Tech

California’s Heat Wave Is a Big Moment for Batteries


In a late time During a summer heat wave in California, golden hour becomes dangerous hour. At the offices of the California Independent System Operator, the state’s power grid regulator, things get tense. Their job is to keep the electrons going where they’re supposed to go — otherwise, it would lose power by millions.

That risk arises from a brief, but important, mismatch between supply and demand. The state’s growing energy source comes from solar panels, which accounted for about a fifth of the supply last year. But as the sun goes down and those panels stop receiving photons, the demand for electricity will continue to soar. People come home from work and plug in the electric car, then turn on the air conditioner to relieve the stuffiness in the afternoon. Maybe they make dinner and run the dishwasher. Meanwhile, when going back to work, the lights in the office are probably still glimmering.

Here are the concerns during this week’s heat emergency, as dozens of cities break all time temperature record and energy demand skyrocketed. But this time around, the California ISO had a few more benefits to work with: a relatively new group of grid-scale batteries. They are designed to hold their power for about four hours – just long enough to fill the evening void. At peak output, about 6% of the power supply comes from these discharge cells, up from 0.1% in 2017, according to an analysis by BloombergNEF. Capacity nearly doubled in the past year. Just after 6 p.m. Tuesday, the battery surpassed the output of the state’s last remaining nuclear plant, peaking at just under 3,000 megawatts.

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There’s also a second push, this one on the bridge side. At about 5:45 p.m., the phones of millions of Californians rang as a solid block of text arrived, begging them to delay all that evening’s ceremonies to save energy. Obviously, they did. Over the next 20 minutes, more than 2,000 megawatts of demand disappeared from the grid, according to Anne Gonzales, a spokeswoman for the California ISO. It happened so quickly that many energy experts were stunned. “I was surprised to see how people came together,” said Ryan Hanna, an energy researcher at the University of California, San Diego.

Overall, Hanna said, both battery usage and text alerts are relatively “marginal” inputs to keeping supply and demand in balance, with demand hitting record highs this week: 52,000 megawatts. At night, the state still relies on natural gas for its electricity, as well as imports from other states. (For comparison, gas peaked at nearly 27,000 megawatts.) But in a crisis like this, “profits are everything,” he added. While utilities in some Bay Area communities continued to experience outages Tuesday, affecting about 50,000 customers – the result of what the California ISO later called misinformation – the number was less. much more than expected. On Wednesday and Thursday, despite being close to Tuesday’s demand record, power outages were once again avoided.

That’s a relatively slow growth for large-scale battery deployment. Efforts to overhaul the grid and create more storage capacity began a decade ago but have stretched renewable energy production, such as solar and wind farms, in terms of installation put actual. In part, that’s because batteries are a puzzle of regulation. Some math is hard to find the right incentives for an energy source that stores, rather than produces, energy. Plus, while solar panels and wind turbines are now commonplace, grid operators have little experience deploying batteries on a large scale, so technical uncertainties remain. The state’s largest battery, with a capacity of 1,600 MW now located at a natural gas plant in Moss Landing, has spent much of its time offline due to temperature management issues with the massive pile of lithium-ion batteries. giant.

There are other issues that need to be addressed. Earlier this week, some batteries began discharging earlier than expected as the price battery operators were paid for their energy exceeded state regulatory limits. (These operators may include local utilities or independent companies.) With no benefit to keeping their electrons around longer, batteries begin to discharge their loads well before the grid is in a state. high alert. Dan Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “Analyzing whether it is the right move or not. But it has the potential to spark discussions about the right way to encourage battery performance — and potentially to redesign the software that controls their operation for more flexibility in extreme situations.

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Over the past two years, the difference in early evening battery usage has been stark – more than 10-fold increase in peak usage in 2022 compared to 2020. State plans call for an increase. 41 gigawatts of energy storage by 2045, up from about 3 gigawatts today.

And that’s a good thing, Kammen points out, because in a way, California got lucky for most of this heatwave. Although it was very hot, it was not bland at all. High winds pose a risk of power line failures causing fires, so utilities can shut off power first to avoid trouble. Worse still, if fires spark, they can force other parts of the system to shut down or create smoke that obscures the sun and reduces solar output. (That came at the end of a Thursday night heatwave caused by fires in Southern California, forcing officials to begin demand reduction calls earlier in the day.) the tools at their disposal. And that means hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses are already self-sufficient with rooftop solar, putting less strain on the grid. Rooftop solar powered up to 8,000 megawatts during Tuesday’s peak.



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