For decades, rolling blackouts and urgent calls for energy conservation were part of life in California — a reluctant summer ritual almost as reliable as the heat waves that drove them. But the state has undergone a quiet shift in recent years, and the California Independent System Operator hasn’t issued a single one of those emergency pleas, known as Flex Alerts, since 2022.
Experts and officials say the Golden State has reached a turning point, reflecting years of investment in making its electrical grid stronger, cleaner and more dependable. Much of that is new battery energy storage, which captures and stores electricity for later use.
In fact, batteries have been transformative for California, state officials say. In late afternoon, when the sun stops hitting solar panels and people are home using electricity, batteries now push stored solar energy onto the grid.
California has invested heavily in the technology, helping it mature and get cheaper in recent years. Battery storage in the state has grown more than 3,000% in six years — from 500 megawatts in 2020 to more than 15,700 megawatts today.
“There is no question that the battery fleet that has grown rapidly since 2020, along with the state’s expanding portfolio of other supply and demand-side resources, has been a real game changer for reliability during summer periods of peak demand,” said Elliot Mainzer, CAISO’s president and chief executive.
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. In the wake of that event, California’s energy leaders vowed to take action to make the grid more resilient.
Since then, CAISO has overseen a massive build-out of new energy and storage resources, including more than 26,000 megawatts of new capacity overall, which has also helped make the grid more stable, Mainzer said. The state hasn’t seen rolling blackouts since 2020.
“Extreme weather events, wildfires and other emergencies can pose reliability challenges for any bulk electric system,” he said. “But the CAISO battery fleet, along with the additional capacity and close coordination with state and regional partners, have provided an indisputable benefit to reliability.”
Batteries are now key to California’s climate goals, including its mandate of 100% carbon neutrality by 2045.
Solar panels and battery storage units at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County on Nov. 25, 2024.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Already, batteries have enabled the grid to operate with dramatic decreases in the use of planet-warming fossil fuels. Now they’re becoming a more cost-effective and reliable replacement for aging gas-fired power plants, according to Maia Leroy, founder of the California energy consulting firm Lumenergy LLC and co-author of a recent report on the rise of battery storage over gas generation in California.
“Historically, Flex Alerts have always come through in summertime when it’s super hot and everyone is cranking their AC,” Leroy said. “But also in the summertime, we’re seeing that gas plants underperform because combustion doesn’t work well with ambient heat. So when we’re able to shift that need from having to use gas plants to something more stable, dispatchable and flexible like battery storage, then we’re able to meet that demand in the summer without having to rely on those underperforming gas plants.”
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.
Nikhil Kumar, program director with the energy policy nonprofit GridLab, said the technology already exists for longer-duration batteries, including through different chemistries such as iron-air batteries, which release energy through oxidation, and flow batteries, which store energy in liquid chemicals that flow through a reactor.
Those batteries are not yet as mature and can be more expensive and larger than their lithium-ion counterparts, Kumar said. But a recent GridLab report indicates that equation is changing, with the average cost of a new gas plant often on par with four-hour lithium-ion batteries and only slightly less expensive than longer-duration battery technologies.
“Batteries are going to get cheaper,” Kumar said. “Gas isn’t.”
The battery storage shift is occurring as the Trump administration takes steps to stifle solar and other forms of renewable energy in favor of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. At the end of September, the administration announced that it would open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired powered plants, which officials said would help strengthen the economy, protect jobs and advance American energy.
During an hourlong news conference on the initiative, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum described wind and solar energy as intermittent sources that are “literally dependent on the weather” — but neither he nor any other official mentioned the growth of battery storage that has made those sources more reliable and more promising.
It’s not a partisan issue. ERCOT, which operates Texas’s electrical grid, has more than 14,000 megawatts of batteries online, a nearly threefold increase from early 2023. California and Texas are constantly trading places as the top state for battery storage.
Battery storage units at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert of Kern County on Nov. 25, 2024.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
But Trump has made moves to support the production of batteries in the U.S. Currently, about three-quarters of the world’s batteries are made in China, and Trump’s tariffs — including a proposed 100% tariff on China — have been good for at least one Sacramento-based battery manufacturer, Sparkz.
“The administration wants critical material manufacturing to happen in the U.S.,” said Sanjiv Malhotra, founder and chief executive. “They basically are very much in favor of domestic manufacturing of batteries.”
Sparkz is making lithium-iron batteries that don’t use nickel and cobalt — a composition that has long been an industry darling but that depends on imported metals. Instead, their lithium-iron-phosphate batteries have a supply chain that is entirely based in the U.S., which means they can take advantage of federal tax credits that favor the production of clean energy components made mostly of domestic parts, Malhotra said. The company’s clients include data centers and utilities.
Malhotra added that California has done an excellent job “beefing up” the grid’s storage capacity in the last few years. He said batteries are a major reason why the state hasn’t seen a Flex Alert since 2022.
“The numbers basically tell the story that it was all because of, essentially, energy storage,” he said.
There is still work to do. While the state’s grid has seen improvements, it is more than a century old and was built primarily for gas plants. Experts and officials agree that it needs additional substantial upgrades and reforms to meet current energy demands and goals.
Permitting is also a hurdle, as California typically requires lengthy environmental review for new projects. The state, sometimes controversially, is now speeding review, and recently approved a massive solar and battery storage farm, the Darden Clean Energy Project in Fresno County, through a new fast-track permitting program. It will make enough electricity to power 850,000 homes for four hours, according to the California Energy Commission.
Safety remains a considerable concern. In January, a fire tore through one of the world’s largest battery storage facilities in Moss Landing, Monterey County. The facility housed around 100,000 lithium-ion batteries, which are exceptionally dangerous when ignited because 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 that were measured within miles of the site.
“When you’re dealing with large technologies in general, there’s always going to be some kind of danger,” said Leroy, of Lumenergy. “This points to the big need for diversifying the technologies that we use.”
Other forms of energy, such as oil and coal, also pose considerable health and safety risks including the emission of air pollution — soot, mercury, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide contributing to climate change.
California is in the process of eliminating coal power and expects to be completely coal-free by November. And while natural gas still makes up a large piece of the state’s portfolio, renewables represented nearly 60% of California’s in-state electricity generation in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The numbers continue to trend upward. 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.
“We have literally just demonstrated that California is able to run with super clean resources, with backups from natural gas,” said Kumar, of GridLab. “And it works. We don’t have Flex Alerts.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
