Gov. Gavin Newsom stated Thursday that California continued to quickly add the battery storage that’s essential to the transition to cleaner power, however admitted it was nonetheless not sufficient to keep away from blackouts throughout warmth waves.
Standing in the midst of a photo voltaic farm in Yolo County, Newsom introduced the state now had battery storage techniques with the capability of greater than 10,000 megawatts — about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is required to fulfill its local weather objectives.
“That is essential to how we obtain 100% clear power by 2045,” Newsom stated. “Batteries enable us to make use of clear power captured by photo voltaic and different renewable sources always of the day, particularly when photo voltaic technology drops after the solar goes down.”
The last word objective, he stated, is to gradual local weather change.
“Because the hots get hotter, the drys get drier, the wets get wetter, simultaneous droughts, and rain bombs, we now have to deal with these points with a ferocity that’s required of us and we’re doing simply that in California,” he stated.
Requested by reporters if California now had sufficient battery storage in order that residents not needed to fear about blackouts throughout instances of excessive energy use, Newsom laughed.
“We’ve a number of work to do nonetheless in transferring this transition, with the sort of stability that’s required,” the governor stated. “So no, this isn’t at present asserting that blackouts are a part of our previous.”
Battery storage installations work by receiving extra photo voltaic and wind energy and releasing it later, particularly from 4 to 9 p.m. when the state’s grid is most below stress.
Final yr, Newsom appointees voted to increase the operation of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant one other 5 years to bolster the reliability of Calfornia’s grid and keep away from rolling blackouts. The growing old nuclear facility and its twin reactors had been scheduled to close down.
In August 2020, a serious warmth occasion fueled by the local weather disaster pressured a number of the state’s first rotating energy outages in many years, as the continued transition to inexperienced power lagged behind demand. Californians narrowly averted rolling blackouts in 2022 as a record-breaking warmth wave broiled nearly each nook of the state for days.
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