Wet & dry swings intensifying

Source

From Phys.org

Los Angeles is burning, and accelerating hydroclimate whiplash is the key climate connection. After years of severe drought, dozens of atmospheric rivers deluged California with record-breaking precipitation in the winter of 2022–23, burying mountain towns in snow, flooding valleys with rain and snow melt, and setting off hundreds of landslides.

Following a second extremely wet winter in southern parts of the state, resulting in abundant grass and brush, 2024 brought a record-hot summer and now a record-dry start to the 2025 rainy season, along with tinder-dry vegetation that has since burned in a series of damaging wildfires.

This is just the most recent example of the kind of "hydroclimate whiplash"—rapid swings between intensely wet and dangerously dry weather—that is increasing worldwide, according to a paper published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

"The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases," said lead author Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.

"This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed."

Global weather records show hydroclimate whiplash has swelled globally by 31% to 66% since the mid-20th century, the international team of climate researchers found—even more than climate models suggest should have happened.

Climate change means the rate of increase is speeding up. The same potentially conservative climate models project that the whiplash will more than double if global temperatures rise 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The world is already poised to blast past the Paris Agreement's targeted limit of 1.5 C.

The researchers synthesized hundreds of previous scientific papers for the review, layering their own analysis on top.

Anthropogenic climate change is the culprit behind the accelerating whiplash, and a key driver is the "expanding atmospheric sponge"—the growing ability of the atmosphere to evaporate, absorb and release 7% more water for every degree Celsius the planet warms, researchers said.

"The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest in a bank," Swain said. "The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming."

The global consequences of hydroclimate whiplash include not only floods and droughts, but the heightened danger of whipsawing between the two, including the bloom-and-burn cycle of overwatered then overdried brush, and landslides on oversaturated hillsides where recent fires removed plants with roots to knit the soil and slurp up rainfall. Every fraction of a degree of warming speeds the growing destructive power of the transitions, Swain said.

Many previous studies of climate whiplash have only considered the precipitation side of the equation, and not the growing evaporative demand. The thirstier atmosphere pulls more water out of plants and soil, exacerbating drought conditions beyond simple lack of rainfall.

"The expanding atmospheric sponge effect may offer a unifying explanation for some of the most visible, visceral impacts of climate change that recently seem to have accelerated," Swain said.

"The planet is warming at an essentially linear pace, [but see  Rise in world's temperatures accelerates] but in the last five or 10 years there has been much discussion around accelerating climate impacts. This increase in hydroclimate whiplash, via the exponentially expanding atmospheric sponge, offers a potentially compelling explanation."

That acceleration, and the anticipated increase in boom-and-bust water cycles, has important implications for water management.

"We can't look at just extreme rainfall or extreme droughts alone, because we have to safely manage these increasingly enormous influxes of water, while also preparing for progressively drier interludes," Swain said.

"That's why 'co-management' is an important paradigm. It leads you to more holistic conclusions about which interventions and solutions are most appropriate, compared to considering drought and flood risk in isolation."

In many regions, traditional management designs include shunting flood waters to flow quickly into the ocean, or slower solutions like allowing rain to percolate into the water table. However, taken alone, each option leaves cities vulnerable to the other side of climate whiplash, the researchers noted.

"Hydroclimate in California is reliably unreliable," said co-author John Abatzoglou, a UC Merced climate scientist.

"However, swings like we saw a couple years ago, going from one of the driest three-year periods in a century to the once-in-a-lifetime spring 2023 snowpack, both tested our water-infrastructure systems and furthered conversations about floodwater management to ensure future water security in an increasingly variable hydroclimate."

Hydroclimate whiplash is projected to increase most across northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, northern Eurasia, the tropical Pacific and the tropical Atlantic, but most other regions will also feel the shift.

"Increasing hydroclimate whiplash may turn out to be one of the more universal global changes on a warming Earth," Swain said.

In California this week, although winds are fanning the extreme fires, it's the whiplash-driven lack of rain that suspended Southern California in fire season.

"There's not really much evidence that climate change has increased or decreased the magnitude or likelihood of the wind events themselves in Southern California," Swain said. "But climate change is increasing the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions later in the season and the occurrence of these wind events. This, ultimately, is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires."

Under a high warming scenario, California will see an increase in both the wettest and driest years and seasons by later this century.

"The less warming there is, the less of an increase in hydroclimate whiplash we're going to see," Swain said.

"So anything that would reduce the amount of warming from climate change will directly slow or reduce the increase in whiplash. Yet we are currently still on a path to experience between 2 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius of global warming this century—so substantial further increases in whiplash are likely in our future, and we really need to be accounting for this in risk assessments and adaptation activities."


[More information: Swain, D.L., Prein, A.F., Abatzoglou, J.T. et al. Hydroclimate volatility on a warming Earth. Nat Rev Earth Environ 6, 35–50 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00624-z , www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00624-z

Journal information: Nature Reviews Earth & Environment

Provided by University of California, Lo]

Will this change the Right's narrative about climate change?  Elon Musk, bless his cotton socks, is already saying it wasn't climate change.

Renewables, batteries help California grid breeze through heatwave

 From This is Not Cool.

No rolling blackouts or grid emergencies as California continues on path to a carbon free grid. Several strategies, including upgrades to vulnerable parts of the grid at play here, but key enabler is more clean energy, especially solar, and above all, battery storage, now equivalent to 5 very large nuclear power plants.

In fact, California seems to have reached a level of storage that is creating some kind of a phase-change in the grid, yielding benefits that are surprising even expert observers. More and more days where renewables supply greater-than 100 percent of California’s power – enabling exports even under these challenging conditions.

 

California reaches 100% renewables

I think I might have mentioned that, in Australia, the State of South Australia is showing the world how to move towards a 100% renewables grid, with wind and solar in the State frequently exceeding 100% of demand.  California, which is a 20 times larger economy, is also showing the same thing. 

Both economies are located in the mid-latitude sunbelt.  High latitude economies without hydro might struggle to reach these figures.

From a toot by Renewable Energy.  (Read the comments and replies, which are interesting)

Truly amazing record run of renewable energy carrying 100% of California’s grid for portions of the day:

43 straight days — and 67 out of 73 days — where clean energy exceeded 100% of demand.

5th largest economy on the world, 39 million people and over a million EVs on the road here.

Right now renewables are producing 103% of demand and it’s 3:30pm here. It’s just amazing and should bring immense hope around the world!

Note: "hybrids" means generators with two or more power sources,
such as, for example, combined wind and solar on the same site.
Also, exports to neighbouring States are not shown in the chart.

How California kept the lights on

From ClimateCrocks

The recent heatwave showed grid scale battery storage has arrived in California in a big way. In 2020, the state had a mere 250 megawatts of batteries installed on its grid, out of a total statewide peak load of 52 gigawatts (GW). During last week’s heat wave, California had more than 3.2 GW of batteries supporting the grid, more capacity than the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. These batteries typically provide four hours of energy, so that’s 150 times more energy from just two years ago. Batteries played a critical role in keeping the grid running, and without them we would have experienced rolling blackouts.

California’s grid has the most installed battery capacity installed of any grid worldwide, and the United States led global investment in grid scale battery storage with nearly half of all investment last year. By investing in energy storage, the state has increased its resilience to extreme weather.

But this is just the start – more and more batteries are coming online in California. Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission issued its preferred system plan, which includes 15 GW of new storage and demand response resources to be installed by 2032. More than 90 GW of batteries are proposed in the California ISO’s interconnection queue, showing strong commercial interest in battery storage. Batteries will be a crucial resource for meeting California’s ambitious clean energy goals, ensuring sufficient firm capacity to keep the grid running even in times without solar or wind energy.

Demand response, where customers reduce their usage either voluntarily or through compensation, plays a critical role in grid reliability and is a key building block in the resource portfolio balancing supply and demand. In extreme cases like the heat wave last week, grid operators don’t always have enough generation online to meet load. In fact, most grids plan to have some small number of outages, as it is very costly to plan to meet load all the time.

Tuesday’s extraordinary text alert asking customers to reduce their electricity demand was successful in avoiding rolling blackouts – it was followed almost immediately by a roughly 2 GW drop in demand. But that sort of mechanism can only work in limited situations, and can’t be called on more than once or twice a year.

Some localized outages were caused by distribution transformers overloading due to heat, and the City of Healdsburg misunderstood the grid operator’s emergency level and started load shedding (rolling blackouts) before they were asked to, but overall the grid held up well.

The weather facing the state, and the rest of the West, was prolonged and extreme. Not only does the hot weather mean record breaking load for the grid, it also means punishing temperatures can force equipment offline. Grid planners need to acknowledge climate change is pushing historic temperatures from extreme to normal and plan for more of these extreme, West-wide, long lasting heat storms.

Solar provided a consistent 13 GW of power to California’s grid last week from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day, roughly a quarter of total demand. The evening hours from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. were the times of greatest grid stress, as solar output drops but demand remains high. This is when batteries helped the grid, charging during midday and discharging in the early evening. On Tuesday, heat wave’s hottest day and the day of greatest grid stress, wind picked up in the evening and provided 2.7 GW of power.

While we made it through last week with the grid intact, California shouldn’t have to suffer such close calls in the future. The state is racing to install more solar, wind, batteries, as well as transmission to connect all these new resources to the grid.

However, supply chain challenges with both solar and batteries have delayed many projects, leaving the state short of meeting its goals. In addition, the pace of transmission development has not kept up with the demand, leaving many projects stuck in the queue waiting to connect to the grid. The state needs a comprehensive plan to deploy new projects and unblock the logjam of transmission development so it can meet its clean energy goals.

California reaches record renewable output

 From IEEFA

California's solar and wind farms generated record volumes of renewable energy in the first half of 2022, producing at times more carbon-free electricity than the world's fifth-largest economy could consume.

Cutbacks [curtailments] of available wind and solar output on the California ISO transmission network, covering most of the Golden State and a sliver of Nevada, surged 79% in the first six months of the year to a record 2,063 GWh [2.1 TWh], according to an S&P Global Commodity Insights analysis of grid operator data.

The nearly 2.1 TWh of wind and solar curtailments in this year's first half, compared with roughly 1.2 TWh in the first half of 2021, mark a return to fast-expanding periodic excesses of CAISO-connected renewable energy after tighter market conditions in 2021 interrupted their rapid growth in 2020 and 2019.

The six-month total was 30% more than the prior annual high of 1,587 GWh curtailed in 2020. The first-half volume of idled renewable energy was also more than the combined net output of California's single largest solar and wind farms in 2021, according to S&P Market Intelligence data. Berkshire Hathaway Energy's 586-MW Topaz Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., and Pattern Energy Group Inc.'s 265-MW Ocotillo Wind Energy Facility in Imperial County, Calif., together generated about 1,740 GWh last year.

[Garrett Hering]

What could California do with its excess renewable electricity?  

1. Sell it to neighbouring states.  But their economies and populations are much smaller than California's.  The largest relatively close market is Texas, but for political reasons, Texas refuses connection to the US grid.
2. Store it using batteries.  California's battery banks are growing fast, but not fast enough to absorb this quantity of electricity.
3. Use it to make green hydrogen which can then be exported to other countries, either as Hydrogen, or, more effectively as methane or ammonia.
4. Live with curtailment.  Renewables are so cheap that we can afford excess capacity.

Terra-Gen’s 560MWh Valley Center Battery Storage Project, San Diego, California, which came online last month. Image: Terra-Gen.
Source: Battery storage load shifting up to 6GWh a day on CAISO grid

California just ran on 100% renewables

 From  OPB

On a mild Sunday afternoon, California set a historic milestone in the quest for clean energy. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing and on May 8, the state produced enough renewable electricity to meet 103% of consumer demand. That broke a record set a week earlier of 99.9%.

Energy experts say the falling records are a sign of the remarkable progress that renewable energy has made. But that doesn't mean fossil fuels were out of the picture.

Even as the record was broken, natural gas power plants were still running in California.

Because despite the dramatic growth of renewable energy, turning off natural gas power still isn't possible in California. The reason is due to a tricky time of day: when the sun sets and solar farms stop producing. California needs to replace that power quickly and seamlessly with other sources, like hydropower and natural gas.

The state is rapidly building huge battery projects for that purpose, so power generated during the day can be stored for use at sunset. But so far, it's still a small fraction of what's needed.

It's a sign that, even as California and more than a dozen other states work towards long-term goals of getting 100% clean energy year-round, weaning off fossil fuels is no simple task.

"Their role is not going to go away until we have a substitute for the service that natural gas generation provides," says Arne Olsen, senior partner at Energy + Environmental Economics, an energy think tank. "The good news is that you can get an awful long way just by adding wind and solar and batteries to our current grid."

Springtime is an ideal time of year for renewable energy in California. The days are getting longer, so solar energy is on the rise. Wind power and hydropower from dams is humming along and mild temperatures mean air conditioners aren't turned up, so electricity demand is still relatively low.

For about an hour on April 30th, grid operators at the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which serves about 80% of the state, had enough electricity from solar, wind, geothermal and small hydropower dams to meet all of the demand in their area More power was being generated than was needed at that moment, so some was exported to other Western states.

"That's quite an accomplishment because it demonstrates if you can do it for one instantaneous hour, you can do it for longer periods of time," says Mark Rothleder, senior vice president at the California ISO.

Records have fallen consistently in the spring over the last few years, due to the dramatic expansion of solar farms. Renewable energy, including solar panels on building rooftops, has more than tripled in the state since 2005. In 2019, 63% of the state's power came from carbon-free sources, including renewables, hydropower and nuclear.

Still, at the time the record fell, natural gas power plants were generating about 10% of the electricity on the California ISO's grid, including the power being exported out of state. That's because those power plants are still vital to keeping the lights on later in the day.

When the sun sets, solar power disappears from the grid rapidly, which means grid operators must turn up other sources of electricity. Supply and demand must stay delicately balanced, so the entire system doesn't fail.

To replace solar at sunset, California generally uses hydropower, imports from other states and natural gas power plants. But most large natural gas plants are massive industrial facilities that aren't designed to turn on quickly. Many take 4 to 8 hours to switch on, so in order to use them at sunset, they must already be running during the day.

"We back them down as far as they can go," Rothleder says. "Anything below that, we'd have to shut them off. But the decision is that if you shut them off, you may not have them when you need them a couple hours later."

That means even when there's plenty of solar power during the day, natural gas power is still part of the energy mix. In fact, on some days, solar farms are told to turn off because there's simply too much power on the grid.

California is working to store extra renewable energy generated during the day so it's available later in the evening. Large battery projects are popping up around the state and in the past two and half years alone, energy storage has grown 20-fold in California.

"The more storage that we can get online that can be charged by solar, the better our chances are of making sure that when the state needs power the most, it's the cleanest it can be," says Shannon Eddy, executive director of the Large-Scale Solar Association.

16 hours of clean energy daily

 From Energy Storage News

San Jose Clean Energy, a non-profit electricity supplier in California, has celebrated the completion of a solar-plus-storage project which will ensure the delivery of carbon-free electricity during evening peak times.

The supplier held an online press conference on 2 February to officially inaugurate the Kern Solar and Storage Battery Project, which was brought online by developer Terra-Gen on 31 December 2021.

Under a 12-year power purchase agreement (PPA) signed with San Jose Clean Energy, Terra-Gen guarantees that 62MW of energy from the facility will be available to the supplier’s member-customers between 6pm and 10pm each day.

This is the period after solar production has tailed off for the day and evening demand for power from homes and businesses in San Jose, the largest city in Silicon Valley. The city is targeting becoming carbon neutral by 2030, which will make it the US’ first, and SJCE’s 350,000 customer accounts representing about a million people will be a big part of that, city mayor Sam Liccardo said at the press conference.

Liccardo said the 62MW of power is equivalent to about 20% of SJCE’s demand, but more importantly the project addresses the intermittency, or variability, challenge that renewable energy brings to the grid.

In effect, clean energy will be supplied from the project for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, SJCE director Lori Mitchell pointed out. It is also the first project to come online from a US$1 billion investment commitment into four large-scale solar and wind projects by SJCE, one of California’s Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) energy suppliers.

One of the next in that list will be another 100MW project by Terra-Gen, for which the CCA has signed a 15-year PPA, expected to come online during this year.

The Kern project is at the Edwards Air Force Base site in California’s Central Valley, in Kern County where many of the state’s large solar — and wind — farms are located.

Terra-Gen, which will own and operate the project, already has a 2GW wind energy power plant nearby, and the project for SJCE is part of a much larger solar and storage facility it is building at Edwards Airforce Base.

In fact the plant — or rather the vast complex — referred to as the Edwards & Sanborn project, is thought to be the world’s largest combined solar-plus-storage facility to date. Aiming to eventually reach 760MW of PV and 2,445MWh of battery storage, Terra-Gen closed US$804 million financing for its initial 346MWac PV and 1,501MWh of batteries in August last year.

Off-taker deals have been signed with a range of different parties, from corporates like Starbucks to other CCAs and some portions of the project have already been delivering.

Simon Day, VP and head of solar development at Terra-Gen said that for the SJCE deal, the developer built an oversized 118MW solar PV array at the site, as well as additional new battery storage.

It is also able to use other resources such as wind from the company’s portfolio to firm the delivery of clean energy for 16 hours a day, in what he described as a “groundbreaking” arrangement for the solar industry.

 

Aerial view of the project, built on land leased from Edwards Airforce Base. Leasing revenue will go towards maintaining the base’s mission, Terra-Gen’s Simon Day said. Image: SJCE / Terra-Gen.

16 hours baseload a day is great. And the remaining 8 hours can be covered by wind.  Unfortunately, the article doesn't give the cost (LCOE) but presumably it was competitive, i.e., even with storage.  Every day, we're getting closer to a grid which will no longer need fossil fuels.

California battery storage is greening the grid

 A fascinating chart from Brian Bartholomew

Explanation of the chart:

The black line ("emissions intensity") shows how many tonnes of CO2 are emitted for each MWh of production during the course of the day.  Notice how it drops during daylight hours because of solar.

The blue bar chart shows battery charging and discharging.  The batteries charge up during the solar surplus, i.e., while emissions intensity is low, and discharge during peak demand, from 4 to 9 p.m.  There is some charging during the night, when emissions intensity is high, but much less than during the day, when it is low.

The implication is that, even if there is still coal/gas in the grid, the mixture of solar and batteries will still reduce emissions.  In fact, it will allow coal power stations to continue to operate while we move to 100% renewables, because they won't have to throttle output down during the solar peak as batteries will be taking any solar surplus up.  At the same time, emissions intensity will be reduced.  The goal must be to progressively reduce emissions intensity to zero.  And expanding solar plus battery storage will do that.

California utilities will reach renewables target

 From IEEFA:

California regulated utilities are on track to reach the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard goal of procuring 60% of retail sales from renewables by 2030, although 27 are at risk for not meeting near-term goals, according to a California Public Utilities Commission report to the Legislature.

Investor-owned utilities are forecast to have excess renewable procurement through 2027, according to the CPUC. However, small and multi-jurisdictional utilities, electric service providers and community choice aggregators collectively need to procure additional renewable resources to meet the 2021-2024 compliance period requirements, as well as future requirements.

“The aggregated percentages show that over the last three years, investor-owned utilities’ RPS procurement has increased by 12%,” according to a Nov. 19 CPUC statement. “This increase is primarily driven by load departure from investor-owned utility service to community choice aggregators, but partially mitigated by the investor-owned utilities selling excess renewable energy credits to community choice aggregators and electric service providers.”

Small and multijurisdictional utilities’ RPS procurement declined from its 2020 spike by 9%, but remains above pre-2020 levels, according to the CPUC. Community choice aggregators procurement has remained steady at 2020 levels, which dropped from 2019 primarily due to new community choice aggregators coming online with minimal to no RPS procurement and expiring short-term contracts. Electric service providers, which previously had steady RPS procurement, experienced a 10% drop from 2020 due to decreasing forecasted RPS procurement in 2021 compared to 2020.

Photo by Jeff Turner, Flickr

World's biggest battery gets even bigger

 From Inside Climate News

The largest battery storage facility in the world, located along Monterey Bay in California, has completed an expansion, demonstrating how storage systems can exist on a gigantic scale and can easily expand.

Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, owned by Vistra Corp. of Texas, has now added 100 megawatts to the 300 megawatts of capacity that went online in December, for a total of 400 megawatts. The lithium-ion batteries can run for up to four hours on a charge, which translates to 1,600 megawatt-hours. The initial project and the expansion are operating under a long-term agreement with the utility Pacific Gas & Electric.

At the storage facility, rows of structures that resemble shipping containers fill an area that, even before the expansion, was about the size of three football fields. A large concrete box houses seemingly endless racks of batteries. The storage system is replacing a natural gas power plant and helping to provide flexible and carbon-free power to a part of the California grid that sometimes struggles with reliability.

California was already leading the nation with 1,438 megawatts of utility-scale battery storage capacity as of June, as much as the next 10 states combined, according to federal energy data.

US battery storage triples

 From ClimateCrocks

The challenges of the Texas grid were on display in February when a winter storm led to the loss of almost half of ERCOT’s generation, leaving millions without power for days. In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) warned that Texas faces an “elevated risk” of energy emergencies this summer due to high heat or potential long periods of low wind production. Although ERCOT itself said that it expects to have sufficient generation to meet peak loads, it did outline three “extreme” scenarios that could lead to blackouts, including extended hot weather that spikes demand, thermal generator outages or a shortage in generation from wind and solar.

“One of the pretty clear lessons learned from Texas’ power challenges this year is that renewable power is outperforming other forms of generation when the grid is under stress,” said Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. 

According to S&P, there are nearly a dozen storage projects ranging from 50 MW to larger than 200 MW scheduled to start up this summer, headlined by the 203 MW Crossett Power Battery Storage system in Crane County. ERCOT expects that battery storage on the system could rise from 225 MW at the end of 2020 to 1,771 MW at the end of 2021 and 3,008 MW in 2022. Developers have announced large-scale projects expected to come online in 2022, like a pair of 100 MW battery storage facilities announced by Wärtsilä Energy a month after the February cold snap. 

North Carolina-based FlexGen is one of the largest storage installers in the state, claiming to be responsible for more than three-quarters of the storage there by megawatts. Yann Brandt, FlexGen Chief Financial Officer, said ERCOT’s market is attractive for developers looking to engage in energy arbitrage, but value of storage as an ancillary resource has risen as Texas faces more extreme weather events. 

“It’s a unique situation where you’re able to maximize revenue when the market needs it because you’re providing a valuable service,” Brandt said. “I hope grid operators and planners start viewing energy storage as part of the planning process and not try to plug it into a generation-first power market.”

If the plans of developers and utilities pan out, total installed utility-scale energy storage capacity in the U.S., not including conventional pumped hydroelectric storage, could jump roughly 185%, to 5,582 MW, through August from a year prior, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.

This summer’s storage surge, consisting mostly of four-hour lithium-ion battery systems designed to discharge during critical periods of peak demand, is centered in California and Texas, the country’s two largest states by population and economic output, respectively.

Along with market reforms, improved planning and energy conservation, these large storage systems could help both states, which have arguably the nation’s most fragile electric systems, ride through the summer turbulence with few of the sorts of widespread outages that have plagued them in the past 12 months. 

California, which in recent years has struggled with blackouts related to wildfires, in August 2020 experienced two rounds of rotating outages amid a regional heatwave. Now the California ISO, the state’s primary transmission grid operator, is battling with other southwestern states also thin on reserves over access to resources needed to keep the lights on this summer.

Texas, meanwhile, saw its primary power grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council Of Texas Inc., severely buckle under the weight of a rare Arctic blast in February, leaving millions of residents without electricity for days. The state could be in for another rocky ride this summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in its summer 2021 assessment.

California could have more than 2,800 MW of largely four-hour lithium-ion battery storage at its disposal before September, nearly five times as much as a year before, while Texas could have about 1,400 MW, roughly eight times more, S&P Global data show. Combined, the two states account for three-quarters of the total installed nonhydro energy storage resources slated to come online by the end of August.

That profit-seeking utilities are installing battery storage on this scale suggests that the price of large-scale batteries has fallen enough that they are now cost-effective, if one includes the arbitrage opportunities.   

Top 20 California fires

 From Dr Jonathan Foley

And 2021 isn't even on the chart yet.

After the Quake: Los Angeles a Radioactive Dead Zone

From EcoWatch:

Had last Friday's 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin.

The likely human death toll would be in the millions. The likely property loss would be in the trillions. The forever damage to our species' food supply, ecological support systems, and longterm economy would be very far beyond any meaningful calculation. The threat to the ability of the human race to survive on this planet would be extremely significant.

The two cracked, embrittled, under-maintained, unregulated, uninsured and un-inspected atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, would be a seething radioactive ruin.

Their cores would be melting into the ground. Hydrogen explosions would be blasting the site to deadly dust. One or both melted cores would have burned into the Earth and hit ground or ocean water, causing massive steam explosions with physical impacts in the range of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The huge clouds would send murderous radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere that would permanently poison the land, the oceans, the air ... and circle the globe again and again, and yet again, filling the lungs of billions of living things with the most potent poisons humans have ever created.

In 2010, badly maintained gas pipes run by Pacific Gas & Electric blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno, killing eight people. PG&E's badly maintained power lines have helped torch much of northern California, killing 80 people and incinerating more than 10,000 structures.

Now in bankruptcy, with its third president in two years, PG&E is utterly unqualified to run two large, old, obsolete, crumbling atomic reactors which are surrounded by earthquake faults. At least a dozen faults have been identified within a small radius around the reactors. The reactor cores are less than fifty miles from the San Andreas fault, less than half the distance that Fukushima Daiichi was from the epicenter that destroyed four reactors there.

Diablo cannot withstand an earthquake of the magnitude now hitting less than 200 miles away. In 2014, the Associated Press reported that Dr. Michael Peck, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's site inspector at Diablo, had warned that the two reactors should be shut because they can't withstand a seismic shock like the one that has just hit so close. The NRC tried to bury Peck's report. They attacked his findings, then shipped him to Tennessee. He's no longer with the Commission.

All major reactor disasters have come with early warnings. A 1978 accident at Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor presaged the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island. The realities were hidden, and TMI spewed radiation that killed local people and animals in droves.

Soviet officials knew the emergency shut-down mechanism at Chernobyl could cause an explosion — but kept it secret. Unit Four exploded the instant the rods meant to shut it down were deployed.

Decades before disaster struck at Fukushima Daiichi, millions of Japanese citizens marched to demand atomic reactors NOT be built in a zone riddled by fault lines, washed by tsunamis.

In California, ten thousand citizens were arrested demanding the same. Diablo's owners hid the existence of the Hosgri Fault just three miles from the site. A dozen more nearby fault lines have since been found, capable in tandem of delivering shocks like the ones shaking Ridgecrest. No significant structural improvements have been made to deal with the newfound fault lines.

[Read more here]


Time to shut it down.

Battery storage shock

From ClimateCrocks:

Los Angeles Power and Water officials have struck a deal on the largest and cheapest solar + battery-storage project in the world, at prices that leave fossil fuels in the dust and may relegate nuclear power to the dustbin.

Later this month the LA Board of Water and Power Commissioners is expected to approve a 25-year contract that will serve 7 percent of the city’s electricity demand at 1.997¢/kwh for solar energy and 1.3¢ for power from batteries.

“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States,” said James Barner, the agency’s manager for strategic initiatives, “and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S. and we believe in the world today. So this is, I believe, truly revolutionary in the industry.”

It’s half the estimated cost of power from a new natural gas plant.

Mark Z. Jacobson, the Stanford professor who developed roadmaps for transitioning 139 countries to 100 percent renewables, hailed the development on Twitter Friday, saying, “Goodnight #naturalgas, goodnight #coal, goodnight #nuclear.”

The anti-nuclear activist Arnie Gunderson, who predicted storage prices under 2¢/kwh four years ago on the night Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Powerpack, noted Saturday that his 2015 prediction was too high. He too said, “Goodbye coal, nukes, gas!”

The Eland Project will not rid Los Angeles of natural gas, however. The city will still depend on gas and hydro to supply its overnight power. But the batteries in this 400-megawatt project will take a bite out of the fossil share of LA’s power pie. 

“It reduces the evening ramp (of natural gas) as the sun sets,” Barner told commissioners at their June 18 meeting. “As the sun goes down for our other 1,000 MW of solar that doesn’t have batteries, the gas-fired generation and hydro have to compensate for that. So that net peak load in the evening will be offset with this facility. We’ll be able to contribute to that and keep gas powered generation not running at the full amount.”

Crudely, Los Angeles can count on solar power generation from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., said Louis Ting, director of power planning development at the agency. The batteries in this project effectively extend that horizon four hours, to 11 p.m.

“The battery can be dispatched differently,” Barner added, “depending on the system need. So you could run that four-hour battery over 16 hours at one-fourth of the output, so you can vary it over time. It’s not just fixed over four hours.”

The plant will be developed by 8minute Solar Energy on 2,653 acres of privately-owned land in the Barren Ridge renewable corridor in Kern County. The development was first reported Friday by John Weaver at pv magazine, who noted in comments that the price for battery storage is not added on top of the solar price. It’s a separate power product, sold at 1.3¢.

Barner explained that the plant will be able to generate more solar energy each day than the available transmission capacity. The extra power will be stored.

“The solar is inherently variable, and the battery is able to take a portion of that solar from that facility, the portion that’s variable, which is usually the top tend of it, take all of that, strip that off and then store it into the battery, so the facility can provide a constant output to the grid. It can turn this solar facility, which is not typically dispatchable, into a dispatchable type of facility.”

The plant is expected to deliver its first megawatt by April 2023, a timeline that qualifies it for the federal solar investment tax credit. 

“This project is able to make full use of that investment tax credit, which is substantial,” Barner said. “It’s 30 percent that is basically knocked off the capital cost of the project.”

A natural-gas plant opening that same year would produce power at more than twice the price, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, or 4¢-4.3¢/kwh. The agency did not bother modeling the estimated cost of coal or nuclear plants in its 2019 Energy Outlook because, it says, none are expected to be built. Nuclear often benefits from optimistic estimates in the range of 12¢/kwh. Nuclear’s advantage has been its constancy and reliability, an advantage cheap storage increasingly challenges. 

The lowest known solar price is 1.97¢ for a project in Mexico that did not include storage.

Solar is cheap in the SW USA because it has the best solar resources in the country (clear desert skies closer to the equator than the northern half of the country).  But the real shocker is the cost of storage.  $12/MWh for 4 hours of storage!  That's only a hop, skip and a jump from $36/MWh for overnight storage, which will be enough in most grids with wind and solar to allow renewables (excluding hydro) to reach 90% of total generation.  4 hours of storage makes solar dispatchable, between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., but 12 hours will make it invincible.  Remember also that gas is cheaper in the US than it is in the rest of the world, so if this works in L.A., it will likely work in most places outside the high latitudes, where solar is more expensive for obvious reasons. 

Once again, the trends are crystal clear—renewables plus storage are beating fossil fuels hands down, and because costs keep on declining, the superiority of renewables will only increase.  Of course, for now, we will continue to use coal and gas for existing fossil fuel generators, even as we stop building new ones.  But already wind or solar plus storage are close to or below the operating cost of coal power in many localities.  Each year that goes by will make this true of more and more places, and that will mean that coal power stations will be shuttered, even if they are new.  The thermal coal price truly has nowhere to go but down.

Half UK's electricity zero carbon

Not long after the news that Germany has reached 47% renewables, and 60% nuclear plus renewables in its electricity grid comes the news that this year the UK will pass a tipping point where less than 50% of its electricity generation will come from fossil fuels:

Zero-carbon energy sources are poised to overtake fossil fuels as the UK’s largest electricity source over a full calendar year.

This year will be the first that fossil fuels make up less than half of the electricity generated, according to National Grid, following a dramatic decline in coal-fired power and rising renewable energy.

Instead, UK homes and businesses will rely more on clean electricity generated by wind farms, solar panels, hydro power and nuclear power reactors.

A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%.

In the same period renewable energy has climbed from supplying just 2% of the UK’s power to a fifth of all electricity produced.

The “landmark tipping point” is an “historic achievement” in the UK’s journey towards becoming a net-zero carbon economy by 2050, said National Grid.

John Pettigrew, the UK power system operator’s chief executive, said: “The incredible progress that Britain has made in the past 10 years means we can now say 2019 will be the year zero-carbon power beats fossil fuel-fired generation for the first time.”

“We wouldn’t have said it if we weren’t confident that this will be the year.”

National Grid is able to confidently predict the 2019 record only six months into the year following the UK’s greenest ever winter, and the huge number of coal-free days recorded since then.

[Read more here]

Source: The Guardian

Germany and the UK are, respectively, the world's fifth and sixth largest economies.  Meanwhile, California, which if it were a separate economy, would be almost as big as Germany or the UK, is targeting 60% zero-carbon electricity by 2030, and reached 48% zero-carbon in its grid in 2018, if you  include nuclear and hydro (it's closing down its last nuclear power station because it's too costly, hence the relatively slow rise over the next 11 years).

UK, Germany and California make up 12% of world GDP.  They're transitioning to renewables without fuss, without any adverse effects on living standards or growth rates, step by inevitable step. 

Why can't Australia with its huge solar and wind resources do the same?  Because the right-wing parties in Oz are in the grip of a collective delusion.  For them, neo-liberal theories and the mad drivel from dotty right-wing "think-tanks" makes more sense than facts, science, and technology.  Reducing emissions is for them giving in to "leftist" environmentalists.  The mere act of co-operation with other countries is considered "socialism".  It doesn't matter that renewables are far cheaper than coal—they'll oppose them just because it irks the Left.  Conservatives used to be the pragmatists, the ones who faced up to facts, who eschewed dogma and theory.   No longer.  Now they are the wild-eyed theorists, the batty revolutionaries, the spittle-flecked ranters.

Sad.

Model 3 best-selling car in California

In the second half of last year, the Tesla Model 3 was the best selling car of all in California.  Note how it's outselling much cheaper cars, like the Civic and Accord.

Where California leads, the rest of the world follows.  Divorce and "serial monogamy", gay rights, dope, car emission standards, women in trousers, renewables ......  The only other countries that avant garde are in Scandinavia, and while influential beyond their size, they're still small in the scheme of things.  But California is the 5th or so largest economy in the world.

Today California, tomorrow the world.  Already, petrol-engined car sales have peaked, globally.  Every year from now on the decline in ICEV car sales will accelerate.

Source: CleanTechnica

The South Australia duck curve

The continued expansion of rooftop solar in South Australia has produced a "duck curve" like the Californian one we've talked about.

In the chart below, you can see how increasing amounts of rooftop solar on days of low demand has year by year reduced the midday peak until it is now the point of lowest net demand (i.e., demand after rooftop supply).  But notice something unusual about these curves.  Peak demand is at midnight!  When everyone is asleep and most factories and businesses are closed!  What gives? 

Well, years ago, when SA's electricity came solely from black and brown coal-fired power stations, there was surplus power at night.  So to use up this power, which would otherwise have been wasted, the (then) state-owned utility encouraged users to use electricity after midnight heating their geysers (= hot water cylinders, to Americans), by giving them a discount.   Geysers had two elements, a large one at the bottom of the cylinder, which turned on after midnight, and a smaller one about half way up, which only turned on if the water temperature at that point in the cylinder fell below the desired minimum.  This tended not to be used except when you had guests in the house.  Or teenagers.

This suited everyone: baseload power wasn't wasted, and users got cheap electricity to heat their water.  Heating water can take more than 20% of total household electricity usage, so that was an important consideration.  But of course, these days the SA grid is mostly renewables, wind and solar.  And so it would make more sense for geysers to turn on when supply is at its maximum, which is over the period from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.  Perhaps that's a clumsy solution, because there are times when wholesale prices go negative because the wind blows strongly, at night.  So the clever solution might be a geyser which checks to see what wholesale electricity prices are doing, and heats the water when they are low.  If prices don't get low enough, then it would default to midday plus or minus 2 hours. On the other hand, the most cost-effective solution for households would be to heat their water between 10 and 3, thus using as much of their own solar power as they can, because the feed-in tariff is way below the tariff we pay to get our electricity back from the grid.

If geyser demand were rescheduled to midday, then there would still be a duck curve as more solar (now increasingly utility-scale) is installed, but it would be smaller.  The morning (net) demand peak would run from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and the evening one from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.   On a very rough calculation, this would mean that 2 hours of storage would be more than enough to fill those demand peaks.  (1.5 hours of storage would equal 6 hours * 1/4 of total demand) .  So SA would need 2.4 GWh of storage, provided geyser demand were rescheduled to the period of maximum daylight.  The big battery cost A$66 million for 126 MWh of storage capacity, so SA would need to spend A$1.3 billion to do this, or about $360 per person. 

Even with enough storage, the interconnector to Victoria would remain very useful for periods of exceptional overdemand or undersupply, as would the new HVDC interconnector to NSW, which the new Liberal  (i.e., right-wing) SA government is in favour of.  The more a grid is connected to its neighbour grids; the more storage it has; and the more diverse its sources of power, the more stable it will be.

Source: Dylan McConnell, from the Climate and Energy College in Melbourne

California -- zero emissions from electricity

Crescent Dunes, a thermal solar plant near Tonopah, is the world’s first utility-scale facility to feature advanced molten salt power tower energy storage capabilities. Source: The Las Vegas Sun

We've mentioned this here before.  California has set a target of zero emissions from electricity generation by 2045.  The new target is 60% from non-carbon sources by 2030, and 100% by 2045.

In a move to solidify California's role as a world leader on climate action, state lawmakers voted this week to shift their state—the world's fifth-largest economy—to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.

The legislation now heads to Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature. Brown hasn't commented on it but is widely expected to sign the legislation as one of the crowning environmental achievements of his administration, which ends in January. The renewable energy commitment also comes on the cusp of a Global Climate Action Summit that Brown is hosting in San Francisco beginning Sept.12.

In a summer when California has been fighting record wildfires while facing off against the Trump administration's attempts to rollback climate policies, the state's Democratic-controlled legislature sought to double down on its commitment to shift away from fossil fuels.

"After a grueling year it has finally passed," tweeted state Sen. Kevin de León, the Los Angeles Democrat who sponsored the measure. De León, who is challenging fellow Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her U.S. Senate seat in November, was in the Assembly chamber on Tuesday to help round up the final votes needed for passage. The Senate approved the amendments on Wednesday and sent the legislation to the governor.

"Our state will remain a climate change leader," de León said.

[Read more here]

This is actually quite a slow pace of transition.  Currently renewables provide 29% of California's electricity.  So to 2030, that's a transition of 2.6% per year, i.e., 2.6% of fossil fuel generation capacity will need to be retired and replaced with renewables.  From 2030 to 2045, it would be 2.7% a year.   Actually, it's even less than that, because of existing hydro-electric power.  But I'm being conservative and assuming hydro diminishes as global warming steadily dries out the SW of the USA.

How will California do this?

• More solar.  All new homes in buildings under 3 stories high will be required to have integral solar.  Plus, given California's solar resources, there will be more solar farms in California and across the border in Nevada
• More batteries.  Batteries are still too expensive for time-shifting, i.e., storing power from midday for the evening demand peak, but they are excellent for synthetic inertia, for stabilising the grid, and for providing some additional supply at peak demand times.  Falling battery costs will mean that the role of batteries will steadily increase.
• More concentrated solar power.  The Crescent Dunes CSP plant across the border in Nevada uses mirrors to focus sunlight to melt salts.  The stored heat is then used to drive turbines to provide power in the evening and at night.   The company which built the Crescent Dunes plant is planning one 10 times as large nearby.  The cost of CSP has halved over the last 5 years.
• Less nuclear.  The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is scheduled to close in 2025.  It produces about 9% of California's electricity.  
• Less gas.  This will be hard.  Gas is ideal for firming the variable generation from wind and solar.  Replacing it will require other forms of storage: batteries, pumped hydro, molten salts.  However, California may be the first place to use power-to-gas at a large scale.  That's where  surplus renewable energy is used to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen, with CO2, is then passed over a catalyst at high pressure and temperature to produce methane, which can be burnt without adding to atmospheric CO2. 

Even while California is switching to a 100% green grid, its transport will also be transitioning to EVs.  By 2045, 100% of California's car, lorry and bus fleet is likely to be non ICE (internal combustion engine)

California has already cut its emissions even while growing strongly.  As it often has in the past, it will again be leading the world.

100% green electricity in California

It's been obvious for a while now that there will be a pincer movement crushing fossil fuels.  The one half of the pincer is the steady decline in the cost of renewables, storage and EVs, and the ongoing technological advances which underpin these cost declines.  The other is the ever increasing awareness of the steady rise in global temperatures. It's become impossible to deny that global warming is real.  

That pincer movement has begun.  California is likely to target 100% green electricity by 2045.  Because of rapid cost declines in renewables, it's likely to get there early.

Wind turbines lining the Altamont Pass near Livermore in 2013.
Kevin de León’s Senate Bill 100 would mandate 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.CreditNoah Berger/Associated Press

From The New York Times:

California has been a leader in trying to counter the forces contributing to climate change, from its stringent standards for auto emissions to its mandate that 50 percent of the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2030.

Now, with climate concerns magnified by extreme summer temperatures and catastrophic wildfires, lawmakers are considering a move that would go further: a proposal to mandate 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.

The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Kevin de León, says that with the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster electricity generated from fossil fuels, California and other states must chart their own course on energy policy. And, partly owing to recent events, he thinks the bill can pass within three weeks.

“Because of the fires, because of the extreme drought, because of the anti-environmental edicts coming from this president, there’s a huge ground swell of support,” Mr. de León said of his proposal, designated Senate Bill 100.

[Read more here]

California is the world's 5th or 6th largest economy.  It has conclusively demonstrated that strong economic growth is possible even as carbon emissions fall.  If California can do it, the rest of the world can too.  By 2045 or before, electricity generation in California will be 100% green, and so will transport.  It's a path the rest of the world will follow.

Climate change is a hoax. Nope.

From the cartoonist Steve Breen