Days before President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office and took actions to stall the transition to clean energy, a disaster unfolded on the other side of the country that may have an outsize effect on the pace of the transition.
A fire broke out last Thursday at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in California, one of the largest battery energy storage systems in the world. The fire raged through the weekend, forcing local officials to evacuate nearby homes and close roads.
Battery storage is an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. It works in tandem with solar and wind power to provide electricity during periods when the renewable resources aren’t available. But lithium-ion batteries, the most common technology used in storage systems, are flammable. And if they catch fire, it can be difficult to extinguish.
Last week’s fire is the latest and largest of several at the Moss Landing site in recent years, and I expect that it will become the main example opponents of carbon-free electricity use to try to stop battery development in other places.
The biggest problem with batteries is that people think that we need them.
What we need is for big consumers (heavy industries) to learn to take the electricity when it is cheap.
I have to disagree with that, because this solution isn’t free either.
Asking them to regulate their use requires them to build excess capacity purely for those peaks (so additional machinery), to have more inventory in stock, and depending on how manual labor intensive it is also means people have to work with a less reliable schedule. With some processes it might also simply not be able to regulate them up/down fast enough (or at all).
This problem is simply a function of whether it is cheaper to a) build excess capacity or b) build enough capacity to meet demand with steady production and add battery storage as needed.
Compared to most manufacturing lines battery tech is relatively simple tech, requries little to no human labor and still makes massive gains in price/performance. So my bet is that it’ll be the cheaper solution.
That said it is of course not a binary thing and there might be some instances where we can optimize energy demand and supply, but i think in the industry those will happen naturally through market forces. However this won’t be enough to smooth out the gap difference in the timing of supply/demand.
Bravo - very well-reasoned response.