In the Arizona desert, a Danish company is building a massive solar farm that includes batteries that charge when the sun is shining and supply energy back to the electric grid when it’s not.
Combining batteries with green energy is a fast-growing climate solution.
“Solar farms only produce when the sun shines, and the turbines only produce when the wind blows,” said Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper. “For us to maximize the availability of the green power, 24-7, we have to store some of it too.”
The United States is rapidly adding batteries, mostly lithium-ion type, to store energy at large scale. Increasingly, these are getting paired with solar and wind projects, like in Arizona. The agencies that run electric grids, utility companies and developers of renewable energies say combining technologies is essential for a green energy future.
Batteries allow renewables to replace fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, while keeping a steady flow of power when sources like wind and solar are not producing. For example, when people are sleeping and thus using less electricity, the energy produced from wind blowing through the night can be stored in batteries — and used when demand is high during the day.
Juan Mendez, a resident of Tempe, Arizona, gets power from local utility Salt River Project, which is collaborating with Ørsted on the Eleven Mile Solar Center. As a state senator, Mendez pushed SRP to move to renewable energies.
He thinks the power company is still investing too much in gas and coal plants, including a major expansion planned for a natural gas plant in Coolidge, Arizona, near the solar center.
“This solar-plus-storage is a good step, but SRP needs to do more to provide clean energy and clean up our air and help address climate change,” Mendez said.
The utility said it’s adding more renewables to its energy mix and recently pledged to zero out its emissions by 2050.
The U.S. has the second most electrical storage in the world, after China. In 2023, the U.S. added an estimated 7.5 gigawatts — 62% more than in 2022, according to the BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy factbook. That amount can power 750,000 homes for a day and brings the total amount of installed capacity nationwide to nearly enough for 2 million homes for one day, according to BloombergNEF.
In the year and a half since the passage of the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), energy experts have called for regulatory reforms to help fix the grid—think of expediting permits for transmission lines that deliver electricity from power plants to cities and speeding up the process of connecting new power plants to the grid. A 2022 Princeton University reportfound that more than 80% of the IRA’s emissions reductions could be lost if transmission expansion doesn’t pick up beyond its recent rate of about 1% annually.
Recent warnings that we need to get the electric grid in order have grown even more dire as a variety of factors have coalesced. To start, the grid has suffered from under-investment for decades and improvements can be hard to permit. At the same time, demand for electricity is growing much faster than expected, in large part driven by data centers and growing electrification of the economy (think of everything from EVs to stoves). Wind and solar energy have created additional challenges. After all, solar only generates power when the sun is shining and turbines only spin when the wind is blowing.
All of this adds up to an urgent picture: the integrity of the entire system is at stake, meaning that it may grow more difficult to keep the lights on consistently. A December report from North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that huge swathes of the country face elevated or high risk of inadequate electric generation capacity.
Writing about energy and climate change over the past decade, I’ve encountered many climate people who try to avoid talking about challenges with the grid out of fear that doing so might feed into a narrative that renewables aren’t reliable. Others have wanted to avoid the thorny issue of building new infrastructure in people’s backyards and the messy debate about permitting reform. With the grid’s looming issues, it may be time to change that thinking.
A reliable grid is important in its own right. The grid not only keeps our economy running but also protects our health and well-being. There are climate effects, too. Polsky argues that an unreliable grid—driven by a wide variety of factors—could lead to a “backlash” from the public. “My fear is that we have a major issue with the grid and then [people] start finding a scapegoat,” he told me. “What is the scapegoat? Renewables.”
The solution, if it weren’t clear already, is relatively simple: invest in the grid. To do that, though, will require a combination of private sector investment and support from government and regulators.
Chris Keefer’s latest Decouple’ podast talks about the huge increase in demand already happening from AI. An interesting point is that they want to keep line latency between data centers and areas of major demand down to milliseconds, if possible. The centers used to go to places like Iceland, with lots of cheap renewable energy, and cold climate for easy cooling. Now they’ll go to within a 100km of so of where demand is. Many are in Virginia, where the US Defence department first started building the net. A massive data center there .has just contracted for baseload supply from Susquehanna nuclear plant, 2 GW, 2 reactors, with very high capaciity factor. That won’t do the climate any good, though, unless it stimulates the build of new generating capacity. Whether that’s nuclear, W&S + batteries, geothermal, or gas is yet to be seen, but the tech billionaires have enough cash to pay for it.
“An interesting point is that they want to keep line latency between data centers and areas of major demand down to milliseconds, if possible.”
Michael Lewis’ 2014 book Flash Boys describes the special fiber optics lines that algorithm-driven high-speed trading companies wanted to connect to stock exchanges. They made money at the scale of pennies per millisecond or less which scales up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a day (or more). Like the energy-sucking Bitcoin miners and patent squatters, it’s just another example of rent-seeking behavior that makes money extremely disproportionate to provision of value (if anything is produced at all).
[Paradoxically, mainstream (i.e., non-slumlord) residential rentals do provide value in terms of residential service and maintenance for those who do not want the practical responsibilities of ownership. (Tomorrow I have to call another contractor to fix a major problem with my house.)]
I keep going back to one of grid expert Alison Silverstein’s areas of improvement: Better sectorization.
During the Texas-wide deep freeze of February 2021 the theory was that local utilities would implement rolling blackouts to spread the pain, while preserving power for vital services like hospitals. In Austin, the utility wasn’t split up that way, so people who lived near hospitals never lost power, while my particular neighborhood was out of power for just over 4 days.
You design a system to avoid failure, but in the event it does fail, it should fail in a controlled fashion. (That may sound oxymoronic to some, but in the case of a dam it’s better that only a portion fail than that the whole thing collapses.)