GridStatus Blog analyzes US electric grid data, covering batteries, solar, ERCOT and CAISO, and data center load.
HN commenters cite its data to argue California's batteries have largely solved the duck curve problem and absorb much of solar output.
Because it is economic insanity to rely on your asset to have an economical life across 70+ years.
Then some storage boogeyman. Do check out California.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
A recent study found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261924010882
> Exactly, paying an obscene amount of money now means that in 90 years' time, that money is much cheaper compared if you had to spend it in 90 years, or every 20 years to replace your renewables and storage parks.
Great that you admit to having zero economic knowledge. That is the exact reverse of how it works.
Money now are worth way more than money…
Summarizing from the article, this link [1] shows that there were more sources of generation that ERCOT didn't ask to come online. Specifically, all the capacity that could come online with 5 minutes was online except for a tiny 130 MW of generation.
[1] https://blog.gridstatus.io/content/images/2024/08/ERCOT-Recap-8.19-8.20.2024--7-.png
Instead of calling for something that needed more than 5 minutes, ERCOT relied on all the batteries on the grid. I don't know what this quote means:
> 2,000 MW of extra capacity released from ECRS.
But I do know what this means:
> battery discharge peaked 20% higher than the previous record, which was set only the day before.
It's referencing this graph: [2]
[2] https://blog.gridstatus.io/content/images/2024/08/ERCOT-Recap-8.19-8.20.2024--3-.png
The graph has units of Megawatts. In other words, the thing that was record setting about the batteries was not the Megawatt-hours, or total storage in battery systems.
What set the record was the instantaneous power usage, and apparently the batteries in Texas were at their hottest ever. (No idea if anything caught on fire though!)
Here are some more assumptions I am reading into this:
* The 130 MW that didn't come online may have been rotated around. Maybe all the generation jumped in at different times, guided by supply and demand, but ERCOT regulations likely played a role in keeping the existing systems from exceeding the demand or blowing up transmission lines, etc.
* The article…
I'm hungry for good news about technical solutions working - especially right now when Trump just killed the US's largest solar project (6.2 GW in Nevada), ended USDA solar support for farms, and posted "We will not approve...Solar". So I wanted to check if California's battery story holds up.
The data is actually encouraging. Peak demand hit 48,323 MW in 2024 - higher than the 2020 blackout year's 47,121 MW [1]. Weather was severe: 2023 broke 358 California temperature records, 2024 saw valleys top 110°F during multiple heat waves [2][3]. Battery discharge reached 5-7 GW during Sept 2024 peaks, offsetting ~16% of demand [4]. That's real.
Fair caveat: 2020 had compounding failures (imports fell 3,000 MW short, gas plants failed, planning issues [5]), and recent years benefited from better coordination and wet winters. But batteries were clearly the biggest new factor - going from 500 MW in 2020 to 15,700 MW today is massive buildout, and it performed when tested.
Nice to see an existence proof that we can make progress on adapting to climate change's second-order effects, maybe even progress on root causes - through technology, at scale, in the United States of 2025.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory.pdf
[2] https://news.caloes.ca.gov/extreme-heat-breaking-records-at-home-and-beyond/
[3] https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-forecasts/california-heat-wave-temperatures-to-top-110-as-july-begins/1663794
[4]…
Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Heyo everyone, cool to see this here. I'm a co-founder and head of product at Grid Status if anyone has specific questions about the site. I see some energy market questions here about CAISO and natural gas, net load, etc., so here's a link to a blog we wrote last year that covers some of these topics, might be helpful[0]. The market has been setting a bunch of records recently, which you can see here[1].
Also, as a bonus, if you click this link[2] while logged in it will enable a preview of our nodal price map app which people tend to enjoy playing around with.
[0] https://blog.gridstatus.io/balancing-act/ [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso [2] https://www.gridstatus.io/map?nodalMapPreview
IN https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/ , there is a very interesting quote. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has also been lauded for its growth in storage, but when put into perspective of load, the gap remains quite large. Comparing all-time peak load and peak storage discharge (non-coincident), ERCOT's battery fleet would have met less than 5% of demand, while CAISO's battery fleet would have met about 16%, more than triple the value in Texas."
Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.