that explains the clock on my Oster toaster oven that's faster by 15-20%. The display is pretty much a random number every time I look at it. And no way to turn it off altogether.
I had 2 of the same brand and they both had this issue.
Or maybe they don't like that rhe voltage goes to 128V during peak solar production. Thats the number I see on my UPS display around noon. After dark its regular 120V. Haven't been able to get PG&E linesmen to fix it even though it's way out of spec.
Re: Liberal arts majors... (Score:1)
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I believe this is the original version. Couldn't find the current one, but it's not very different. It's got touch controls that don't scream "analog". And are extremely hard to see with my PPS maculopathy. Pretty much need the smartphone flashlight to read the. The newer model has an even darker control panel.
https://www.costcobusinessdelivery.com/oster-digital-french-door-air-fry-countertop-oven.product.100396080.html
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It must be a cheap clock if it's using mains frequency to actually keep time instead of the literally 2 cent component that would handle that. I had a coffee maker like that in the 90's.
There's nothing "cheap" about it. Mains frequency used to be incredibly well regulated over time to the point where it could be used as reasonably accurate source of time. The instantaneous time may vary but it should have been incredibly stable over period of a day or so. For something as simple as a kitchen appliance a mains frequency regulated clock will outperform a $20k Rolex with ease providing the mains voltage is in spec (yes the Swiss Chronograph spec is an order of magnitude worse than drift requi
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I'll be honest: I don't know enough to be able to answer that for you.
Based on this random comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/expla... [reddit.com]
An excess SUPPLY of electricity in a grid flow causes the generators to have decreased resistance and they begin to generate with increased frequency. And an overloaded (too much DEMAND) grid faces increased electromagnetic resistance in the turbines which causes a lower frequency to be produced. But this is talking about classical AC generators (like steam turbines or hydro).
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It's almost always gigawatts = 1-4 hours at that rate of discharge. Usually 1 hour (1C discharge is safe for long life cells) but some facilities it may be 4 hours to save on inverters.
This sounds like you could run out but the peak times are usually brief, just a couple hours in the evening, and the grid can 'catch up' at night (from wind + natural gas) and especially the next day (massive solar overproduction from 10am to 3pm)
https://www.caiso.com/ [caiso.com] has the details in real time
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In Germany, the level of a water power plant is stored in kWh (or in MWh) no one stores it in meters. Except you have it in an extra column in the data base.
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A quick search gives conflicting numbers, California either has about 10GWh of battery storage or 39GWh of battery storage.
Even with the lower figure, assuming it can output 6.6GW peak then that will do a lot of help prevent blackouts. When a transmission line goes down, one of the main issues is that the loss is instant and it takes time to route power from other places. Once the grid is down it is then a slow process to bring it back up, getting everything back in sync and dealing with the massive loads t
Better late than never. (Score:1)
This is excellent, and only 20 years after I had already figured this out myself and installed all my own batteries!
Fast Forward... (Score:3, Insightful)
...about 20 years when the automotive solid state battery is predominant. Homeowners will be backfilling their power needs from their vehicles which would probably be good to power their whole house for about 10 days under normal, not reduced loads, which would save the power grids everywhere. I look at EV's and see so many probable improvements, including dramatically reducing the cost of moving both people and cargo at electric motor 90%-ish efficiency rather than internal combustion 15% - 20%, maybe somewhat more for diesel but not close to electric. So many things will be improvements resulting from EV's, once they are capable of doing everything ICE vehicles will do. Hey, want to lose a lot of misery from asthma and other respiratory conditions brought on or exacerbated by auto exhaust pollution? That too will fall to the advancement of EV's. I'm just afraid I'm going to have to attempt to live to 95 years old or something close in order to benefit from it. Or maybe the improved air quality will help me get to 95...
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Fast-forward and peer into Greed N. Corruption's predictable behavior, and I see a planet choking to death on unregulated EV battery mining and manufacturing in third world countries that are still (somehow) a Third World in the 21st Century.
But hey! Let’s not think about those obvious patterns mankind has managed to confirm damn near every time over centuries. THIS time, is different. Pinky swear we promise the planet comes before profits! See, it’s scheduled for Someday.
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The national daily average power consumption is 29 kWh. So you are saying that a future EV battery will be able to supply 290kWh?
Right now, EV batteries average 40 kWh.
It may happen, just like we may develop an altogether new source of energy running on currently unknown science. But there is no basis for predicting it at the moment. Its wishful thinking.
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"Right now, EV batteries average 40 kWh."
Right now, almost every EV that has a range in the 300 mile range has about a 100 KwH battery pack. Toyota is touting their solid state battery as 750 mile range, so it's logical that their battery would be 2 1/2 times the capacity of current batteries, which would be 250 KwH. My own home power consumption is around 650 KwH except for the really hot or cold months, and that would make the battery good for about 11.5 days. If it's really hot or really cold, then
gigawatts (Score:2)
>"6.6 gigawatts were batteries"
That is a meaningless metric for energy storage in an article about backing up parts of the grid or meeting some demand to prevent blackouts. 6.6 Gigawatts for what? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days?
Gigawatt-speed, GO. (Score:2)
>"6.6 gigawatts were batteries"
That is a meaningless metric for energy storage in an article about backing up parts of the grid or meeting some demand to prevent blackouts. 6.6 Gigawatts for what? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days?
Pfft. If it’s anything like ISP advertised speeds, you’ll be sold 6.6 gigawatts but you’ll find you don’t even have the 1.21 gigawatts it takes to go Back to the Future on a Friday night. Total letdown.
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It's probably Gigawatt-hours. Journalists know SFA about science or dimensions; they're only metric is word count. Pretty soon they'll abbreviate it to "Gig", then invent a new unit, the Giggity, as in "Quahog has a new Giggity station".
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That does not really matter. It is obviously not for days.
It is the capacity available for load balancing.
If I had a 1GW pumped storage plant, you would not ask ... So, why ask in case of a battery?
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>"That does not really matter. It is the capacity available for load balancing. If I had a 1GW pumped storage plant, you would not ask ... So, why ask in case of a battery?"
It matters because battery storage is very tiny compared to other energy "sources'" runtime. Natural gas and nuclear, for example will essentially never just suddenly "run out", so you typically don't have to think about how long they can run at supply-rate. Without knowing how long battery storage is, there is absolutely no way to
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For balancing power it does not matter if it runs out.
Everyone involved in using such a device: knows how to utilize it.
A 30seconds reserve power plant is useful because it covers the time you need to spin up a gas turbine. And 10 minutes later: it is recharged already.
The information you seek, is completely irrelevant for you: as you are not a grid operator.
Re:gigawatts (Score:4, Informative)
Well, no. Power delivery is not *meaningless*, in fact it's quite important. For some applications wattage delivery may be a much more limiting factor than watt-hours of storage.
Consider a hydroelectric storage facility like the Northfield Mountain facilty. That facility has a storage capacity of 8.7 MWh and can deliver it at 1.17 MW. This balance between storage capacity and power is no accident; Northfield was designed to take power generated by the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant during off-peak hours and shift it to peak consumption hours within window of several hours. For that reason the facility needed to have roughly twice the power output of the nuclear plant it was designed to work with.
I think you're thinking in terms of keeping the grid running for a day or so with restricted supply. Sure, for that use case total storage capacity would be a limiting factor. But for grid stabilization, the engineers are thinking more in terms of minutes of operation. For example the extremely economically successful Hornsby Power Reserve in Australia is designed to generate peak power for about 10 minutes to help prevent rolling blackouts, and up to three hours or so of load management assistance.
Power delivery may be the Achilles heel of some of the new grid storage technologies that look simply amazing in terms of dollars per watt-hour of storage. The energy stored in a battery is useless if you can't get it out when it's needed.
Re: gigawatts (Score:1)
It is 6.6GW potential output power. Grid scale batteries are built for 5-10m of power before the generators kick in.
It also doesnâ(TM)t quantify whether the risk is lower compared to last year or a decade ago before they started the green transformation. Because right now 8000 people are experiencing a blackout.
2.21 Gigowatts !!! (Score:2)
1.21 Gigowatts it is.
Fun fact : in French, 1.21 Gigowatts has been "translated" to 2.21 Gigowatts.
France has moar powaaaah.
Risk (Score:2)
"Blackout Risk", this is an iatrogenic problem. Don't brag about a silly partial solution.
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Hope, well wishing and hooplah are all the article are. California could have the worst blackouts ever this summer, "risk" means nothing.
sparks, not capacity, seemed to be the issue (Score:1)
A battery is not a generator (Score:2)