California has new weapons to battle summer blackouts: Battery storage, power from record rain

An aircraft takes off from Los Angeles International Airport behind electric power lines at sunset It’s a summertime sequence that’s become all too familiar in California: Extreme heat forces air conditioners into overdrive, which pushes the state’s power grid to the brink. “In general, we’re doing better this summer because we have better hydro, we have more batteries.” Since last summer, California ISO — the nonprofit that runs the state’s electric grid — has brought more than 2,000 megawatts of new battery storage online, an almost 75% increase in capacity, officials said. “Extremes of climate change remain a wild card — another extreme event like last summer could once again put the grid into vulnerable territory.” He predicted that a situation like last September — when the grid hit record-high demand, at about 52,000 megawatts — could likely be managed with the state’s contingency resources and additional market procurements. “We haven’t hit particularly high demand yet.” Even still, California ISO last week issued an energy emergency alert 1, noting “higher than anticipated demand,” but ended it an hour later. Then this week, officials issued two energy emergency watches — the lowest warning — citing Wednesday “some resources going offline, continued excessive heat in interior Southern California and transmission congestion restricting movement of power to parts of the state.” But data shows demand, even at peak hours, never quite flirted near capacity as it did repeatedly last September.