NPR In 2008, Nancy Skinner was elected to the California State Legislature.
So technically my term began in 2009.
Nancy has witnessed the state's vision for clean energy first -hand.
Soon after she was elected, a bill was being considered to get more of their electricity than ever, from renewables, but there was a problem.
When the sun doesn't shine, or the wind doesn't blow, there's no power.
Several people approached Nancy to raise this issue.
We're going to have to figure out, how to store it?
And one way to store energy, a battery.
Extra solar and wind electrons that aren't needed on the grid, could flow into a battery.
The problem was though, grid scale storage wasn't really a thing.
None the less, Nancy was optimistic that eventually it would happen if you created a market signal.
So she introduced a bill requiring utilities to purchase a certain percentage of battery storage when they bought electricity.
Nancy remembers pushback.
That this was just pie in the sky.
This is not real like another California pipe dream.
Still, in 2010, the bill passed, although nothing really happened.
Grid -scale batteries remained a pie in the sky concept for years, and, then, all of a sudden, in 2021, batteries took off.
This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Kooper Katzmackim.
And I'm Darien Woods.
After years of nothing, grid -scale batteries are now widely used and growing fast – basically, the same tech that's in your phone is now helping power millions of homes across America.
How did that happen, and what does the newfound success mean for this grid?
– this week, we're bringing you three stories about battery storage.
And we'll begin in California, where batteries took off in the U .S.
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indeed from the very sunny California where there are enough batteries to power 13 million homes, I wanted to go because I have no idea how batteries actually work.
And I hope you learnt this on the trip.
I did. I connected with the battery storage facility that's connected to a solar farm, spread across 2 ,900 acres.
That is huge! It is the equivalent of more than 2 ,000 football fields.
It really did feel huge.
It took a long time to drive through.
The whole operation is called Cal Flats.
It's owned by an independent power producer, called Arevon.
Justin Johnson is the chief operating officer there.
Can we get our hard hat back there?
Yeah. Justin gave me a tour of the facility along with Anand Narayannan, arevon's senior VP of asset management.
I lost for a couple of hard hats.
At the battery storage facility itself, there are rows of white containers not much taller than a person.
I learned this is where it all happens.
It's like a series There's all these as a series of shelves, like imagine server racks, right?
So it's a bunch of silver racks like you have all your PCs, and the bunch of like PCs stacked together.
Which have the batteries in them, the in water inside them.
There's three per door.
So their stacked if you open up one of these doors, could we open one of them?
No. Yeah, which we don't have the keys.
Unfortunately, those are pretty fast.
No Koopa, I just wanted to open the door.
Don't see the problem here.
the do not press button was so tempting, if I see a button I wanna press it.
Either way, they told me that each one of these cabinets holds the batteries themselves.
They're about the size of a large briefcase and are manufactured by Tesla.
The batteries are similar to what would go in Tesla car, which is also made up of lithium ion.
And the site is packed with energy, I heard that Carl Flatts has enough storage capacity to power 60 ,000 homes over an afternoon, I know, yeah, it is wild.
of the world, Justin told me how this all works.
There's excess solar in the middle of the day, so the power price can be low, so we can take the extra solar that's produced in the day, from the arrays, and store it for use later in the evening, when it's needed most, when the sun is going down.
U -Husband's Pelazzi That hum you're hearing behind Justin is the HVAC system, keeping the batteries cool because they're charging from that solar energy, and probably also the heat just from how hot it is outside.
The sun was very strong when I visited.
Let's move to the shade.
That's like rule number one in solar is don't visit in the sun either.
Sounds like you might have got a bit of a California tan Cooper.
Yeah. The sun is not my friend as a redheaded man.
So it sounds like you'll be happier when the sun goes down.
Which is when a Revon sells the power when prices are high.
Rivon then moves the renewable electrons into underground cables to transmission lines to the grid.
For this power specifically, Rivon has two customers that buy this power Apple and PG &E, California's biggest electricity provider.
It's such a big facility and there's so much power generated It's hard to find one buyer to take and we also split the output to two buyers of electricity.
That means that somebody's home, saying, at Fresno, they'd turn on their lights or literally anyone who takes PG &E.
Exactly, yes, this power is kind of, I mean, an electron's an electron, it's hard to tell where it actually came from once it hits a transmission line, but ...
Alright, so how did we actually get here?
Remember that utility providers were saying to Nancy Skinner that this was some kind of pie in the sky, California dreaming concept.
Yeah, we put that question to Justin.
Right, so like all the scale and the advancements that went in the manufacturing to make it, to bring the scale up and then to drive the cost down.
Just weren't there yet to do it economically.
So we're at that really nice intersection where the technology's improved is enough, the cost has come down at that intersection where you're meeting the demand at the price they need to be successful where it allows us to build these sorts of plants to serve that need.
And so what we're left with is a totally new way for renewables to interact with the electricity grid.
The power created by the sun or winds can go further now, tapped into whenever a customer, like Apple or PG &E, wants it.
That's very significant, yeah.
So that was one of the big knock -on renewals, it always has been, it's intermittent.
But that hurt us financially as well - because we were paid less for our power because we were intermittent - So when you pair storage with solar, now we can...
The people we sell power to, it's more valuable to them because we can provide them power when xi want it most.
We can provide them a fixed shape, meaning tell us how much power you want in any given hour of the day and will design a plant to meet your needs exactly.
This new reliability and renewables is very attractive to tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon.
They already use solar and wind power but they have power hungry data centers to feed things like artificial intelligence.
So they're buying up battery storage too.
Tech companies aren't alone.
electricity demand is spiking worldwide due to data centers, but also electric cars, trains, cryptocurrency mining.
Demand is also coming from grid services like serving as a backup power if there's ever a blackout due to maybe an overworked grid that they can get.
I think if you have a solar plant, or a battery plant, or a combination anywhere in the US that's ready to be built these days, you can find an off -taker, you know, someone does sell the power.
There's just Tremendous demand for it.
In 2019, California had limited battery storage capacity.
In April of last year, batteries could power 10 million homes for a period of time.
Just six months later, that number grew to 13 million homes.
California has a long history of expanding its alternative energy sources.
Historically, the Golden State has been way ahead of the curve on renewables.
Going all the way back to the 1980s, with support and subsidies from both Republican and Democratic governors, but when it comes to the ongoing battery expansion, Justin Johnson says things are just getting started.
But this phenomenon you've seen in California, it's gonna occur elsewhere in the U .S.
It's just because California has the highest penetration level renewables anywhere in the U .S.
and it created the demand for storage.
As penetration levels increase throughout the U .S., as they have in Texas and elsewhere, the storage market is gonna follow in those areas too.
So everyone's ready for that.
Justin's company Revon believes in grid scale battery storage so much it's invested $2 billion in the space.
They already have five facilities in California including cal flats and it's looking at six more.
California got where it was because of planning from politicians like Nancy Skinner.
But in Texas, they take a bit more of a hands off free market rodeo type way of doing things.
We're looking to that on our next episode.
This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with Engineering by Neil T.
Vault was fact checked by Sarah Juarez.
Cake and Cannon edits a show and the indicator is a production of NPR.
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