California's Grid Survives Heat Wave Thanks to Massive Battery Storage (sacbee.com) 155
Longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a report from the Sacramento Bee: California's power grid handled a nearly three week long record-setting heat wave with few issues. The heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record around Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. Emergency alerts and calls for voluntary conservation were avoided this time around. Officials credit years of investment in renewable energy, especially battery storage that store solar power for use when the sun stops shining.
CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, [said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO)].
"Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid," he added. "That made a big, big difference." [...] Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, [said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO)].
"Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid," he added. "That made a big, big difference." [...] Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.
fine for statists (Score:4, Insightful)
... but Texas has freedom!
Re:fine for statists (Score:5, Funny)
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Freedom to cut off from the national grid and freedom to ask for hand out when disaster hits. Double freedom!
... otherwise known as having your cake and eating it.
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Except Austin. Austin's kinda cool.
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Totally the democrats fault. Even though republicans have been running the state for 30 years.
Re:fine for statists (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, it has freedom for some. They're picky about who they give freedom to.
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... but Texas has freedom!
Texas grid so bad, when it fails it makes frontpage news here. California grid so good, when it manages to NOT fail it makes frontpage news here. LOL :DDDDDDDD
units (Score:2)
roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power
The units in this article are hurting my head.
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Well, at least megawatt is actually a measurement of power.
I see it mixed up with energy instead all the time.
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This is, for better or worse, pretty typical when discussing grid-scale energy storage. It tends to get reported using units of power, because grid operators care more about how much power a facility can handle to balance out supply and demand. Pumped hydro storage, for instance, tends to be limited by the po
Imports rise at night... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, batteries, solar and wind are a big help during the day but if you look at the CAISO energy source graphs, you'll see they have to import about 5000MW over the night hours. Good news is that all the solar is resulting in a some export activity (ca. 2000MW during peak sunlight).
Hilarity ensues when you look at the nuclear-powered generation...it's a flat line at 2000MW 24/7. We need a bit more of that, but it's not to be in this political environment.
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You can see where this going. As the amount of battery storage and solar increase, the need to import will decrease, and the need for nuclear will decrease as well. Presumably that nuclear plant is already having issues during the day when demand falls to zero due to the amount of solar already installed.
Just wait until deep water wind turbines start appearing off California's coast.
Do they have any flywheels yet? Ireland is installing them at the sites of old coal plants, to add some inertia to the grid.
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Grid scale batteries ARE new. Think of it this way - when you flip the light on, someone on the grid had to immediately increase power ou
Meanwhile millions in TX without power for weeks. (Score:3)
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Sometimes there is justice in the world.
I'm sure they're blaming Biden and illegal immigrants for any and all issues...
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I wonder if The 8 Bit Guy will do a video about it. He made one where he tested his lashed together solar power system to see if it could get through a day without the grid, and it managed it. It really was a bodge though, no proper battery, just portable units. His house looked pretty poorly insulated too.
I hope things are okay for him, but seeing the numbers he was getting he could have gone so much further with a bit of forward planning.
10,000MW? HUH? (Score:2)
So... is this the peak or sustained output?
Or is it supposed to represent the amount of power stored somehow?
If it's the amount of power stored, is it in minutes, hours, days?
Why are articles like this always written by blithering idiots?
Very efficient houses (Score:2)
" 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours"
Good thing Al Gore doesn't live in California then, he runs a 25 kW house.
Battery or solar? (Score:2)
Units are wrong. (Score:2)
So of 11600 MW of newly installed renewables, 10000 or 86% is in those batteries. That's absurd.
Why the F*** when a scientist says he's found a nearly complete bellusaurus skeleton, the reporter says: "A what-o-saurus??, let me get my pencil and write this down". But when it is about batteries and energy, they simply get it wrong. There is probably about 2000 MW, 10000 MWh of battery capacity installed.
Note they didn't mention private solar panels (Score:3)
Those, of course, provide what the people need but are conveniently invisible to bureaucrats who want to impose centralised solutions.
Though to be fair the headline of this government link is:
California Leads the Nation in Distributed Generation
https://www.californiadgstats.... [ca.gov]
Part of the issue (Score:2)
Hard to make any sense of this but.... (Score:3)
Hard to make any sense of this, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between MW and MWh. Thinks that batteries are a form of renewable energy capacity. Its impossible to tell from this whether in fact there is enough capacity to power 10 million homes for a few hours.
Perhaps the giveaway is in the last line: "Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m"
So, it wasn't as hot in SC, and electricity consumption was lower than usual, and they got away with it. What role batteries played or could play is unknown.
For the rest of the world (Score:2)
124F = 51.1C
Would be great if /. editors added normal units as well.
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Americans translate when it matters. They buy eight balls of cocaine - 3.5 grams or 1/8 of an ounce. They buy a pound of weed or a kilogram of harder drugs. They buy sheets of acid of relatively unknown potency, but generally something hovering around 80 micrograms.
Sure you can dig up the sensationalism of a probe being smashed into a planet because of conversion problems, but for the most part Americans have their feet successfully planted in both worlds.
I'm from a metric country but I know my height in i
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In addition to normal units, also add molar units.
Classic news reporting (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
Yeah, that's what happens when your electricity bill DOUBLES from the year before. Your aircon gets set to 82-85 because you can't afford anything lower.
So they say "Oh, just build solar". Yeah, my condo HOA doesn't allow that.
Screw California power generators.
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"noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m" Yeah, that's what happens when your electricity bill DOUBLES from the year before. Your aircon gets set to 82-85 because you can't afford anything lower. So they say "Oh, just build solar". Yeah, my condo HOA doesn't allow that. Screw California power generators.
This. California energy costs are just plain outrageous. While my mom in Tennessee sees wholesale costs of 7 cents per kWh and retail average of ~13 cents, the residential average is an appalling 43 cents per kWh on average in PG&E territory. At one point, I actually calculated that I'd pay something like half as much for power if I bought a small natural gas generator and ran it on PG&E residential natural gas at market rates.
But the actual wholesale costs in California are actually going *down*
nonsense (Score:3)
"That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours."
Nope, that says nothing about how long it could run. However, grid-level battery storage is apparently typically designed to provide peak power for 4 hours.
So far! (Score:2)
CA hasn't hit the peaked summer yet!
Re:What heat wave? (Score:5, Informative)
a relatively quick Google search says you're wrong. California like the rest of the world is seeing record temperatures over and over again.
I'm not sure why you would say something so easily disproven. Did you get paid for it or do you just like being contrarian?
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"I'm not sure why you would say something so easily disproven. Did you get paid for it or do you just like being contrarian?"
I live in Los Angeles. I have a flippin' weather station in my backyard and I can confirm this summer has been mild compared to most years.
He's not lying and his observation about capacity being available because of this sounds very reasonable.
Re:What heat wave? (Score:5, Informative)
Even the summary says that "Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California..."
Everyone here needs to just pay more attention.
Re: What heat wave? (Score:5, Interesting)
And to the fact the heatwave is in NorCal not LA, triple digits coming again this week to Sacramento.
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Why do you let your very expensive batteries get used as a free service for the public grid?
Your batteries have a limited number of recharge cycles and each recharge along the way does a tiny bit of damage.
My solar sends excess power back to the grid but my batteries are in emergency use only mode at all times. They do not drain down unless the grid is off and my solar can't produce enough for my needs. Also, you are leaving yourself in a position where you won't have much battery charge for yourself once
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Why do you let your very expensive batteries get used as a free service for the public grid?
Presumably arbitrage. There's a limit to how much solar power they'll take before they start to curtail. But if you have storage, you can sell back that power later, after everybody's panels start producing less power, during peak rate periods later in the afternoon/evening, when everybody's air conditioners kick on to cool their houses down before the owners get home.
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Battery packs are roughly $10k per unit.
I can't imagine the ROI from burning the batteries out sooner vs the money taken in from a little extra energy sell back is worth it.
A Tesla Powerwall is rated for 4,000 cycles. That's $2.50 per charge cycle, for 13.5 kWh. If you can make over 19 cents per kWh, it makes sense to burn it down. Unfortunately, PG&E cheats people and only pays single-digit pennies per kWh (less than the cheapest price you'll ever pay for power even in the middle of the night).
So it is literally never cost-effective to sell back power from a Powerwall to the grid in PG&E territory, regardless of what you bought it for, except during power emergenci
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Every time I lost everything in the freezer due to not having solar it cost me a few hundred bucks to replace all the spoiled food. The ROI and risk/reward of donating batteries to PG&E's grid seems like a really bad deal.
I don't disagree. That said, a $500 Jackery can keep a typical freezer going for more than a day, so you can always have a cheap kilowatt in reserve for that, and charge it when power comes back. You don't really need whole-home backup for a freezer. :-)
I left California a little over a year ago and have solar in Florida where we also get hosed on energy sell backs. Power here is way cheaper than California and flat rate so arbitrage is literally impossible and FPL managed to rig the fee structure so they never end up paying customers back on excess power. I can essentially zero my power cost but not make extra back.
Power companies the same everywhere, fucking people over.
Pretty much. The only power companies that aren't constantly trying to screw you are the ones that are municipal nonprofits or other government-owner corporations that are prohibited by law from turning a profit (e.g. TVA).
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Please for the love of fuck (Score:2, Informative)
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I really should not have to explain the difference between climate and whether to you.
Whither weather?
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"Learn the difference between climate and weather. "
Learn to stay on topic. The claim is that the grid survived because of the batteries. That's a half truth. The grid survived because of the "weather" in so cal left capacity available for other regions. The OP was called a liar when he pointed this out.
The article even mentions this.
"One of the major factors is that it's not cooling off as much at night which is putting increased strain on the grid..."
It's been in the 60s at night according to my weath
Re:Please for the love of fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
If we correct the summary to "California's Grid Survives Heat Wave Thanks in Part to Massive Battery Storage", what's your objection?
Another way to look at it is that, of the factors within the government's control, batteries appear to be quite effective at lowering the risk of grid failure. If you object to that statement, I can only assume you have a more effective solution that doesn't rely on "let's hope the climate doesn't kill us lol". So don't be shy, let's hear it.
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AC said: "No, the claim is that the officials credited the stability of the grid to batteries. "
The article said: (cough)"Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California..."(/cough).
It's certainly not due ONLY to "batteries" at the very least. We have about 10MW of battery storage -- we need something like 50 GW to have enough battery to do everything CA wants to do with power. Keep shutting down power plants before we're ready (and counting the power plants that h
Re: Please for the love of fuck (Score:2)
It's not driving you'd need to restrict, it's recharging. If it came to that.
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Why would everyone need to charge their cars at the height of temperatures during a heat wave?
I have no statistics, but I would imagine that most people that like keeping money in their bank accounts already set their cars to charge overnight during off-peak rates.
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"...but I would imagine that most people that like keeping money in their bank accounts already set their cars to charge overnight during off-peak rates"
You mean like 4pm-9pm when folks get home from work? When power is far more expensive? And peak hours can (and often do) extend much later than that. We burn more energy in our homes collectively than we do out-and-about and/or at work.
The goal would be to bank the power during off-peak and charge your car whenever the hell you need to off of the storag
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You mean like 4pm-9pm when folks get home from work?
No, I mean at 1am when it can still charge for a full 5 hours, and it's nowhere near peak usage time. That's why I specifically mentioned "off-peak rates" which apparently you completely ignored in your rush to respond to something I never said.
You do know that basically every EV allows you to set a charging schedule, so you can plug it in and walk away, and it starts charging when you tell it to? Example: set it to start charging at 1am which is literally never peak usage. You still plug it in when you
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I'm not going to repost all of this because you can click a link [slashdot.org] to see it.
5 different news articles from the last week about "another" Northern California heat wave coming. "Another" being a key word telling you there was one in the recent past.
Are they all lying? Or are you suffering from a recency bias where you think yesterday's weather is going to be a static condition?
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So because you didn't personally experience it where it wasn't happening, that means it didn't happen?
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Thank you for the sample size of 1.
Re:What heat wave? (Score:5, Informative)
You know that California is like 700 miles long, and has very different climate zones across it, right?
Your one data point does not disprove all the others that say you're wrong. Weather doesn't care about arbitrary lines on a map, so it is quite possible that the heat wave is happening north of the San Gabriel Mountains in Northern California and parts of the Pacific Northwest.
Just to prove the point:
Thursday marks return of triple-digit weather [kcra.com]
After a few mild days, another Northern California summer heat wave on the horizon [cbsnews.com]
A record stretch of heat for Northern California [abc10.com]
California's heatwave evaporates billions of gallons of water from reservoirs [desertsun.com]
Another heat wave starts friday [kcra.com]
All of those are from this week. Are all those news organizations lying? Or maybe your "flippin' weather station in [your] backyard" isn't where the heat waves have been happening?
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So saying that, "Because SoCal had a mild summer..." is a laughable misdirection.
The milder SoCal summer is definitely a contributing factor to the temperature not being even higher than their current elevated value
You're bordering on a shill. You keep using the same questionable numbers and saying the same very soundbite-ish assertions.
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You said: "...is a laughable misdirection."
What's laughable is you saying this when the flipping article SAYS "Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California..."
I don't think you understand what misdirection is -- because you are doing it right now.
Or maybe you do and it's deliberate.
Between the loss of power plants in the last few years and the addition of 10kMW of battery capacity, at best it's a push. To suggest this is anything other than a "shallow victory" for
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What's laughable is you saying this when the flipping article SAYS "Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California..."
Of course he did.
Because if SoCal were having a normal summer, then the heat wave throughout the entire state would be worse. That's how averages work, dipshit.
You're not a very bright one.
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If you look at animated temperature anomaly maps for past heat waves, you'll see bands of heat and cool moving across the state, often with little islands of cool in the heat and vice versa. If you look at the temp anomaly maps from yesterday, LA was a little island about -1C below average for the time of year surrounded by areas where the temperatures were +4C. So nobody is really factually contradicting each other here.
California is a big enough state that weather patterns differ across it; which means
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"I'm not sure why you would say something so easily disproven. Did you get paid for it or do you just like being contrarian?"
I live in Los Angeles. I have a flippin' weather station in my backyard and I can confirm this summer has been mild compared to most years.
There are many locations in Southern California, but we have very detailed and precise weather records, so we can check on these claims for the entire area.
Based on weather data from NOAA, the number of total cooling degree days (for 17 days in July) as a compact metric respectively in LA, San Diego, and Riverside were 162, 110, and 281 compared to a historical normal of 133, 88, and 219 or +29, +22, and +62. For comparison, those numbers for San Jose and Sacramento were 204 and 303 cooling degree days com
Less population since 2020? (Score:3)
Is this also helped by having lost 500,000 people since 2020 from Wikipedia....?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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California like the rest of the world is seeing record temperatures over and over again.
Where I live (Switzerland) we have had repeated articles talking about the record-breaking temperatures. Hottest Spring on record! Hottest June ever!
Let me tell you: it has been a miserably cold and wet Spring and summer. This week - mid-July - is the first week that we could possibly call "Summer". Yet, just today, I saw another "heat map" showing Switzerland dark red, for record-breaking heat.
I used to live in the UK, so we also follow UK news to some extent. Same thing: It's been a cold and rainy year
Re:What heat wave? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes and only a few days ago it was hot as shit and it's warming again. No one at any point was speaking specifically of today which was in fact a welcome break from otherwise hot temperatures.
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Local weather is not static over time. Just because it's not hot today, doesn't mean it won't be hot this weekend, or wasn't hot last weekend. And we have a whole bunch of people that make it their business to track past weather data, so they can more accurately predict future weather trends.
In addition, Southern California != Northern California, as should be self evident by the types of vegetation that grow in both regions.
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Were you born this stupid, or did you take lessons?
Oh sweet sweet self-owning irony, how I've missed you.
SOUTHERN California != NORTHERN California.
California is ~1,000 miles from the Oregon border at the Siskiyou Summit to the San Ysidro Crossing at the Mexico border.
Do you really think the weather you get in the Los Angeles area is the same as what they get in Shasta? Do you think San Diego and Sacramento are the same place, with the same weather? How about Half Moon Bay and Lake Tahoe? Clearly going to have the same weather, one being a Bay Area coast
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It was way hotter than typical in the Bay Area (sorry if all of California is not LA). It gets that hot in Central Valley, but I don't recall it ever being that hot for that many days in a row before. Two regions I spent a lot of time in during the heat wave, and it was brutal. I've lived in both areas for many years, and am a native, and it was brutal. In Fresno, where it's always hot, people were definitely talking about it.
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It was over 100F in many parts of the Bay Area two weeks ago, including San Jose (not just inland cities like the everhot Livermore). Last week it hit 102 in San Jose. This weak is relatively nice in the 80s. There were extreme heat advisories every day, there were heat advisory signs on the freeways. It was 106F where I was in central valley, though othe parts listed as over 110F. At no time in July were the highs in the 70s, nor predicted to be that low for the test of the month, for San Jose. San Fran
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Temps have been about normal for July in SoCal. Which, Los Angeles being referred to as "The Sump" by the industry, means there was plenty of capacity available to support the less populated northern regions.
Fake news, from start to finish.
Funny thing, SoCal was one of the few places which had a carve out for the recent record breaking high temperatures [newsweek.com] in California.
Perhaps your climate is different from the weather in the rest of California.
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Temps have been about normal for July in SoCal. Which, Los Angeles being referred to as "The Sump" by the industry, means there was plenty of capacity available to support the less populated northern regions.
Fake news, from start to finish.
Texas man has chimed in, being pissed that their Freedom Jeebuz Electricity free markt we don't need to connect to any grid power failed yet again. So he has to try to shit on California.
You failed pretty hard.
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Yes, because Southern California famously has the exact same weather as regions in the north of the state that are 800 miles away, over a couple mountain ranges and inland from the ocean.
We all know that Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs have the EXACT SAME WEATHER, EVERY DAY. Same with San Diego and Shasta, right? I mean we all remember when San Diego got a couple feet of snow this last winter!
Stop being a fucking moron. Remember that you chose to post this stupid shit multiple times, and it is about the dumb
Re: What heat wave? (Score:2)
So California spent billions of dollars so it could avoid asking for voluntary rollbacks in energy usage for a couple weeks...
I think it would have been cheaper to just issue the press release to please use less electricity...
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You know people's "objective" lived experience is always very reliable "data".
Don't be fucking stupid.
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Stupid people will always believe stupid things. It's their defining characteristic.
They'd still be sacrificing kids at altars to improve the harvest if it weren't for us, and like always, we will keep dragging you stupid fucking cretins forward. You're welcome.
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What about you, slick?
Weren't you the stupid fucker who I argued with about Ukraine and Russia once? God I hope so.
If you get bored, the entire premise of your comment was wrong, anyway. [yale.edu]
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the front page of slashdot more than once. Good enough for me.
Pretty low aspiration for success in life then. Check.
Weren't you the stupid fucker who I argued with about Ukraine and Russia once?
Don't know, are you one of Putin's boot lickers? Would not surprise me.
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It's always precious when people take the time to respond about how they don't give a fuck, when it's clear they gave enough of a fuck to take the time to respond.
If you truly didn't give a fuck, you would have scrolled on and actually not given that fuck.
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Re:Sorry (Score:4, Funny)
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Buddy, your whole argument is that Palm Springs must not have hit the recorded 120+ degree temps because you didn't personally experience an inconvenience.
And the whole climate change alarmist argument is that these heat waves are new. Palm Springs recorded 123-degree heat this year, tying a record originally set over half a fucking century ago.
The climate does change. Clickbait bullshit sells that as a “new” thing on our planet. No one ever thought about changing the name of Death Valley for valid reason.
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"Those periods were likely on their mind over the last few weeks, when sweltering heat enveloped California. This prolonged heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record in Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. But emergency alerts or calls for voluntary conservation were ultimately avoided this time around. Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temper
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Yeah, and you know what? In Eugene, Oregon it's also only an expected high of 83, so clearly the stack of articles and data being pulled from the inland valleys of Northern California are all lies, right?
I mean, Eugene is basically the same distance to Sacramento as your SoCal backyard weather station, so according to you the weather forecasts must be exactly the same, right? Oh, no they won't be, because Eugene isn't in the same arbitrary box drawn on a map that we call "California" and that makes all th
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So you think that because you LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT HERE you think that your weather observations of that desert that is hundreds of miles away from the events that we're speaking of is any way relevant?
You seem to think that because it's not hot where you are on that specific day, it can't possibly be hotter somewhere else hundreds of miles away with a different climate profile?
And who the fuck is talking about climate change in this context? We're talking about a localized heat wave, which is objectiv
Re: You know it would be nice (Score:2, Flamebait)
I think everyone can agree that X is worse than it was before Musk.
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Indeed you could say they are powering the entire grid by keeping it stable since unstable = outage.
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So? Grid stabilisation is critical, and hard when demand peaks. I can’t tell you how many fuckwitted arguments I’ve seen from people dismissing battery storage because they think the job of batteries is to provide continuous power for hours, days or weeks on end, when that was never the purpose.
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I can’t tell you how many fuckwitted arguments I’ve seen from people dismissing battery storage because they think the job of batteries is to provide continuous power for hours, days or weeks on end, when that was never the purpose.
I can't tell you how many people (including many here on /.) think that is exactly what we are going to do. When they say "renewables and storage" they are not talking about grid stabilization.
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OK, well you and I know better than that. Li battery chemistries are great for many things including grid stabilisation, but there are other technologies that provide better long-duration storage. And overbuild massively reduces the need for longer durations of storage anyway.
Re:Inertia (Score:5, Informative)
They are doing more than stabilizing the grid. They are taking in excess solar capacity during the day, and delivering it back around sunset during peak demand. That's time-shifting, and reducing the need for other sources (natural gas, mostly, or imports from out-of-state). Here's a plot of the Cal ISO energy mix [gridstatus.io] for July 17th. There's a big wedge of battery-supplied power from 6:30-10:30 PM. At around 8:30 PM, it peaks at around 7 GW. That's not grid-stabilization: that's bulk power being supplied to people's homes. And that doesn't count any "behind the meter" battery installations in private homes, of which there are many in California.
This article from the NYTimes [nytimes.com] explains further. (Paywalled, sorry. It's a good piece with good plots.)
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The heated air from the sun doesn't cool instantly when the sun falls below the horizon.
Batteries allow you to time-shift the energy that you collected from solar when it was still producing, into time that the solar is not producing, to support ongoing peak loads from air conditioning that continues to run, as well as millions of electric stoves, ovens, air fryers, microwaves, etc. cooking people's dinners.