Category: CALIFORNIA_NEWS ENERGY_STORAGE_MN

According to the non-profit ISO, which oversees the operation of California’s bulk electric power system, transmission lines and electricity market generated and transmitted by its member utilities, the 5GW of lithium-ion battery capacity on the electric grid can provide enough power for approximately 3.8 million homes for up to four hours before needing to be recharged.

Consultants and analysts have warned of looming shortages due to surging demand for key minerals like lithium and cobalt used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies.

Texas led the nation in battery storage growth for the first few months of the year, adding enough utility-scale batteries to power almost 100,000 homes on a hot summer day, according to research and consulting firm S&P Global.

When frigid weather caused rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve across North Carolina, Eliana and David Mundula quickly grew worried about their 2½-week-old daughter, whom they had brought home days earlier from a neonatal intensive care unit.

The fan club for abandoned oil and gas wells is an exceedingly small one, but Kemp Gregory might just be the president. Where others see an eyesore or a source of rogue methane emissions, Gregory sees opportunity.

For decades, hydropower has been most common source of renewable electricity in the world. (In the US, it was passed by wind a few years ago.) Pumped hydro — large hydropower facilities in which water is pumped up and run down hill to store energy — remains the most common form of energy storage, both in the US and in the world.

Battery recycling has become an important issue in the United States, and recent efforts by the federal government, private industry and academia suggest that the country is quickly making batteries more easily recycled, reused and kept out of landfills.

If y’all have been around for a while, you know that I love writing about batteries (see exhibits A, B, and C). Using chemical reactions to store energy is handy and scaleable, and there are about a million ways to do it, which is why batteries have basically become synonymous with energy storage.

The memorandum of understanding brings together the federal government, Edison Electric Institute, Electric Power Research Institute and the Long-Duration Energy Storage Council.

A record 4.8 GW of utility-scale non-hydropower storage was established in the U.S. in 2022, bringing total capacity to 11.4 GW, according to Sustainable Energy in America 2023 Factbook released Thursday by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. That’s up from a previous record build of 3.7 GW in 2021.