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Texas and California offered intriguing, opposing examples of what batteries can do for the grid.
While cold winters in the south and hot summers across the country are the most dramatic times for electricity usage — with air conditioners blasting as weary workers return home or inefficient electric heaters strain to keep toes warm from Chattanooga to El Paso before the sun is up — it may be early spring that gives us the most insight into the lower-emitting grid of the future.
In California, America’s longtime leader in clean energy deployment, the combination of mild temperatures and longer days means that solar power can do most of the heavy lifting. And in Texas — whose uniquely isolated, market-based and permissive grid is fast becoming the source of much of the country’s clean power growth — regulators allow the state’s vast fleet of natural gas power (and some coal) power plants to shut down for maintenance during the mild weather, giving renewables time to shine.
And not just renewables: Both Texas and California saw remarkable usage of batteries on the grid this week. If the whole country’s grid is ever going to be decarbonized, other grids will have to start looking at what's happening in America’s two largest states.
At 7:30 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, with 20,000 megawatts of power unavailable due to planned outages of thermal power plants, batteries were providing 1.7 gigawatts of power to the Texas grid, slightly more than solar, while wind was providing 5.5 gigawatts. Four hours earlier, solar and wind combined for almost 25 gigawatts. Real-time prices Tuesday evening topped out at over $4,000 per megawatt hour, getting close to the $5,000 cap imposed after blackouts and price spikes of Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
“There was a substantial amount of physical capacity available still,” Connor Waldoch, co-founder of the electricity monitoring company Grid Status, told me, referring to generation that was capable of selling power to the grid but was being kept off in case of an emergency. “ERCOT,” the organization that governs the Texas grid, “has been operating conservatively for the last few years,” he said. Temperatures were also high late in the day, with temperatures in the 80s in the evening parts of Texas, leading ERCOT to ask some plants to delay their scheduled maintenance.
According to Grid Status,there was more battery storage on the Texas grid Tuesday than at any point since high temperatures tested its stability last September. That combined with high prices in the real-time energy market meant a huge payday for battery storage operators. When there are more planned outages for natural gas, Waldoch explained, batteries are bidding “at the very tippity top” and likely earning huge revenues in just a few a hours.
But all those batteries are not necessarily helping decarbonize Texas’ electricity system by charging when there’s a lot of cheap solar and discharging when renewables are scarce and prices are high.
That’s because battery systems in Texas make the lion’s share of their revenues by providing what’s known in Texas as “ancillary services.” ERCOT pays battery operators to be available if the grid needs power quickly — and then they get paid again for the power they provide when called upon.
The spike in prices and battery operators' response be a sign that the battery market is maturing. In 2023, according to the battery storage data service Modo Energy, Texas battery operators earned around 85% of their revenuefrom providing ancillary services. For battery developers, earning money this way is ideal because it means less wear and tear on battery systems as they charge and discharge.
That said, the portion of revenue that battery systems earn from selling actual energy almost tripled from 2022 to 2023; Brandt Vermillion, Modo’s ERCOT lead, estimated that installed battery capacity would double in ERCOT in 2024, while the amount of ancillary services would stay “more or less fixed.” As the supply of battery capacity gets closer to and possibly exceeds demand for ancillary services, those prices will fall, Vermillion said. Over time, “energy arbitrage” — charging when prices are low and discharging when prices are high — will become a more and more attractive way to earn revenue.
To get a sense of what that will look like, Texas battery storage operators should look west.
In California this week, conditions were more, well, pacific. At 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday night, there were around 6 gigawatts of battery storage discharging onto the grid, more than the 5 gigawatts of natural gas or the 4.5 gigawatts of hydro power at the time. Batteries were the largest source of power on the grid.
This was a signal moment for California, which has been procuring and deploying grid batteries at a breakneck pace, and even retooled its residential solar program to encourage home battery storage. California’s grid has over 7 gigawatts of installed battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, the most of any state, while Texas, in second place, has just over 3 gigawatts. (There are another 300 utility-scale battery projects in the pipeline for 2024, according to the EIA, with about half of them planned for Texas.)
In California, the so-called “saturation” of ancillary services by batteries is far more advanced, and the portion of revenues earned by battery systems by providing them has decreased.
“Ancillary services have gone from taking up the majority of battery capacity to only a small fraction,” according to a report by the California Independent System Operator. By the end of 2022, the majority of battery revenue came from the energy markets, not ancillary services, the report said.
Thanks to the magnitude of solar in California, Grid Status’ Waldoch explained, “almost every day there’s a long negative- or low-price period” — an ideal time for carbon-abating energy arbitrage.
Batteries that are most carbon-abating tend to power themselves when transmission is congested, which essentially “strands” renewables on the grid, or when they would otherwise be curtailed, when there’s too much renewable power available compared to demand, explained Emma Konet, co-founder of Tierra Climate, which is working to set up a voluntary carbon market to encourage carbon-abating battery usage. When the company examined Texas’ battery market in 2022, it found that only about a fifth of batteries were actually abating carbon.
In fact, the most carbon-intensive battery system in Texas that Tierra Climate looked at was also its most profitable, making the lion’s share of its revenue in the ancillary services markets; the most carbon-abating didn’t participate in the ancillary services markets at all, and was paired directly with a solar project.
Texas's energy market is simply not structured in a way such that there's a good correlation between low prices and low emissions for charging and high prices and high emissions when batteries discharge, Konet told me. (The best way to align batteries with lower emissions, she added, would be a carbon tax of at least $50 a ton.) While Tierra Climate hasn’t looked in detail at California, Konet said California’s battery systems are more likely to be carbon-abating because of the prevalence of storage projects paired with renewable generation.
There’s probably no worse way to encourage Texas to do something than by pointing to California as a positive example. Still, if Texas’ battery storage industry is ever going to turn into something more than an adjuster pedal for its existing grid mix, it’s going to have to get a little more Left Coast — or at least move a little closer to those solar panels.
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.