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California has got good at building giant batteries
- toomuchtodo 1y agoRelated: Californian batteries set new output record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119878 - May 2025
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://archive.today/j6O1N https://archive.today/j6O1N
- dyauspitr 1y ago[flagged]
- standardUser 1y ago[flagged]
- happyopossum 1y ago> some guy yelling "fire" in a crowded theater to be fair, there really was a fire, and it was a bad one. You can't just lose 80% of the capacity at one of the largest battery storage facilities in the US in a multi-day fire and hand-wave it away as some kind of conspiracy theory.
- ImaCake 1y agoIt's also just bad optics, unfortunately. A coal power plant kills people living nearby slowly over the course of decades, a battery fire might injure a few people but it does so in a way that makes headlines. No one cares about boring lawsuits over a power plant being turned off next year anyway, and that is part of what makes these kinds of stories so frustrating!
- epistasis 1y agoI live close to this and the event is proving the horseshoe political theory very very correct. You get the lefty RFK Jr. anti-science types becoming very anti-batteries, collaborating with the extreme-right-wing coalition of mountain hermits, rednecks, and extremely wealthy Monterey peninsula types. We are a community that is easily spooked, but the batteries have really brought out the crazies.
- AdamJacobMuller 1y ago> mountain hermits, rednecks These guys love their off-grid and solar and batteries tbh.
- epistasis 1y agoWell, some of them. Some of them love propane and generators. Maybe solar, but not always.
- AdamJacobMuller 1y agoIn fairness a good number of them seem to live in Alaska or other places where solar is effectively pointless and totally useless for months of the year.
- AdamJacobMuller 1y agoAt this point I wonder if the environmental impact from a lithium battery fire would eclipse the impact from a worst case scenario at a modern nuclear power plant. There is far far more in terms of containment in the nuke plant, but, the stuff inside is much more dangerous and longer lasting.
- epistasis 1y agoWe will find out soon about the environmental impact from soil testing. Results are supposed to be on the county website [1] at the end of May [2], and that's a few days away. This is pretty much a worst-case scenario for battery fire size and spreading. It is a very early large-scale battery deployment with what appears to be completely insufficient fire suppression, and very little thought for fire isolation. It was a tightly packed indoor multi-story facility, very unlike the more typical outdoor shipping-container style facility. [1] https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-landing-vistra-power-plant-fire/soil https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land... [2] https://santacruzlocal.org/2025/05/15/new-soil-tests-start-after-moss-landing-battery-fire/ https://santacruzlocal.org/2025/05/15/new-soil-tests-start-a...
- jeffbee 1y agoYeah it was pretty bad, but the siting is excellent. If an organization simply must use these unstable batteries, they can build them below grade at this site and fight fires with the simplest possible means: pushing a pre-placed heap of beach sand into the pit.
- epistasis 1y agoI'm not even sure if the fire was bad. It was visible, surely, and people are scared of the unknown. But the preliminary results are that there's nothing unusual on the soil: https://www.countyofmonterey.gov/home/showdocument?id=139505 https://www.countyofmonterey.gov/home/showdocument?id=139505 Metallic taste in the air was the worst symptom that people reported, and people here were complaining of metallic taste in the air, 40 miles away, upwind from the site, for months. So unless something really shocking comes up in the report this month I think battery fires are mostly a concern for insurance companies and fire code to protect fire fighters and other structures. IMHO building below grade and dumping dirt seems to be massive overkill; just separate containers and don't stack them so that a lower fire spreads to multiple upper containers, and things are probably fine.
- slg 1y agoI honestly have no idea whether you are right or whether that county supervisor has merit to what they said. That is why we need journalists to actually be people who want to seek truth and inform their audience of that truth rather than just being a public stenographer. A good journalist should have skepticism towards what they are told by public figures and needs to consider whether what they are told is accurate before repeating it without any qualification. But then again, there doesn't even appear to be a byline on this article, so who knows who actually wrote it. If no one is willing to stand behind these words, maybe it wasn't even a human who wrote them. Maybe that quote from some unnamed person is a complete hallucination of some AI. I guess it's up to the reader to do their own research, which makes you wonder what role the journalist is even serving in this instance.
- outside1234 1y agoThis event demonstrated that battery systems need to be designed, like any engineering system, such that any failure is not catastrophic. They failed on this battery plant, and regulations were put in place to prevent that for future plants.
- sciencesama 1y agoTesla marketing plot !!
- amazingamazing 1y agoJust in time for datacenters spiking AI usage to eat all of that peak time excess. Luckily the super scalers are some of the folks driving investment into this stuff.
- jeffbee 1y agoThere are, relatively speaking, not significant data centers in California.
- amazingamazing 1y agohttps://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biggest-california-utility-sees-more-than-40-jump-data-center-interest-executive-2025-05-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biggest-california-u...
- jeffbee 1y agoThat's great. Now look at literally any other state.
- amazingamazing 1y agowhat do other states have to do with anything?
- jeffbee 1y agoThey have to do with your invocation of the phrase "super scalers" thus setting a false context for the amount of California grid load attributable to data centers.
- amazingamazing 1y agoSee my other comment about AI demand increasing. I never mentioned any other state lol… you are reading too much into it
- vondur 1y agoWe also have some of the highest energy prices in the United States.
- justinzollars 1y agoYes. My energy costs have exploded over the last decade.
- epistasis 1y agoIf the "we" means California, that that also includes me, and it's pretty clear that we don't have high costs because of the generation side, but because CPUC keeps on approving massive rate increases for grid costs. It costs ~$0.13/kWh to generate the electricity (which includes any battery costs), but $0.25-$0.50/kWh to deliver the energy across the grid. The utilities get guaranteed profits from rate-basing all the grid stuff, but the generation side is a more competitive market. Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 1y agoYeah, compare the Sacramento municipal rate[1] is compared to what SCE or PG&E prices things, and it's crazy. Average in California is $0.32[2]; I pay about $0.28, but I have a TOU plan and charge my car during super-off-peak so that brings my average down. 1: https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Price-plans https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Pric... 2: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- secabeen 1y agoSacramento municipal has a lot of customers in a small space. Running a grid in and around a major city is significantly different than covering an entire state with lots of mountains and forests from Oregon to San Luis Obispo.
- Animats 1y agoSomebody needs to make large lithium-iron phosphate batteries in the US. A123 does, but they are China-owned. Anyone know if this American Battery Factory company is going to deliver?[1] They have the same street address as Lion Energy, which seems to be an importer of battery packs and inverters. Street View shows a small startup space. Back in 2022, they announced they would have a new factory on line in two years. Three years later, no factory. [1] https://americanbatteryfactory.com/ https://americanbatteryfactory.com/ [2] https://www.energy-storage.news/us-gigafactory-startup-abf-claims-first-3gwh-lfp-making-facility-can-be-online-in-two-years/ https://www.energy-storage.news/us-gigafactory-startup-abf-c...
- philipkglass 1y agoOne Next Energy does: ONE said yesterday (15 May) it was launching US-manufactured 314Ah lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, an ‘Aries Grid Module’, and a battery management system (BMS), all designed for the battery energy storage system (BESS) market. "ONE Launches U.S. Manufactured Grid Products: LFP Cells, Modules and Battery Management Systems" https://one.ai/one-launches-u-s-manufactured-grid-products-lfp-cells-modules-and-battery-managem https://one.ai/one-launches-u-s-manufactured-grid-products-l... https://one.ai/manufacturing https://one.ai/manufacturing In October 2023, the first LFP cells rolled off ONE’s 10 MWh customer validation line at ONE Circle in Van Buren Township, Michigan. In April of 2023, we started producing Aries LFP modules at Piston Automotive, also in Michigan.
- andyferris 1y agoTesla Powerwall 3 is LFP - do they make that in the US? (I'm not sure if you call it large but Tesla also does large installations).
- yalogin 1y agoI think one of the Tesla execs also started a battery recycling company there as well.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
- epistasis 1y agoTexas, Arizona, and even Idaho (!!) are putting up fairly good numbers too, according to this map: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 Pretty much all new grid assets are solar, batteries, and wind, with a bit of natural gas. And that natural gas will likely be a stranded capital asset that won't be able to compete on price within a decade.
- rogerrogerr 1y agoIsn’t natgas basically a waste product? As in no one is setting out to produce it, it just shows up when you produce other hydrocarbons? So either it’s going to get released, flared off, or something useful will get done with it even if it goes to $0.
- detaro 1y agoYes and no. It is a by-product of oil wells, but there are also pure gas fields only harvesting it.
- epistasis 1y agoYou still have to move it to the generation turbines, store it, and maintain the turbines. Even if the price of extracting natural gas is zero or negative, it may not be economical to use it for electricity generation in the future. Solar, wind, and storage are a major disruption of our energy technology. They do not follow the same cost curves, and fuel-based generation is already a very mature technology. We are either at early ages or teenager years for solar and storage, we don't know where they will end up when mature, but it's going to be so much cheaper than it is now.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- njarboe 1y agoIn the eastern US much of the fracking done is to extract natural gas. Not a waste product there.
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- scop 1y ago> has got really good For whatever reason that turn of phrase seems very amateur/lazy coming from the Economist.
- johnea 1y agoI have to agree. I was going to say, just plain grammatically incorrect. At first I though this had to be a truncation for the purpose of the HN subject line, but no, it's the actual title of the article. Could this be a difference between English and American?
- jjtheblunt 1y agoIt’s incompetence, Or it’s purposeful (“think different”) to get attention, Or It’s a shout out to a common slang where past participles (gotten) get used in place of simple past tense (“I seen this before” which should be “I saw this before”) but here is the other swap, the simple past "got" used where the past participle "gotten" belongs.
- andoando 1y agoLanguages change, get over it. "Proper" language is directly the result of the same things that you're complaining about happening over and over again. If we actually stuck to a perfect defined grammer, language would never evolve
- jjtheblunt 1y agoI've got years of linguistics background, nothing to get over here. The interesting thing you may or may not know is that this use of a past participle for a simple past actually has become normalized, in the languages change sense, in Russian, for one example. In English, it's usually less educated or second language acquisition speakers who make that substitution.
- andoando 1y ago
- hackernewshomos 1y ago[flagged]
- outside1234 1y agoI know you are trolling based on listening to fossil fuel funded Fox News et al, but one of the key advantages of batteries is that they can switch on/off (aka are "dispatchable" in power jargon) on the millisecond level basis, and as such, make the grid much more stable than old-school energy sources like natural gas which has dispatch times in the hours.
- transcriptase 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- epistasis 1y agoThe free-market is proving your conspiracy theory wrong. Texas is also deploying absolutely massive amounts of batteries, and it's private investors doing it because it lets them deliver cheaper energy and profit. Batteries are a cost-saving grid asset. Journalists are under-reporting this fact, not over-reporting.
- trhway 1y agoNapkin. Batteries are $100 per KWH (say prismatic, 5000 cycles). So at $0.1 per KWH - say diff between high demand rate and the low demand - it takes only 3 years (1000 cycles) to break even. Practically a gold rush just a bit worse than crypto :) It becomes even better if you add vertical integration optimization - i.e. your own solar farm in addition to your own battery farm.
- transcriptase 1y agoConspiracy theory? The company featured in this article literally raised money from investors to buy Tesla megapacks. Same as the rest.
- dreghgh 1y agoBut are they being improperly incentivised to do so by the state of California?
- UltraSane 1y agoWhy would Musk get any credit for this?
- transcriptase 1y ago
- mullingitover 1y agoI knew someone who worked for ESS Tech[1], which makes giant iron flow batteries in 40 foot shipping containers. Sadly they're on the verge of bankruptcy[2]. [1] https://essinc.com/ https://essinc.com/ [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2025/05/28/wilsolnville-grid-battery-maker-ess-sees-shutdown.html https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2025/05/28/wilsoln...
- DavidPiper 1y agoThere was a company in Australia called Redflow making these too. They were liquidated end of last year. Much as a like the idea of niche and diversified battery technologies, it seems like there isn't enough motivation to move too far away from Lithium-based solutions (no pun intended).
- dzhiurgis 1y agoI don't get the pun. Is it chemistry related?
- etrautmann 1y agoThe double meaning of solution
- dzhiurgis 1y agoAhh. I thought lithium is one that's most likely to give away its electrons or something like that.
- DavidPiper 1y agoLooking back, I also didn't even notice the "liquidated". Must be tired today.
- jeffbee 1y agoVanadium flow batteries are better in the economics.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoOh wow, now the utilities can go pat themselves on the back and raise raises another $.20kWh. Even the middle management could use porsches!
- peterlada 1y agoBYD does batteries at scale now for about $45/kWh. The cheapest US made ones are $120/kWh. The yield and the lack of automation is the holdup. Source: recent article on Works In Progress.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoThe 400 MWh scale project started operating here in NZ last week. Total project cost $537 USD (900 NZD) per kWh. Current FIR/SIR cost seems to linger around $0.2 NZD / MWh. No idea how do calculate payback on this.
- samarthr1 1y agoThat unit seems off? Should that not be read is kW? Because kWh is for energy, not power?
- Havoc 1y ago> Because most lithium-ion batteries provide just four hours of power, they cannot yet replace baseload generation Huh? You just need more and discharge individual ones slower. What a bizarre claim
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoIt's that they're not economical to replace baseload generation. Those four hours they provide are during the time when demand most outstrips supply, i.e. after solar stops generating but before the load trails off for the evening. The price per kWh is highest then, which is what makes battery storage economical then but not necessarily at other times of day.
- nielsbot 1y agoAlways fun to check out the live CAISO grid chart showing where CA's energy is coming from: https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso At its peak today (May 29), solar was 75% of CA's power generation. And at the peak yesterday (7 PM, May 28), batteries provided 25%. Seems like solar often produces more than 100% of CA's demand during the daytime and is curtailed. Maybe to charge batteries?
- quietthrow 1y agoGenuine question: If CA is mostly getting its energy from Solar why is my energy bill so high especially during winters? Or does solar energy while clean does not necessarily mean cheap?
- _aavaa_ 1y agoMost of that is not generation, but for transmission, distribution, and grid upgrades. Specifically burying the lines so they survive forest fires.
- amluto 1y agoGo pick a few PG&E tariffs, look at the unbundled prices, compare them, and then try saying that it’s legitimate transmission and distribution costs again with a straight face…
- _aavaa_ 1y agoBlame it on the continual rate increases for the sake of money if you’d like. But it isn’t expensive because generation is expensive.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI find the explanation that they neglected maintenance and upgrades in favor of dividends and stock pumping for years, and now we're paying off the last couple of decades of maintenance and upgrades in a new, more volatile wildfire climate for which PG&E has been assigned legal and financial liability. I agree that it doesn't necessarily reflect the individual marginal cost of an additional customer, but that makes sense, things rarely do.
- Aziell 1y agoI used to think big batteries were just for short-term backup. Didn't expect California to reach the point where they can actually support part of the grid. Before, when the wind stopped or the sun went down, you'd need gas to kick in. Now, in many cases, batteries are enough. That said, I do wonder what happens when all these batteries get old. Are we just pushing the next problem down the road?
- ragebol 1y agoBatteries can be recycled, just like solar panels can. Maybe not as easy as metals or glass, but can be recycled nonetheless
- Aziell 1y agoI didn’t know batteries could actually be recycled. I always thought it wasn’t very common. But now I’m curious how high the actual recycling rate is. Are there any good examples of it working well?
- burkaman 1y agoIt's very difficult to tell what the global recycling rate is, here's a good article about that: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/battery-recycling-myth https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/battery-recycling-.... It might be as high as 59%. There are a lot of companies working on ramping up this industry in the US, some examples are https://ascendelements.com/ https://ascendelements.com/, https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/, https://ecobat.com/our-business/ecobat-solutions/lithium-services/ https://ecobat.com/our-business/ecobat-solutions/lithium-ser.... There's no real technological barrier, it's just about making the economics work.
- justinzollars 1y agoWho cares? Electricity is literally the flow of electric charge, typically measured in terms of current (amperes). China has substantial baseload capacity. China adds an America of capacity every 18 months. Batteries connected to the grid, imply shortages. A need to balance supply and demand, manage variability in energy sources. They are also very expensive. So we have net on net, less power, that's unreliable, that's more expensive. Nothing to brag about.