One of the killer features of renewables is that they’re modular, scalable, and can be fit in right where they’re needed. Less so for wind turbines, perhaps, but the innovation happening with batteries is showing this at virtually every level. At the smallest scale – personal, even – electricity can be stored in portable solar generators (I just got a small one of these to keep my phone, laptop, & more running; $300 and free power from the sun for years to come). On the bigger end are utility-scale “BESS” (battery energy storage systems), which add resiliency at the electrical grid level.

The biggest of those BESS projects can be subject to the delays inherent in any big construction effort: bureaucracy, complexity, NIMBYism, fear mongering about their supposed dangers (a topic for another post), cost and schedule overruns, etc. That’s where the killer feature of scalability comes in: these solutions don’t all have to be so big. As in this story from Canary Media: Small but mighty grid batteries take root in Virginia amid energy crunch.

The 10-megawatt, four-hour batteries, one each in the tiny towns of Exmore and Tasley, represent this ​“missing middle,” said Chris Cucci, chief strategy officer for Climate First Bank, which provided $32 million in financing for the two units. Batteries are a critical technology in the shift to renewable energy because they can store wind and solar electrons and discharge them when the sun isn’t shining or breezes die down.

When it comes to energy storage, ​“we need volume, but we also need speed to market,” Cucci said. ​“The big projects do move the needle, but they can take a few years to come online.” And in rural Virginia, batteries paired with enormous solar arrays — which can span 100-plus acres — face increasing headwinds, in part over the concern that they’re displacing farmland.

The Exmore and Tasley systems, by contrast, took about a year to permit, broke ground in April, and came online this fall, Cucci said. Sited at two substations 10 miles apart, the batteries occupy about 1 acre each.

These “small but mighty” batteries can fill the crucial gap when production from solar or wind dips, as well as when demand spikes. That kind of capacity planning is crucial for utilities, to protect their users in the event of severe weather, summer heat as well as winter storms. A popular solution to these eventualities in the past has been gas-powered “peaker” plants. But in addition to the power they provide being more expensive, there are other problems with those.

“Peaker plants are smaller power plants that are in closer proximity to the populations they serve, and [they] are traditionally very dirty,” Cucci said. ​“They’re also economically inefficient to run. Battery storage is cleaner, more efficient, and easier to deploy.”

Gas peaker plants are wasteful partly because of all the energy required to drill and transport the fuel that fires them, said Nate Benforado, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group.

“Then you get [the fuel] to your power plant, and you have to burn it,” Benforado said. ​“And guess what? You only capture a relatively small portion of the potential energy in those carbon molecules.”

Single-cycle peaker plants, the most common type, can go from zero to full power in minutes, much like a jet engine. Their efficiency ranges between 33% and 43%.

The other good news for these grid battery installations is that federal tax credits for them managed to survive Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, and are still in effect. This is a clean, proven, and inexpensive technology that can be – no, should be – deployed wherever needed.

Good news: US judge strikes down Trump order blocking wind energy projects

A federal judge on Monday struck down Donald Trump’s order blocking wind energy projects, saying the effort to halt leasing of windfarms on federal lands and waters was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated US law

One of the key arguments here at Solar Noon is we don’t have time for that shit, referring to the nonsense that distracts us from the solar future that’s already within our grasp today. Here’s a perfect example: a splashy National Geographic cover story on the giant fusion project “ITER”. The online version of the article, “Inside the long-shot megaproject that aims to solve our energy worries forever” is locked for subscribers (like me, currently), but read on and you won’t miss much. You’re not missing much regardless.

Fusion is that other kind of nuclear reaction, the one that generates energy by atoms smashing together, as opposed to fission, the one that splits them. Fission is what’s used in the nuclear power plants of the past: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Homer Simpson’s Springfield. The magical unicorn promise of fusion is that it has less radioactive waste (but not none!) and can theoretically provide a lot more power.

The key word in that last sentence is theoretically. A lot of smart folks who know about such things aren’t too keen on the whole idea:

Daniel Jassby, who worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab for 25 years, wrote after his retirement that a fusion plant would be too convoluted, requiring endless maintenance, and “cause more problems than it would solve.” The late Lawrence Lidsky, an associate director of MIT’s fusion center and founding editor of the Journal of Fusion Energy, declared after a long career that fusion power is a fantasy, noting that it’s widely regarded as “the hardest scientific and technical problem ever tackled.” Walter Marshall, former chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, reportedly said that “fusion is an idea with infinite possibility and zero chance of success.”

The entire framing of this article is insane. It’s practically a manifesto of how impractical, complicated, expensive, misguided and crazy this whole project is, but cast in the heroic light of amazement and wonder. Which I suppose is on brand for National Geographic: audacious and amazing and impractical stuff, pictures of rare wildlife, etc. Another article in the same issue is about an 18-year-old who’s climbed the world’s 14 tallest peaks. But the subtitle of this ITER article is, The race is on to harness the near-infinite power of nuclear fusion—by building a star on Earth. And scientists are closer than you might think. Scientists, you learn after reading the whole thing, are actually farther away than you think:

The strange truth of ITER, however, is that it will never produce power. The machine is strictly an experiment to prove that all the steps are achievable. Steam turbines, old technology well understood, will presumably be installed in later generations of fusion plants that will be built all over the world. This step could easily be more than 50 years away.

Realize, dear reader, that this effort started in 1958. Construction of the facility featured in this article didn’t even start until 2007. In 2022 they made headlines around the world for a huge milestone: installing one – one! of nine! – of the central “vacuum vessel modules” that’s essential to part of the design. Yet that was so badly botched that they had to tear it all out and start over, a mistake that cost them years. At the cost of billions of dollars, of course - though the thing’s been dragging on so long that nobody’s really sure how much total money it’s burned yet (the US Dept. of Energy estimates $65 billion, and counting).

That’s all public money, from countries all over the world (the international cooperation behind this boondoggle is actually a pretty nice story, if surely sanitized in Nat Geo style), but there are also a bunch of private companies trying to crack this nut. Let’s stop pouring taxpayer money into the 270-million degree plasma that will never exist inside this “most complex machine humans have ever attempted to build”. And let’s stop looking to these ‘so crazy it just might work’ long shots.

Fusion, observers like to say, is 20 years away—and always will be.

Meanwhile, as the world outside of Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France continues to burn, we have the technology right now, today, this minute, to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. Those technologies – solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage – are all advancing at a fantastic pace, too. Their research and deployment could absolutely use billions of public dollars, and they will start putting out the climate fires immediately. They’re also easily distributable and installable all over the world. Even if there were some magic breakthrough with nuclear fusion and someone figured out how to build these “most complex machines humans have ever attempted” today, how soon do you suppose one of those reactors would pop up in Africa, or Southeast Asia, or Mississippi? It’s ludicrous to suggest this technology fantasy has the slightest bearing on “solving our energy worries”, so let’s just not, okay?

Great news from The Guardian: law changes could soon bring balcony solar to millions across US

Balcony solar panels are now widespread in countries such as Germany – where more than 1m homes have them – but have until now been stymied in the US by state regulations. This is set to change, with lawmakers in New York and Pennsylvania filing bills to join Utah in adopting permission for the panels, with Vermont, Maryland and New Hampshire set to follow suit soon.