California — The Resilient State. Really.

In the midst of a historic heat wave, the state’s power grid has so far passed with flying colors

Remember rolling blackouts in California? At least at this point, they appear to be a thing of the past.

Earlier today, I noticed a tweet from Cody Hill, who refers to himself as a “batteries and clean energy infrastructure developer,” pointing to a rather stunning development. Despite a massive heat wave that has put more stress on California’s power grid (downtown Los Angeles set a record 105 degrees yesterday), there have no reliability problems and no price spikes on the ISO.

It’s pretty obvious why: batteries.

Look at the chart: there is large reserve capacity on the grid. As ABC reported today:

While electricity demand has not necessarily decreased, grid capacity has increased substantially in recent years.

CAISO said peak grid capacity often reached just over 50,000 megawatts five years ago. Today, peak capacity has reached nearly 70,000 megawatts.

“Batteries are really the story here,” said Jayme Ackemann of CAISO. “In the last five years, we’ve added more than 17,000 megawatts of battery storage.”

A friend of mine told me two decades ago that “batteries are the future of energy, and they always will be.” He doubted that we could ever develop batteries cost-effectively. But we can, and we have. Combine that with solar — and yes, natural gas (still massively cleaner than coal) — and you can see the energy transition in real time. As more wind power and geothermal come online, it will get even better.

This won’t stop Republican knuckle-draggers from insisting that renewables cannot handle base loads, but like everything else they say, it just ain’t so.

It bears highlighting that even with the heat, and record setting humidity, air quality has remained pretty good. Virtually the entire Los Angeles Basin had either good or moderate air quality throughout September 9th and 10th — only the highest smog areas like Riverside and San Bernardino went lower, and even there, it was only unhealthy for sensitive groups. When I was growing up, this would have been a 1st or 2nd Stage smog alert, no question. Thank the Clean Air Act (as Ann will continue to point out).

And it also presents yet another example of a depression fact about public policy and governance: when the government (and the private sector with proper public incentives) actually solve problems, it gets no coverage. And that is especially the case when something bad is prevented. The millions who cursed the government for rolling blackouts will not praise it for fixing the problem. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass gets lambasted almost daily for the city Fire Department’s failure to stop the Palisades Fire: she will get no credit for the LAFD’s squashing out a potentially deadly fire in the Hollywood Hills yesterday. (In point of fact, she deserves neither praise nor blame, but she should get both or neither).

I will be the first to admit that I have not a clue about to fix the problem of The Dog That Didn’t Bark. Except, I suppose, writing a blog post. But we should all be aware of it, and make sure to point it out to anybody and everybody. Who knows? This story is so important that maybe even the media will notice.

Clean Air Act, Cody Hill