batteries on Solar Noon

San Francisco getting huge new battery

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:17:19 -0500

Cool story from Canary Media on an example of how battery technology can be nimbly deployed in an urban area: Nation’s largest urban battery to take center stage near San Francisco.

the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City… will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.

The article points out the difficulty of “sticking a smokestack in San Francisco”, even if California were building new gas plants (which they’re not). This project is a much more feasible way to bring power right into the city.

These days, California expands generation by building large-scale solar plants in wide-open spaces, but those plants need to ship their power over many miles of transmission lines to reach the cities where it gets consumed. The Cormorant battery provides something new: a dense source of on-demand power that can slip into the urban fabric without any local air pollution, and which absorbs the far-off solar generation at midday to discharge later at night.

Virginia, showing how to do it

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:22:12 -0500

That Democratic trifecta in Virginia is showing how it’s done. From this overview from Canary Media, here are some of the initiatives they’re taking to promote cleaner, faster-to-deploy, and – maybe most important in this economy – cheaper energy solutions:

A slew of bills that would maximize use of the state’s grid, pave the way for more batteries and solar arrays of all sizes, and take other steps to lower energy bills are poised to become law with Spanberger’s signature in the coming weeks.

…the state hasn’t wavered from a law mandating 100% carbon-free electricity by midcentury — even as the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to derail Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the largest offshore wind farm in the country

In the face of ongoing self-defeating anti-clean-energy nonsense from the Trump administration, it’s up to states, counties, cities, HOAs, PTAs – whoever! – to do the work of moving away from fossil fuels. Virginia understands the assignment.

Democrats’ strategy for tackling those worries was twofold, said VanValkenburg: to boost solar and storage, and to better utilize existing transmission and distribution infrastructure. “These are the two things we can do that are the cheapest, the fastest to get online, and the fastest way to save ratepayers money,” he said.

He nailed it: we have the solutions right now, and they are cheap and fast. These politicians know they can score quick, solid, and lasting wins. Even when the nation is dragged into unnecessary wars.

“Storage is really a critical affordability component, especially over the long term,” said Nate Benforado, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “If we can build storage, that is going to obviate the need for a lot of this gas, which is expensive and risky for customers.” Noting the war in the Middle East as the latest global conflict to impact fossil fuel prices, Benforado added, “If we continue to invest in gas infrastructure, expect your bills to go up and up.”

I loved this article, too, for this insight:

“There were a whole lot more from other members,” said Hernandez [sponsor of several key pieces of clean energy legislation]. “This moment that we’re in is all about having 1,000 great ideas, because there’s no one thing you can do to fix every problem.”

That’s the spirit! “1,000 great ideas” is exactly what we need. Couple that with the crazy rate of innovation happening with solar (and wind, and batteries), and we have our work cut out for us. We need to stop wringing our hands, stop waiting for some silver bullet, and start doing the work. Go, Virginia!

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:18:16 -0500

Great story – with great pictures – from @Science.org, who named the surge in renewable power their 2025 Breakthrough of the Year:

China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.

The Power of Scalable Battery Power

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:31:59 -0500

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.