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The state once again breaks production records in spring thanks to solar energy, while energy storage takes over during the period of maximum electrical demand, becoming the maximum source of production.
California has announced that it has crossed the line of 10 GW of energy storage installed on its electrical grid. As of the announcement, the state had noted that exactly 10,379 GW of production was connected, representing an increase from 770 MW that were connected in 2019.
The state projects it will need 52 GW of batteries connected to its grid by 2045. Along with an additional 57.5 GW of solar, state modeling suggests an additional 15.7 GW of four-hour lithium-ion batteries, and 19.5 GW of eight-hour lithium-ion batteries. Additional pumped hydraulic power and long-term energy storage are also contemplated, although the projected volumes are currently low in the models.
Although the press release and generally available public data do not provide data on the number of hours these systems would produce, a rough estimate of the hours can be made based on state standards and general industry hardware standards.
As of April 15, the State had installed a total of 154,155 energy storage systems. Of them, just over 98% are residential systems, with a total of 1,076 GW of production capacity. Of the rest, 2,777 are commercial systems, while 175 are commercial-scale installations connected directly to the grid.
For residential and commercial systems, totaling 1,647 GW, the general industry standard is to install two to four hours of storage capacity behind production capacity. If we calculate an average of three hours per megawatt of production, we can have 4,951 GWh of storage behind these units.
In California, by policy, most batteries are four-hour batteries, suggesting that the States 8,736 GW of output capacity has 34,944 GWh of storage behind it.
In total, 39,895 GWh of energy storage was connected to the grid a couple of weeks ago.
However, more significant than the capacity value is what the batteries are doing.
In 2019, California knew it had a challenge: fossil fuels were retiring and evening peak hours were prone to power outages. The state saw the need to exceed 4.7 GW of power to manage these periods in 2022, so it implemented plans to deploy energy storage plus additional solar energy to fill these batteries.
This spring, we saw the batteries do exactly what they were tasked with: taking charge of the evening peak periods.
For example, on April 27 at 8:40 p.m. PST, utility batteries were producing more than 6.5 GW of power, by far the largest source of electricity. There were also several hours where the batteries were the biggest source.
Another 8 GW of energy storage is expected to be deployed next year. |
