> California hasn’t issued an emergency plea for the public to conserve energy, known as a Flex Alert, since 2022.

Feels like that statement deserves to be contextualized with weather data. There were a few summers leading up to that where all of the major metro areas shared concurrent record high heat days, and sometimes coincided with poor air quality from wildfires (meaning more people closed their windows and ran AC even if they wouldn't have otherwise.)

> It was only five years ago that a record-shattering heat wave pushed the grid to its limit and plunged much of the state into darkness.

They mention it here, but then don't talk about whether similar circumstances have been faced since. Don't get me wrong, this is encouraging, but the article invited this kind of reaction by putting "leaving rolling blackouts behind" in the title.

Funny enough, if you look at the article's original title via the URL slug, it was much more measured:

  california-made-it-through-another-summer-without-a-flex-alert

• testdelacc1

  today at 12:54 PM

  While usage of aircon during heatwaves stressing the grid is a valid concern, I think massive increase in solar could offset it. Solar will also generate maximum energy during sunny days with minimal cloud cover, meaning there shouldn’t be a shortage of energy if there’s enough solar.

  Since 2022 California has energy from solar by roughly 50%, while the population has decreased. Solar is now the biggest source of energy in California, and continues to grow. That means that future heatwaves should be handled well enough.

• khuey

  yesterday at 9:04 PM

  > There were a few summers leading up to that where all of the major metro areas shared concurrent record high heat days, and sometimes coincided with poor air quality from wildfires (meaning more people closed their windows and ran AC even if they wouldn't have otherwise.)

  This is underselling it, if anything. The multi-day heatwave around Labor Day 2022 extended across most of the western US, not just California. The electricity demand during that event set what was at the time the all time record for the entire Western Interconnection (since surpassed in 2024) and set what is still today the all time record for CAISO.

  • mh-

    yesterday at 9:32 PM

    I didn't want to overstate it given I wasn't bringing any data to the conversation, but your account matches my recollection as well.

    • khuey

      yesterday at 11:02 PM

      https://www.publicadvocates.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cal-advocate... has some data.

  • rconti

    yesterday at 11:08 PM

    Yep. The previous high was in 2006(!). Overall, statewide energy consumption seems to be flat or declining.

    In 2020, there were extremely high heat days in August, with wildfire smoke covering the state. Thankfully I was out of town, but my wife was suffering, unable to cool the house OR open a window. In 2021 or 2022 I finally broke down and bought a window-mounted AC unit for my office, as I work from home. In 2024 and 2025 I didn't even bother installing it, the summers have been so mild.

    https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...

    • themafia

      yesterday at 11:23 PM

      Equipment dies and needs to be replaced. When that happens a more energy efficient unit is usually available and is often the best option for replacement.

      That's the whole other side to this curve which isn't seen very clearly in grid analysis.

      • yurishimo

        today at 9:01 AM

        This definitely plays a huge factor. Even people who get airco for the first time are already beginning with a different mindset. They also tend to run the units very conservatively because they aren’t used to living in an air conditioned space and often find it uncomfortable after a certain point.

        I moved to Western Europe from a US state where airco is mandatory. I purchased a split unit here and on the worst summer weeks, it still only cost me €10 to run the unit on its coldest setting for a week (almost continuously since I was using it with a fan to blow cooler air around the rest of the house). Back in the US, I had summer electricity bills of hundreds of dollars every year.

        Sure, the weather is a bit more mild here, but there have been heat waves, and I’m definitely an outlier when it comes to usage. But that just goes to show how efficient these new units are!

    • jeffbee

      today at 1:21 AM

      Statewide grid demand is somewhat declining because distributed small-scale solar is massive. It now has an aggregate capacity of 20GW. This is usually ignored by people who are only looking at ERCOT v. CAISO grid statistics. Texas basically doesn't have any small-scale solar.

      • rconti

        today at 1:51 AM

        Are you saying Texas doesn't have much rooftop solar? That's surprising. I suppose largely due to low electricity costs making the investment not worth it? (And, I suspect, secondarily, utilities not really incentivizing it)

        • yurishimo

          today at 9:07 AM

          In Dallas where I grew up, it wasn’t necessarily rare but it wasn’t a given by any stretch. Maybe 10% of homes the last time I lived there (2022)? The neighborhood also made a difference.

          Where I live now in the Netherlands, it feels like 30-40% of private homes have solar and 80%+ of business and government buildings that use more energy during the daylight hours so the payoff is much more realizable.

        • jeffbee

          today at 2:10 AM

          And the hail, I suppose.

          • throwaway2037

            today at 5:12 AM

            I never thought about the impact of Texas hail storms on solar energy. Is there an industry standard practice to shield the panels during hail storms? Or do they use stronger glass? I am curious to learn more.

            • Loic

              today at 7:24 AM

              Tracker systems with "hail stow"[0] mode. They bring the panels as vertical as possible.

              [0]: https://www.energy.gov/femp/hail-damage-mitigation-solar-pho...

            • minitoar

              today at 5:44 AM

              UL has a standard, this article goes into some details https://www.ul.com/news/manufacturers-say-hail-yes-solar-pan...

              • throwaway2037

                today at 8:54 AM

                The title of the article gave me a real laugh!

                    > Manufacturers Say Hail Yes to Solar Panel Testing

• k1t

  today at 6:28 AM

  I feel like the additional unstated context is that nothing has changed.

  Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.

  I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.

• vondur

  yesterday at 8:57 PM

  Yeah, I think you are correct, 2022 was a hot summer with a September heat wave which broke some records for power demand. Also keep in mind that there was a big increase in hydropower generation in 2023 and 2024 due to the really wet/snowy winter seasons.

• thakoppno

  today at 5:18 AM

  > the URL slug

  when will it replace the headline in editorial importance?

  • oezi

    today at 8:26 AM

    Usually slug, headline and teaser are all considered important parts to optimize. My wife works for a big online news company and while news journalists write headline and teaser, they have editors in chief who edit those again and a separate SEO team who will assign slugs.

• chaostheory

  yesterday at 9:19 PM

  There’s also the more forgiving fire season in some areas. This is relevant since a lot of the power transmission goes through forests and nature preserves.

• blitzar

  yesterday at 9:48 PM

  With current technology getting through long days of sunshine linked demand is not an achievement worthy of celebration.

  • khuey

    yesterday at 11:01 PM

    > sunshine linked demand

    The demand lags the sunshine which is why it's a non-trivial problem.

    • tempestn

      today at 3:46 AM

      With a lot of overlap though. The correlation with sunshine is still helpful.

The electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California:

- France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly

- California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year...

And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan:

- https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh.

Nuclear power rules.

• derriz

  today at 12:37 AM

  Electricity prices are set by the French government not the wholesale cost or cost of production. Which is why EDF - the operator of the French nuclear fleet - regularly posts massive losses. Like the €18 billion loss in 2023.

  https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...

  • MaxL93

    today at 1:11 AM

    It should be noted that most of EDF's massive losses are due to the ARENH.

    The European Union insists that EDF must sell energy at very discounted prices, so that third-party "providers" can make an entry on the energy market. The idea was that they would eventually sell their own energy supply, but most just pocketed the difference between the dirt-cheap energy & what they charged customers, then ran away the moment there was any hint of change on the horizon.

    Or, to put it in simpler, blunter terms: in the name of "competition", EDF was forced to heavily subsidize companies that turned out to be nothing more than rent-seekers that only sought to, effectively, grab free subsidy money.

    Here are some articles about it:

    2022: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/10/edf-sues-fr... 2023: https://www.ft.com/content/e2fc3abf-4803-4561-8ef2-0c77fd2d0... 2024: https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/europes-under-radar-ind...

    • oezi

      today at 8:38 AM

      I skimmed your posts but they don't blame EU rules. Can you point to EU regulation which caused this?

      ARENH looks like a mechanism by which France wanted to entice competition in end customer sales (and distribution?) of electricity.

    • radu_floricica

      today at 5:22 AM

      So that's an European thing? huh. We have this in Romania - a couple years back when the war in Ukraine started just as the green deal took effect, the gov started spending like crazy on subsidizing energy. But they did it in a convoluted way with a layer of intermediaries that basically were allowed to invoice the state for price differences from arbitrary price levels. Almost "I'd like to sell at twice the price but you're not letting me, so gimme the difference" - if not exactly that.

      I'm not sure if I'm feeling better or worse that it's a EU invention. Either way, it's hellof a corrupt practice.

      • L-four

        today at 7:40 AM

        No it's a neoliberal thing. Rather than the government doing the thing. They hand out massive subsides and hope it gets done.

  • KptMarchewa

    today at 12:53 AM

    2022, not 2023. That was due to one time effect of corrosion repairs.

    For 2023 and 2024 EDF was profitable, with net income of those two years exceeding that 2022 loss.

    • mikeyouse

      today at 1:20 AM

      And I’m generally a nuclear proponent but one of the worst investments the French utility made was investing in the UKs reactor debacle at Hinkley C.

      • caminante

        today at 4:04 AM

        Per wiki, cost midrange is now 45 BEUR. That's ~14 MEUR/MW capacity (v. solar @ ~1MEUR/MW).

        Ouch!

        • Tade0

          today at 6:16 AM

          To make matters worse gas peaker plants cost approximately €1mln/MW as well, so at the cost of that plant you could have massively overprovisioned solar, backup gas plants and plenty of money for fuel to spare which you wouldn't be spending immediately, so it could be invested instead.

          • caminante

            today at 12:25 PM

            Yes, though gas plant install prices are 2-3MEUR/MW these days due to demand/supply.

• sgustard

  today at 12:28 AM

  Quebec has them both beat. Hydro rules!

  https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-QC/5y/yearly

  (To be transparent, there's controversy around calling hydroelectric renewable.)

  • ziotom78

    today at 6:27 AM

    What strikes me is the fact that nuclear power has received an incredible amount of backslash after the Chernobyl incident (a few thousands deaths) and the Fukushima incident (one disputed death), but hydroelectric power is considered a "good" source of energy despite a few incredibly deadly incidents:

    - Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]

    - Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]

    - Machchu (India, 1979): 5000 deaths [3]

    - Vajont (Italy, 1963): 2000 deaths [4]

    - Möhne dam (Germany, 1943): 1500 deaths [5]

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse

    [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_failure

    [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

    [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hne_Reservoir

    • rkomorn

      today at 6:34 AM

      And the environmental impact up and downstream (both for failure cases and regular operation).

    • ViewTrick1002

      today at 7:24 AM

      I think this line of thinking comes from a westernized world where all water is controlled.

      Many dams have been built around the world not for power generation, but to control flooding. The power generation is a secondary concern.

      In aggregate dams have saved far more lives, by managing flood waters.

      The great thing in 2025 is that we don’t need either the dam or nuclear risk for our electricity needs.

      Just build renewables and storage and the risk for the general public is as close to zero as we can get. The only people involved in accidents are those that chose to work in the industry installing and maintaining the gear.

      We should of course continue to focus on work place safety but for the general public the risk of a life changing evacuation, radiation exposure or flood from dam failure does not exist.

      • madaxe_again

        today at 7:47 AM

        As you say, dams are a net positive, and while failures do happen, these days we tend to be wiser about where we put PHES in particular.

        I guess I’m surprised it isn’t more of an option for California - the U.K. uses Snowdonia as a giant battery, and afaik there’s been one failure of a dam that wiped half of trefriw off the map a century ago - which wasn’t hard as it’s a speck of a place. Since then the lakes have pretty reliably and safely provided somewhere to stick excess energy, and now are largely pumped by the offshore wind arrays nearby.

        California has big mountains, but I’m not sure if the geology or terrain is right for PHES.

    • disentanglement

      today at 7:59 AM

      Did you really just attribute the deaths from a bombing raid on a dam during WW2 to a hydropower incident?

      • ziotom78

        today at 10:10 AM

        I was going to reply, but kakacik already said what I wanted.

      • kakacik

        today at 8:45 AM

        If a nuclear reactor was bombed during the war, would the resulting deaths be counted as a nuclear disaster and used as argument against it, or just another war crime? Depends who you ask I'd say.

  • foobarian

    today at 1:24 AM

    Hydro does rule. Top 8 power stations are hydro right now. And the top power station has been a hydro for over a hundred years now. Very cool! Three Gorges has capacity of 22.5 GW.

    • zdragnar

      today at 2:06 AM

      I really hope nothing bad happens at the three gorges dam. There's nearly half a billion people that would have to be evacuated, and tens of millions who likely wouldn't be able to evacuate in time due to proximity.

      I'd rather live near a modern nuclear plant myself.

  • idiotsecant

    today at 4:15 AM

    I am a bit biased, as an engineer who works exclusively in hydro powerplants, but i think they're awesome too. With that said, it's becoming more apparent that in addition to the biosphere issues they cause, they also cause a pretty significant amount of methane to be released. https://www.hydropower.org/blog/new-study-sheds-light-on-res...

    It would put me out of a job but I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generation and solar with storage, at least until we get fusion figured out.

    • oezi

      today at 8:43 AM

      The linked article doesn't put these emissions in relation to anything. It is hard to imagine it to be a relevant amount of emissions, right?

    • throwaway2037

      today at 5:15 AM

          > I'd still rather see a surge in nuke generation and solar with storage
      

      How about wind?

• ZeroGravitas

  today at 9:16 AM

  Even the poster boy for nuclear is reducing nuclear output as its fleet ages and filling that gap with renewables (reducing its electricity emissions from 2005 when their nuclear peaked too).

  So it apparently doesn't matter what your existing grid is, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, of whatever mix, the thing you should be building now is mostly solar, wind and (not quite caught on globally but just about to make a very big splash) batteries.

  • cm2187

    today at 11:14 AM

    The batteries mentioned in the article have only a few hours of capacity, and are designed to smooth the peak usage intraday. I think many people are confused and seem to think batteries are a viable way to address the volatility of wind, where you may deal with weeks with no/low wind, or solar, which in countries with cold winters is of little help.

    I have yet to see a cheap scalable alternative to carbon to deal with that volatility. Hydro perhaps in a handful of smaller, mountainous countries (and if you are not too regarding of the environmental damages). Right now the UK is using LNG to compensate wind.

    • Qwertious

      today at 12:54 PM

      Long-form storage is inherently unprofitable - a battery that's used daily will make 365x the sales of a battery that's used only once a year.

      So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.

      In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.

      Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.

    • Veliladon

      today at 12:28 PM

      Normally this would be handled by a wider synchronized network. The EU has a continent wide synchronized network and the UK isn’t part of it.

      There are also other ways to store energy. For polar regions sand batteries are capable of storing heat for months. High grade heat to the point they can siphon off that heat for power generation.

• idreyn

  today at 1:26 AM

  These maps are such a cool resource, thanks for sharing!

  "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

• energy123

  today at 9:27 AM

  This shouldn't be confused for an argument to build new nuclear power in the year 2025 when far cheaper alternatives exist. It is an observation that nuclear works really well if it already exists and the fixed costs have been paid for, and that nuclear was the best choice a few decades ago.

  • DeepSeaTortoise

    today at 12:04 PM

    The only reason nuclear is more expensive than any alternative are absurd regulations, reporting duties, the practice of financing these projects on borrowed money with high interests and that many of the companies running these projects are career parking spots and accelerators for the social circles around politicians and the bureaucratic aristocracy.

    Complexity-wise they're about halfway between gas and coal.

• mrtksn

  today at 12:07 AM

  Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices.

  The future is solar simply because these electricity catchers from the sky fusion are mass producible goods that you can just keep pumping and pointing it to the sky in matter of days at dirt cheap prices.

  • newyankee

    today at 12:28 AM

    also because it is modular which really works for the Global south, it can be taken to demand centers and demand adjusted to the supply to a small extent (e.g. irrigation pumps)

  • xondono

    today at 12:10 AM

    > Good luck building nuclear in non-generational timescales and at reasonable prices.

    Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns..

    • cheema33

      today at 12:30 AM

      > Or we could treat nuclear rationally and stop increasing the price three orders of magnitude past diminishing returns

      Who is we here? Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?

      • Hammershaft

        today at 3:25 AM

        'We' could refer to democratic societies that regulate nuclear energy with absurdly stringent standards beyond how we regulate other forms of energy. Just the regulatory cost of approving a new small reactor design exceeds 500 Million Dollars! That's the lifetime earnings of thousands of engineers and bureaucrats.

      • diordiderot

        today at 6:11 AM

        > Do you have examples of any countries having successfully done what you are proposing?

        France pre 21st century, China, Korea, Poland.

        • oezi

          today at 8:46 AM

          Since when does Poland have a significant nuclear power generation program?

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Poland

        • matthewdgreen

          today at 7:25 AM

          Does anyone have actual numbers on what France’s nuclear fleet cost? I thought it was somewhat shrouded in mystery due to government and national security subsidies.

          • mr_toad

            today at 12:43 PM

            > national security subsidies.

            The bit they always say quietly is that you need nuclear reactors to provide the material for nuclear weapons.

        • ViewTrick1002

          today at 11:03 AM

          South Korea had a massive corruption scandal. I guess it takes cheating to deliver?

          https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

          China is barely building nuclear power. In terms of their grid mix it is backsliding.

          Poland haven’t built any so noconfirmed numbers yet?

      • streptomycin

        today at 1:53 AM

        China https://x.com/bataille_chris/status/1981476968202752109

        • adrianN

          today at 4:53 AM

          And still even China is adding as much solar as their total nuclear capacity on a yearly basis.

    • today at 12:28 AM

• ViewTrick1002

  today at 7:21 AM

  The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.

  3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.

  The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

  Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

  Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

  A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

• alecco

  yesterday at 11:31 PM

  Nothing to be proud of. Dangerous ancient reactors owned by an almost bankrupt company about to be nationalized.

  https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long...

  • KptMarchewa

    today at 12:54 AM

    >almost bankrupt company

    "Published on February 3, 2023"

    Since then, in 2023 and 2024 EDF posted over 10 billion a year profits.

    • alecco

      today at 10:29 AM

      In 2022 they lost 18bn because they had to repair widespread "stress corrosion cracking". And it was nationalized.

  • olejorgenb

    yesterday at 11:36 PM

    https://archive.ph/RQxKM

  • pas

    today at 12:12 AM

    if they can run them safely they should. is ASN not trustworthy?

    they are doing reviews every 10 year, and as they get older they can increase the frequency of reviews.

    also the article mentions no dangers with regards to the reactors.

I remember the bad old days of rolling black outs when Enron was doing energy arbitrage with Calfifornia's electricity. A more recent negative event was the battery fire at Moss Landing on the Monterrey Bay near where I live. If we use Sodium-ion batteries in the future we won't have that risk.

"On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire."

- The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries. - About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by the fire.

https://www.epa.gov/ca/moss-landing-vistra-battery-fire

• SoftTalker

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  Any time you have hundreds of megawatts of energy stored in a small area there is risk. This includes steam boilers, nuclear reactors, batteries, dams, etc. No getting away from that. Not saying that some battery chemistry might not be easier to manage than others.

  • jonlucc

    yesterday at 10:55 PM

    This is an inherent problem with storing power. There's a massive battery in Missouri known as the Taum Sauk hydroelectric dam. During the night, they pump water up the hill into the upper reservoir, and in the day, they let the water run downhill through turbines to generate electricity. In 2005, the wall of the upper reservoir failed.

  • jaggederest

    yesterday at 9:57 PM

    Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over in fixed position arrays which will mitigate the risk of fire pretty substantially, being low density and liquid. It's challenging though not impossible to light salt water on fire.

    • KaiserPro

      today at 10:26 AM

      > Well we're probably going to see flow batteries take over

      Its unlikley, they are a massive pain to manage compared to lithium, expensive and have poor round trip efficiency. Oh and terrible energy density.

      I'm not saying its impossible, but I'd be surprised.

      I think the biggest two factors that play against them is that they round trip efficiency is something like 70-80% compared to 90%+. but the real pain in the arse is the charge managment. From what I understand, you need to charge them to full, and then discharge them fully. I don't believe that you can charge from halfway.

      Most power markets work in 30miunute chunks, so managing charging/discharging would be really hard.

    • pfdietz

      yesterday at 10:29 PM

      I thought the prospects for flow batteries were becoming fairly dire due to the decline in cost of Li-ion cells.

      LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.

      • tooltalk

        today at 2:29 AM

        >> LFP promises better fire behavior than older Li-ion technologies, I think.

        LFP's thermal runaway threshold is higher than other lithium ion battery types, but once TR starts, LFP generates more hydrogen gas that can explode if not air-vented out fast enough.

      • jaggederest

        yesterday at 11:41 PM

        I suspect for extremely large batteries or seasonal shifting (summer->winter) flow batteries will still have a place, but I could be wrong.

        • skybrian

          today at 1:19 AM

          Thermal batteries make more sense for that, but they need to be super-cheap. One possibility:

          https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html

        • pfdietz

          yesterday at 11:51 PM

          Flow batteries aren't any good for seasonal shifting; the capex per kWh-capacity is much too high. Granted, ordinary batteries aren't good for that either.

    • amitav1

      yesterday at 10:29 PM

      "Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today"

• 3eb7988a1663

  yesterday at 9:44 PM

  The reports I read said this was an older installation - was that one setup in the same way as a modern plant would be done? That is to say - was there anything unique about this failure scenario?

  The pictures I saw was that the Moss batteries were located inside a building. My mental image of battery storage is freight-sized containers offset from each other - presumably to minimize fire risk. Or was this plant a common dense configuration that is done in areas where they are heavily space constrained?

  • delabay

    yesterday at 10:59 PM

    LG Energy Solution supplied the lithium-ion battery racks/modules (TR1300 using LG JH4 NMC cells) for Vistra’s initial 300 MW/1,200 MWh Moss Landing system; Fluence was the system integrator/GC.

  • ViewTrick1002

    yesterday at 9:57 PM

    The moss landing project has been expanded through several iterations. It started construction back in 2019 which is near ancient in terms of how fast the BESS industry has evolved.

    Utilizing NMC cells which were popular at the time instead of the more stable LFP variety making up the vast majority of storage projects today.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Landing_Power_Plant#Batte...

• hammock

  today at 2:23 AM

  People don’t talk enough about the risk of fire. The crazy thing is when a battery installation catches fire they don’t actually fight the fire. They just have to let it burn out. The resulting environmental damage is terrible.

  This happened recently in the Central Valley. I can’t remember the name of the battery site but it was a huge one, and literally right next door to one of the largest Driscolls strawberry farms, on which black lithium smoke settled all over , over the course of several days/weeks in the middle of the summer.

  Edit: maybe we are talking about the same fire? https://x.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1880277672393412848

Nice! About time they figured out large-scale storage. Hopefully this means no more “flex alerts” every other week.

Relatedly, CA utilities have begun offering hourly variable priced rate plans, which will allow consumers with batteries to theoretically achieve lower average rates if your batteries can rate-follow. It's still not available for net metering plans, though.

https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...

https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...

One of my biggest pet peeves is when outlets talk about energy storage exclusively in terms of output and neglect to mention capacity. Does 15.7 gigawatts of storage mean 15.7 GWh? Capacity is as important, if not more important, than output.

• pahkah

  today at 2:39 AM

  As someone who's interested in all this, I agree it would be nice to have more precision around capacity. Especially as it relates to longer term storage. But! In this context, output is more salient than capacity. You'll see a lot of stories about grid-scale storage that use output. (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/854999 offers a fuller explanation than what I'll give here.)

  This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.

  Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.

  Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)

  Hope this helps ease the peeve!

• amoshebb

  today at 9:06 AM

  The original sin was using watts not joules. Humans hear watts as “gallons” and “watt hours” as “gallons per hour” and all the rest of this confusion in every article about EVs/fast chargers/distribution/solar/everything all trace back to “X-Hours” and “X” incorrectly sounding like a rate and a count, not a count and a rate.

• chihuahua

  today at 2:08 AM

  Based on the following sentences from the article, it's probably 4 to 6 times more than 15.7 GWh (60 to 90 GWh, apparently):

  "Battery energy storage is not without challenges, however. Lithium-ion batteries — the most common type used for energy storage — typically have about four to six hours of capacity. It’s enough to support the grid during peak hours as the sun sets, but can still leave some gaps to be filled by natural gas."

• UltraSane

  today at 2:31 AM

  This also greatly annoyed me. 4 hours is the standard for grid storage batteries in California.

• XorNot

  today at 2:45 AM

  The ratio for LiFePO4 is between 1:3 and 1:4.

  So rated power will give you that for about 3 to 4 hours.

There's this post about sodium-ion batteries from two days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45677243

My understanding is that they are particularly good for large scale storage. It looks like it's relevant part of China's strategy.

Yet, there seems to be close to 0 in the US in general (except from some pilots). I find it weird at least to boast about battery energy storage as a strategy while ignoring the most relevant aspect wrt to the future of battery-based storage.

• dwood_dev

  yesterday at 11:07 PM

  While Sodium Ion may be the future of grid batteries, it's not the present. As long as LFP is cheaper, there is no reason to go with Sodium.

  This calculus will probably change in 3-5 years, but today Sodium is more expensive and therefore has little demand without some form of discount or subsidy.

  The switch will be rapid once the economics make sense, but they don't yet.

  • nharada

    today at 12:29 AM

    CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh. If that ends up even partway true it'll completely change the economics of power storage.

    • grayrest

      today at 3:38 AM

      > CATL is claiming mass production of their sodium-ion batteries starts in December, with a target price of $10/kWh.

      This got widely reported but there doesn't seem to be any source. I'll reference this video [1] to cover the claim along with a comparison to industry projections. Apologies for the video link but I don't have an article handy that addresses the topic as directly.

      [1] https://youtu.be/KjiqqafD_0w?t=861

    • bmicraft

      today at 2:01 AM

      That's plain wrong, they have not announced that price target anywhere. There is speculation that it could be there target internally for the long term, but there is basically zero chance they'll start at that price and no guarantees they'll ever reach it.

    • nextworddev

      today at 12:45 AM

      CATL is just dumping

      • bryanlarsen

        today at 1:11 AM

        CATL had a profit of $2.6B last quarter on sales of $15B. That indicates they're pricing well above cost rather than below it.

        • nextworddev

          today at 12:55 PM

          Western folks still don’t get how China works more than two decades after WTO lol

        • tooltalk

          today at 5:01 AM

          dumping doesn't depend on profit or loss. Also the legal definition of dumping is less-than-the-"normal value." (see Article VI ANTI-DUMPING AND COUNTERVAILING DUTIES of GATT 1994).

          But then China is a non-market-economy, so none of these rules apply in a hypothetical anti-dumping case -- ie, China's local price, or "normal value" doesn't matter.

      • nharada

        today at 12:49 AM

        What makes you say that? I don’t know this space very well

        • nextworddev

          today at 12:49 AM

          Dumping batteries is yet another strategy to take control of global energy infrastructure and destabilize petrodollar

          • nharada

            today at 12:58 AM

            Oh yeah I get what you’re saying but is that a thing? Like CATL has had lines before that aren’t making a profit?

• jillesvangurp

  today at 8:34 AM

  Sodium ion production is only recently starting to ramp up. It will take a few years for that to put a dent into LFP marketshare (both for grid storage and EVs). China is a bit ahead of course. CATL just announced they are starting mass production of their second generation battery in December. It will take a while for that factory to get to full speed production. And if they are building more factories, that will also take a while. Think 10s of ghw production short term.

  The US only recently got volume production of LFP working. A lot of the battery production there is still older chemistries based on NMC. Companies like Peak Energy are indeed experimenting with sodium ion and are looking pretty good right now. But they don't have any mass production facilities yet. That's years away at best.

  I expect there may be some licensing deals with Chinese manufacturers down the line to address this. Sodium ion might become a lot more dominant from 2030 onward. Until then, LFP should remain dominant.

  And with LFP being quite decent already, there's no need to wait until the 2030s with large scale grid storage deployments. This stuff works right now. That's why adoption is so high and rapid around the world.

• JumpCrisscross

  yesterday at 11:06 PM

  > It looks like it's relevant part of China's strategy

  For grid storage? Source?

  • random3

    today at 3:30 AM

    https://www.energy-storage.news/world-first-grid-scale-sodiu...

    Also in US https://www.peakenergy.com/news

I don't really care if the power stays on for five-nines as long as I'm still paying 61¢/kW-h for it :/

https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

• bradlys

  yesterday at 10:43 PM

  Criminally overpriced. We're not getting shit for it either.

  God forbid you live in any of the more woody parts of California either. You'll have to have your own battery or generator anyway. As someone who plans to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains long term, I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.

  • sgustard

    today at 12:36 AM

    Well the faster you get off the grid, the cheaper it'll be for the rest of us. All PGE's problems are caused by running powerlines for you through fire-prone kindling wilderness.

    • Lammy

      today at 12:39 AM

      We could have had atomic energy generated right here in the Bay Area (Sonoma). You can actually go visit the “hole in Bodega Head” where PG&E started digging the reactor pit before being made to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant

    • bradlys

      today at 12:59 AM

      PG&E's problems are caused by malcompliance and the rules being written by a public traded company instead of by an accountable government. There are plenty of people living in the woods in other states that aren't causing massive wildfires that cover the US in smoke every season.

  • potato3732842

    yesterday at 11:35 PM

    >I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.

    Depending on where you live you, your neighbors and/or your predecessors likely a) voted for people who wrote laws to make that illegal b) sneered at anyone who wouldn't want to be on the grid.

    • bradlys

      today at 12:08 AM

      It’s a capitalist run power grid in CA. It’s a publicly traded company. Nothing more capitalist than making my own power when the competition sucks ass.

      • potato3732842

        today at 12:39 AM

        If you think power infrastructure and supplying the electrons that jiggle on it are any sort of example of free market capitalism I have a bridge to sell you.

        • bradlys

          today at 12:57 AM

          It's a publicly traded company. Feel free to do your research.

          • hunterpayne

            today at 2:54 AM

            PG&E is a public utility. Everything they do down to department budgets are decided by state regulators. I imagine almost everyone on this board already knew that PG&E was a publicly traded company. But just because they are a publicly traded company, that doesn't mean that they get to do anything they want. It just means their stock can be bought and sold by others, in the case of PG&E its mostly owned by public sector union pension funds. So it is a quasi-public utility owned by government workers in a highly regulated market. The idea its some sort of paragon of capitalism is absurd. Just about anything they do can be traced back to a decision made by an appointed state government body.

  • dmix

    yesterday at 11:02 PM

    Why is PG&E so poorly run? I don't live there, just follow the news and their name comes up constantly in negative press.

    • RedShift1

      today at 12:11 AM

      Greed and no competition.

    • bradlys

      today at 12:04 AM

      It’s a public company, not run directly by the government. It has a monopoly dictated by the CA government.

      They have no interest in doing good service but instead in making money. They don’t have to really answer to anyone. Supposedly the CA government could implement things to improve the lives of Californians that would influence how PG&E operates but CA politicians are bought off by this corporation. So, there we have it

      • hunterpayne

        today at 2:59 AM

        PG&E is a utility. The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators. And the idea that PG&E buys CA politicians is laughable. The state worker's unions pension funds control CA state politics. They are the ones that donate the most money, PG&E doesn't even get a seat at the metaphorical table.

        PS The largest and 3rd largest holders of US equity are those CA public sector union pension funds. They have far deeper pockets than PG&E by at least 10x.

    • know-how

      yesterday at 11:19 PM

      [dead]

• blindriver

  yesterday at 10:32 PM

  This. Electricity costs are almost 5x the cost in Nevada.

• JumpCrisscross

  yesterday at 11:10 PM

  PG&E's corruption is laid bare by Silicon Valley Power, which serves the town of Santa Clara, charging less than half what PG&E does for the house a few blocks over [1].

  [1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

  • jeffbee

    yesterday at 11:23 PM

    I will only put this down once because I repeat it in many threads and I'm sure people are tired of hearing it, but the reason that isolated municipal utilities are offering great prices locally is that they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought.

    • JumpCrisscross

      today at 12:47 AM

      > they are free-riding on things that PG&E ratepayers bought

      Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?

      • jeffbee

        today at 1:16 AM

        How do you think SVP buys energy from its contracted generators? They don't own transmission from those places (unlike SMUD which, to an incomplete extent, actually does own its generating assets and transmission lines). SVP pays regulated wholesale distribution rates to PG&E to get access to their contracted generators. But the process determining such rates ignores the way that wildfire liability is assigned to PG&E, which is a significant part of current PG&E retail rates. It also ignores mandates such as rural electrification. PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out, while SVP and other MUDs contribute nothing to rural electrification mandates.

        • JumpCrisscross

          today at 3:10 AM

          > PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out

          Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?

When they say their battery storage capacity is 15,000 MW, do they mean MWh? Because watts are time-independent, or rather, they're like speed to Joule's (watt-hour's) distance.

• sgustard

  today at 12:42 AM

  CAISO's own documents quote battery capacity in MW. So I don't think you can just blame journalists.

  "Battery storage capacity grew from about 500 MW in 2020 to 13,000 MW in December 2024"

  https://www.caiso.com/documents/2024-special-report-on-batte...

  As another commenter notes, utilities are interested in "capacity on call" i.e. instant power generation.

• teruakohatu

  yesterday at 11:49 PM

  I struggle to understand why journalists consistently failed to use Wh as a unit of power. People generally can understand it because it is how they are billed and how appliances are rated.

  Even on HN people will defend not using Wh because there is some grid or city in the USA that bills differently.

  • matthewdgreen

    today at 7:37 AM

    Battery storage is always measured in the amount of power that can be delivered (Watts). Secondarily it’s measured in the number of hours that power can be delivered (hours, which is almost always about 4.) To get MWh you multiply watts times hours. This is standard in the industry and has nothing to do with reporters.

  • bolangi

    today at 12:15 AM

    Because American literacy in math and hard sciences has only declined over the decades since the post-Sputnik spurt that benefited my generation. Journalism as practiced today doesn't require scientific literacy or rigor, or at least, they are secondary to the purposes of the writers' employers.

  • ericd

    yesterday at 11:51 PM

    Later, they say “lithium ion batteries only have 4 to 6 hours of capacity”, which again, what? But maybe that implies that the actual capacity rating is their “capacity” x 4-6.

  • ajross

    yesterday at 11:56 PM

    Uh... "Wh" is not a unit of power. Watts are units of power. Watt-hours measure energy. Probably journalists are getting this wrong for the same reason you are.

    • bolangi

      today at 12:22 AM

      The commenter was right that the correct unit is Wh, then slipped up. Does gasoline contain power? Do "high-power" Li-ion batteries? In common parlance, power and energy are used interchangeably. I believe people writing about science should hold themselves to a higher standard, but there is always something more important.

    • 0cf8612b2e1e

      today at 12:18 AM

      I do not know why this particular one gets engineers so annoyed. Energy and power are synonymous in conversation with normal people. There is very little real world scenarios where people would be exposed to the precise meanings -of course everyone gets it wrong.

      • ajross

        today at 12:22 AM

        But the premise of the comment I was replying to was exasperation that journalists got it wrong!

        • 0cf8612b2e1e

          today at 1:11 AM

          No, you were right on the money. Just idly thinking out loud why this is even an issue. Muggles get technical details wrong all the time. Yet any article about energy is going to get a few people riled up when the units are wrong.

• Gibbon1

  today at 12:14 AM

  Utilities are used using MW when discussing supply and demand. Because balancing that is critical. So power is what they care about when discussing grid connections.

  The billing side and customers are concerned with total energy. So kwh.

  Journalists typically don't know the difference. Which is why they list storage capacity in watts. They don't know any better and they don't care.

  Far as I can tell multiply the watts by 4 hours to get watt hours.

Funny to read this today. I live in San Francisco, and we had a blackout today.

The Financial Times has a much better article: https://ig.ft.com/mega-batteries/

I'm hungry for good news about technical solutions working - especially right now when Trump just killed the US's largest solar project (6.2 GW in Nevada), ended USDA solar support for farms, and posted "We will not approve...Solar". So I wanted to check if California's battery story holds up.

The data is actually encouraging. Peak demand hit 48,323 MW in 2024 - higher than the 2020 blackout year's 47,121 MW [1]. Weather was severe: 2023 broke 358 California temperature records, 2024 saw valleys top 110°F during multiple heat waves [2][3]. Battery discharge reached 5-7 GW during Sept 2024 peaks, offsetting ~16% of demand [4]. That's real.

Fair caveat: 2020 had compounding failures (imports fell 3,000 MW short, gas plants failed, planning issues [5]), and recent years benefited from better coordination and wet winters. But batteries were clearly the biggest new factor - going from 500 MW in 2020 to 15,700 MW today is massive buildout, and it performed when tested.

Nice to see an existence proof that we can make progress on adapting to climate change's second-order effects, maybe even progress on root causes - through technology, at scale, in the United States of 2025.

[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...

[2] https://news.caloes.ca.gov/extreme-heat-breaking-records-at-...

[3] https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/california-...

[4] https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/

[5] https://calmatters.org/environment/2020/08/california-2020-r...

I haven't had a rolling blackout in our particular grid in several years. The battery energy storage has been a great benefit. Our home battery energy storage system has been fantastic as well for localized unplanned outages.

What does it mean saying California hasn’t done a Flex Alert since 2022? PG&E issued 3-4 in September/October this year. Is that different?

• klempner

  today at 6:28 AM

  Are you sure you're not thinking of "SmartDay" days that are part of the SmartRate program?

  Flex Alerts are CAISO and ultimately about grid stability. SmartRate/SmartDay are ultimately about marginal cost of production on PG&E. The two are certainly correlated -- at the very least, a Flex Alert day is almost guaranteed to be a SmartDay.

  Notably, the SmartRate program is capped at 15 days per year, and in practice PG&E will keep a few in reserve for surprise late season events, but even if there are no Flex Alert days they're still going to be called on electricity-is-expensive-even-if-the-grid-is-stable days.

> California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.

• zanon234

  yesterday at 9:23 PM

  I think Texas will stay ahead for the foreseeable future. California keeps shooting itself in the foot with regulatory hurdles and permit issues.

  • 3eb7988a1663

    yesterday at 9:47 PM

    Texas also has higher energy demands (residential AC + industry + bitcoin friendly). Seems intuitive that they would have more to gain from larger battery infrastructure.

    • potato3732842

      yesterday at 11:41 PM

      CA also shoots itself in the foot by having all its wealth and population in mild areas so those places run the show and nobody takes it seriously until it's a hot-summer, everyone cranks the AC, the grid keels over and then "how could this have happened". It's literally the stick in spokes meme. Sure there's some guy in the desert who's been screaming about how this stuff matters, but nobody listens to him because they were calling him a dumb yokel the other 364 days of the year.

      • jacobolus

        today at 3:57 AM

        Can you be a bit more explicit? Do you have a specific person in mind as a model of this "guy in the desert" that people keep calling a "dumb yokel" but who actually a power-grid savant or whatever? Aside: alongside your hero, there are some extremely kooky people living out in the CA desert.

  • redundantly

    yesterday at 9:33 PM

    And Texans will keep losing power during winter storms due to lack of regulations.

    • landl0rd

      yesterday at 10:51 PM

      This is ignorant culture war politics and/or anti-Texasism.

      I should point out that cold temperatures place a huge demand on the grid because consumers don't want to winterize for the marginal once-a-decade blizzard any more than utilities; around half our homes have relatively inefficient resistance heaters as opposed to furnaces.

      We have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg

      So no wonder our reserve margins run thinner when we're already having to build at such speed just to keep pace with regular demand.

      Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.

      ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

      • cbsmith

        yesterday at 11:03 PM

        > ERCOT actually does a pretty okay job, all things considered; it's hard to invest heavily in winterization for rare events when you're having to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load.

        I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. It's particularly easy when you have to invest heavily in new generation to keep up with steadily increasing baseline load. Retrofitting winterization is more expensive. If you build in support for winterization when you build the capacity in the first place (which is what happens with sane regulatory oversight), it's all quite inexpensive. It'd be one thing if the cold was a once a century surprise, but when you know you're going to have cold events multiple times over the lifetime of your equipment, it's really easy to do this right.

      • jacobolus

        yesterday at 11:30 PM

        Considering how much the Texas state government has been illegally trampling its own residents’ rights recently, mostly for the sake of private corruption, and backed by incredibly bad faith anti-social rhetoric, perhaps reflexive anti-Texas-elected-officials-ism is a reasonable baseline position.

      • jeffbee

        yesterday at 11:06 PM

        I don't think their comment was either ignorant or anti-Texan. Essentially all of the conclusions in the FERC report on the February 2021 events were those of regulatory failure. Generating assets did not have winterization plans that state inspectors actually enforced, most of the failed assets failed at temperatures above their design minima, natural gas delivery system were totally deregulated at the state level, ERCOT winter forecast practices were poor, etc.

    • energy123

      yesterday at 11:00 PM

      The large majority of normal people would take the half price electricity than the highly regulated, never-ever-have-an-outage electricity that's way more expensive.

    • oldpersonintx2

      yesterday at 9:56 PM

      [dead]

    • sugarpimpdorsey

      yesterday at 11:09 PM

      [flagged]

  • Braxton1980

    today at 12:22 AM

    What's some examples of this that Texas doesn't have?

> cannot be extinguished with water

Why? I thought lithium ion batteries actually contained negligible amounts of lithium? Or is this for some other reason?

Does it make the electricity price go down or up? It seems to me that the electricity price never goes down.

CA has strange pockets of pretty well setup infra. Like Carlsbad has a desalination plant, and a modern standby ng power plant

• kylehotchkiss

  yesterday at 11:34 PM

  I wish we’d put some desal plants in the north of the state and start feeding into the CA aqueduct and unlocking more Central Valley farmland

  • andbberger

    today at 1:24 AM

    farming with desal water is insane. even with abundant power.

    • qaq

      today at 7:21 AM

      why ? at scale desal water via solar looks to be very reasonable thing ?

      • ZeroGravitas

        today at 9:47 AM

        Current legal setups generally actively encourage people to waste water that they have property rights to. It would be infinitely better return on investment to reform that and put proper incentives in place, rather than work around it with technology.

Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units (LFP chemistry) manufactured at Tesla’s Lathrop, CA “Megafactory.”

• JumpCrisscross

  yesterday at 11:08 PM

  > Interesting how they never mention that these are Tesla Megapack 2 XL units

  It's a story about California's battery storage. Tesla hasn't built all of that capacity.

  For a Tesla (or other battery producer) press release? Sure. For an article about the general phenomenon? Irrelevant to the point that if it were included I'd be suspicious of the article being a plant.

  • delabay

    today at 12:02 AM

    By my estimate (GPT5) Tesla has up to 17% of all front and behind the meter battery storage in CA, and is also the vendor growing the fastest in CA. The California battery storage story is also a Tesla story, but based on the positive tone of the article, it clearly made more sense to leave Tesla out of it.

    • JumpCrisscross

      today at 12:30 AM

      > By my estimate (GPT5)

      Please don't do this.

      • delabay

        today at 12:32 AM

        What's your source?

        • jrflowers

          today at 12:38 AM

          Are you asking Criscross if they have a source for your statement?

    • jrflowers

      today at 12:36 AM

      > By my estimate (GPT5)

      You know treating a thing that makes stuff up as a source of truth is the same thing as making stuff up right? You might as well have written By my estimate (as revealed to me in a dream)

      • Paradigma11

        today at 12:45 PM

        But is he wrong?

  • thegreatpeter

    today at 12:08 AM

    If you google any article about eland it literally says they use tesla batteries that were built here in the US

    i think tesla has built MOST of the capacity

• yesterday at 11:19 PM

• nandomrumber

  yesterday at 11:17 PM

  Interesting how the only dollar figure mentioned in the article is about money the Trump administration has put up to refurbish coal plants.

• hagbard_c

  yesterday at 11:08 PM

  That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid.

  • Braxton1980

    today at 12:23 AM

    How do you know that's the reason?

    • JumpCrisscross

      today at 12:32 AM

      > How do you know that's the reason?

      Just noticed that their profile basically taunts that they're a troll [1].

      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hagbard_c

  • JumpCrisscross

    yesterday at 11:17 PM

    > That information does not fit the narrative so it is left unsaid

    This is a good opportunity to calibrate your sense of truth.

    The LA Times is owned by this South African-born immigrant [1]. (Himself the the son of "Chinese immigrant parents who fled China during the Japanese occupation.") He is, like Elon, pro-Trump (after, like Musk, supporting Democrats when they were in power) [2]. And he, like Elon, has censored his publication to reflect his views, including by opposing anti-Musk content [3].

    If you're reading an article in the LA Times and, being upset it isn't mentioning Tesla, concluding it's part of an anti-Musk conspiracy, you're dead wrong. But you're probably also wrong about other adjacent hypotheses.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Soon-Shiong

    [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/13/la-times-owner-mane...

    [3] https://www.status.news/p/los-angeles-times-patrick-soon-shi...

    • roman_soldier

      today at 10:08 AM

      The LA Times famously a left leaning publication and its stories are written and edited by the employees who are likely to be anti Musk, Trump hating woke types. The owner is a business man and will let the editors write for the audience's biases.

    • nandomrumber

      yesterday at 11:34 PM

      It does mention another battery manufacturer, Spark. Where do they fit in to the narrative?

      • JumpCrisscross

        today at 12:32 AM

        > Where do they fit in to the narrative?

        What narrative? If you're saying even a pro-Trump pro-Elon newspaper whose owner has a history of weighing in for Musk has a bias against him, you're saying Elon's massively lost not only standing but also sympathy across the aisle.

        If that's true, his companies are toast. That doesn't seem to be the case. So maybe revisit the hypothesis when the data reject it.

We're still going to have rolling blackouts because PGE turns the power off.

• ezfe

  today at 12:42 AM

  Okay but literally there haven't been in years

> ...leaving rolling blackouts behind

This is a pretty good candidate for "famous last words"

This is the way. It's become standard practice in China, which now leads to the world with half of all battery installations.

• Herring

  yesterday at 10:34 PM

  They installed so much wind and solar their CO2 emissions actually peaked in ~2024 (way ahead of the official 2030 target) and have been declining ever since.

• WillPostForFood

  yesterday at 9:11 PM

  China is a mixed bad, they also lead the world in new coal power plants.

  https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

  • tooltalk

    yesterday at 11:37 PM

    China is adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity by the end of next year, or 180GW. These new installations don't replace old coal plants -- in H1 2025, China decomissioned only about 1GW.

    China is also increasing their coal footprint outside China despite their pledge not to[1].

    1. China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing, Nicholas Kusnetz, data analysis by Peter Aldhous, Inside Climate News, Oct 19, 2025

    • nextworddev

      today at 5:25 AM

      Not sure why you are downvoted. Theres bot rings everywhere on the internet that downvote anything that mentions Chinese emissions

  • rhubarbtree

    yesterday at 10:28 PM

    And smashing everything in Nuclear, whilst America turns to fossil fuels.

    Much as I am against autocracy and oppression, china is doing very well at improving their energy sector.

    • today at 2:14 AM

    • BurningFrog

      yesterday at 11:20 PM

      The US system of decades of environmental review before any energy project can maybe proceed can also be considered a form of oppression.

    • landl0rd

      yesterday at 11:05 PM

      Much as I have problems with current administration, Chris Wright is doing an outstanding job working with industry to push forward next-gen nuclear. I have a lot of well-founded hope for huge progress assuming the next Secretary of Energy continues with this and the NRC backs off just a little.

    • yesterday at 11:26 PM

  • _aavaa_

    yesterday at 9:23 PM

    Just because they built it doesn't mean it gets used: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...

  • fellowniusmonk

    yesterday at 9:22 PM

    Less mixed than the states, more manufacturing and install momentum for renewables and far lower kwh install costs.

    So many people told me 10 years ago we shouldn't even bother trying to reduce global emissions because China would burn us all to the ground. So many brain dead takes.

    • Mistletoe

      yesterday at 9:33 PM

      Now I just think about where those takes started and all roads always lead back to the same culprits. Your parents and the hillbillies don’t come up with these takes on their own, they always starts somewhere and benefit the person whispering it in their ear.

      https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-piv...

      > The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer.

      > This has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which is collectively shitting itself. After a couple of centuries of prospecting we know pretty much where all the oil, coal, and gas reserves are buried in the ground. (Another hint about Ukraine: Ukraine is sitting on top of over 670 billion cubic metres of natural gas: to the dictator of a neighbouring resource-extraction economy this must have been quite a draw.) The constant propaganda and astroturfed campaigns advocating against belief in climate change must be viewed in this light: by 2040 at the latest, those coal, gas, and oil land rights must be regarded as stranded assets that can't be monetized, and the land rights probably have a book value measured in trillions of dollars.

  • standardUser

    yesterday at 10:05 PM

    The expectation being that they should instead endure energy shortages for the common good until their renewable installations catch up with demand? A high bar, especially for a nation with a greater share of its electricity from renewables than most US states.

  • tootie

    yesterday at 9:45 PM

    That's 2023. As of today they are expected to hit peak fossil fuel usage and start declining within the year.

    https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/09/china-on-course...

• FridayoLeary

  yesterday at 10:55 PM

  Much as i dislike China i feel they are pragmatic. I don't know if it's justified but i always give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't do stupid things for no good reason. Unlike Western nations who have to please voters and look good, China has no such constraints and are far more transactional. They don't care about climate emissions. At all. If they think something will be good for them and their economy, they will do it. Another thing is that they take big risks, again they are beholden to nobody so they can. I think the way forward is to be realistic and honest. If renewables are cheaper we should go for them, why not? It's free. If not, not. Frankly having rolling blackouts in california is not a great argument for having more renewables, unless i'm missing something. It might be something for politicians to boast about next time they jet acrosss the world to attend self serving climate summits, but it doesn't help ordinary people. More fossil power plants would be more reliable then renewables. OT but Trump has a special dislike for green energy and i don't understand why, but it's obvious that if it can't compete, or come at least close to fossil fuels and nuclear then that should be fully acknowledged.

  If i'm wrong about China and competely misreading the situation in california please let me know.

  • slashdave

    today at 12:42 AM

    What does rolling blackouts in California have to do with renewables? Opposite, really.

    • FridayoLeary

      today at 12:50 AM

      Renewables are intermittent and therefore unreliable. Also unless california has gone for lots of redundancy the would also be displacing fossil fuel power plants. Again i'm not trashing renewables, because what's wrong with free energy. What i am doing automatically is wondering why batteries are a better option then traditional power stations.

      California does have much more expensive electricity then anywhere else, so it is reasonable for me to scrutinise their energy plans more closely and question whether their current strategy is really the best one.

      • slashdave

        today at 5:29 AM

        You are being contradictory.

        Solar is not intermittent (the sun shines every day). Making your grid reliable is expensive, thus drives costs.

        • sciencejerk

          today at 6:56 AM

          The sun does not shine 24 hours a day. Therefore, if you want to run a power grid 24 hours a day, you need expensive batteries to hold energy collected during peak production. Fossil fuels can be burned continuously, lessening the need for energy storage

  • Axsuul

    today at 12:28 AM

    A lot depends on long term planning but the planning better be right. In my opinion, the markets are much better than planning.

No, more coal and gas is the only way. /S

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• dylan604

  yesterday at 10:30 PM

  <snip>random whacko comments</snip>

  >Come back in 5 years time when the batteries are 10 years old and failing like the bridges and schools and universities.

  This however is a valid point to make. In my experience with battery systems, regular maintenance and replacing failed units is one of the things that people are quick to not do on preventative schedule. Instead, they wait until the unit is completely dead and then gasp at the cost of battery replacement. Based on how companies like PG&E do not do regular maintenance on their lines, it doesn't bode well for the batteries.

  • blackoil

    today at 8:51 AM

    Unless all batteries are installed at once and will fail after a fixed duration it won't be a big issue. After 10-20 year 2-5% batteries will fail and will have to be replaced, along with any new capacity addition. We can emphasise on diversifying the supply chain or having multiple technologies so that a Covid like scenario doesn't completely conks the system, but it isn't much different from any other system we use. And in case of battery, we actually get a real-time info about its health and so can easily calculate capacity of the system. Batteries go from 90% to 0% in extremely rare case.

  • stavros

    yesterday at 10:42 PM

    To be fair, they were all valid points to make. The gonorrhea thing just kind of set the tone wrong.

[flagged]

[flagged]

and there was a huge fire at the moss landing plant which left heavy metals and god knows what else raining down onto sensitive marine mammal habitat. kayak up elkhorn slough and you'll encounter dozens of otters, seals... less than a kilometer from the battery plant.

I don't think we're going to be appreciating the environmental consequences of that accident for years. heavy metals don't decay, they'll be there forever.

a pox on david brouwer and his faux environmentalism, and the politics and economic machinations that ever proposed solar and batteries as an alternate to baseload fission plants. (in fact brouwer did his damage long before solar was ever practical, so he has even less ground to stand on)

"leaving rolling blackouts behind..." I'll take this bet CA blackouts aren't over.

• Gigachad

  yesterday at 11:33 PM

  Adelaide, Australia used to have constant rolling blackouts, including a state wide blackout once. After that, Tesla (pre insanity era) built a grid battery storage system which essentially fixed the problem. I'm sure there were other improvements to the grid at the same time. But these days the grid is incredibly stable while also being majority solar and wind powered. The battery is able to buy and sell power daily and profit on the difference between high and low demand times. And if there's an equipment fault somewhere, it can respond fast enough to cover the time between a generator going offline, and the backup ones starting up.

  • steve_taylor

    today at 1:20 AM

    By the time that blackout occurred, the grid was already quite stable and rolling blackouts were a thing of the past. The state-wide blackout was the result of a severe storm, which included lightning, gale-force winds and three tornadoes, taking out critical transmission lines, combined with inadequate protection circuits not set up to account for lightning strikes. When the state failed over to the Victoria interconnect, the interconnect shut down because the load was too high. So although the grid was stable, it had some failure points that were exposed during this severe and unusual storm.

    The battery array was just one measure taken to increase grid resilience in such a scenario. The general idea was to have an instantly dispatchable electricity supply ready to go at any time while bringing gas-powered electricity online. A nice side effect of the battery is that it flattens out wholesale price spikes and makes a bit of money for itself in the process.

• slashdave

  today at 12:37 AM

  You'll lose. Combined with solar, batteries are perfect. They cover the time of day when solar wanes, but air conditioning is still needed.

• theultdev

  today at 1:23 AM

  Yeah I mean, aren't most of the blackouts controlled?

  Not the lack of supply but shutdown on purpose due to the risk of power lines causing fires?

  Seems burying them would be a more effective use of money if you're trying to solve blackouts.

> they burn extremely hot and cannot be extinguished with water, which can trigger a violent chemical reaction. The blaze emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese

> In the first six months of this year, CAISO’s grid was powered by 100% clean energy for an average of almost seven hours each day.

emitted dangerous levels of nickel, cobalt and manganese

100% clean energy

• harimau777

  today at 12:26 AM

  While virtually no technology is clean if you count "what happens if it catches on fire"; I think it's still likely that this is much better than the status quo.

• Braxton1980

  today at 12:20 AM

  >100% clean energy

  Who said that?