You know that old saw about how California supposedly can’t ever be solar-powered because the sun goes down at night?
That meme just got burnt up like a bug in the yard under a kid’s magnifying glass.
This May, our state got 51% of our electricity from the sun.
That’s not just a first for California. It’s a world record. Ours is the first large-scale power system anywhere to have created over half its electricity from solar over a full month.
And there’s one key reason why, a technological breakthrough that just destroyed the myth that said even if you could generate lots of solar power, there was no way to keep it around.
The answer is better batteries. And, in the last five years, batteries have gotten way better at storing electricity, in great part thanks to technological innovations made right here in the Golden State.
It’s what my brother, Bart Hibbs, BS aeronautical engineering Caltech ’77, has been promising (and working on, at Paul MacCready’s AeroVironment, where he has designed solar planes and cars) for decades. At a lunch with our sisters last month, before last week’s release of the analysis of May power generation here, Bart predicted the news.
“In late afternoon, when the sun stops hitting solar panels and people are home using electricity, batteries now push stored solar energy onto the grid,” Hayley Smith reports in the Los Angeles Times. “California has invested heavily in the technology, helping it mature and get cheaper in recent years. Battery storage in the state has grown more than 3,000% in six years — from 500 megawatts in 2020 to more than 15,700 megawatts today.”
One reason it’s so important: the former scourge of rolling blackouts, which five years ago were often threatened statewide and sometimes even implemented during summer heatwaves when power usage surged. Notice what we haven’t had this scorching summer? The threat of rolling blackouts. The California Independent System Operator hasn’t issued a so-called Flex Alert since 2022.
We often criticize our power companies — looking at you, Southern California Edison — and their Sacramento overseers, but the fact is that it’s CAISO’s growing battery fleet and its creation of a huge amount of new storage resources that are making possible the fact that over half of the electricity we used in May to power our state came from the sun.
It’s a key milestone, but there’s a reason the month known in Southern California for its overcast May Gray was the first to break the record: it’s not too hot nor too cold, which reduces air-conditioning and heating demand, which means solar can meet a higher percentage of our energy needs.
The original analysis, by the British nonprofit Ember, includes both large-scale solar generation such as the massive banks of panels in our High Desert, and homeowner and business rooftop solar panels. Also helping: In April, the really big SunZia wind project in New Mexico started sending electricity to California. That meant much less of a need to burn natural gas for electricity at night.
Nationwide, solar last month also reached a new landmark: It surpassed coal as an energy source.
And even though the current White House no longer lets Americans get federal tax credits for installing solar panels on their homes, just as with our state’s new policies, many more people are using their states’ incentives to add home batteries.
Yes, the progressive and climate-change-believing states of California and Hawaii led the country in new battery storage. But red-state Texas and purple Arizona were not far behind.
The fact that burning fossil fuels causes global warming and weirding isn’t a theory or a belief system. It simply is the case. Against the merely political opposition in Washington, D.C., states will continue to invest in solar, wind and other alternative energies until they are no longer alternative anymore.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.