California battery storage grows rapidly, but blackouts still a risk

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that California continues to rapidly add battery storage, crucial for the transition to cleaner energy, but admitted it’s still not enough to avoid power outages during surges heat.

Standing in the middle of a solar farm in Yolo County, Newsom announced that the state now has battery storage systems with a capacity of more than 10,000 megawatts, or about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts that the The State considers necessary to achieve its climate objectives.

“This is essential to achieving 100% clean energy by 2045,” Newsom said. “Batteries allow us to use clean energy captured by solar and other renewable sources at any time of day, especially when solar production declines after sunset. »

The ultimate goal, he says, is to slow climate change.

“As temperatures get hotter, dry areas get drier, wet areas get wetter, droughts and torrential rains simultaneously, we must tackle these issues with the ferocity that is required of us and that is exactly what we do in California,” he said. said.

Asked if California now has enough battery storage that residents no longer have to worry about power outages during periods of high power consumption, Newsom laughed.

“We still have a lot of work to do to move this transition forward, with the kind of stability that is needed,” the governor said. “So no, we are not announcing today that power outages are a thing of our past.”

Battery storage facilities work by receiving excess solar and wind energy and releasing it later, particularly between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., when the state’s grid is most stressed.

Last year, Newsom appointees voted to extend the operation of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant for five years to strengthen the reliability of California’s grid and avoid repeated power outages. The aging nuclear facility and its twin reactors were scheduled to close.

In August 2020, a major heat event fueled by the climate crisis caused some of the first rotating blackouts in the state in decades, as the ongoing transition to green energy lagged behind the request. Californians narrowly avoided rolling blackouts in 2022, as a record-breaking heat wave ravaged nearly every corner of the state for days.