Fire at the Vistra battery plant in Moss Landing prompts evacuation orders.

[hunter]

5. The use of these battery plants is being misrepresented.

They are not being used to store solar and wind energy for use when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Instead they are being used like the spring / shock-absorber suspension in a car, to keep the tires engaged with the road.

A common street bicycle doesn't need a sophisticated suspension system to travel on a smooth road. The springiness of the air inside its tires and the resistance of the rubber is generally enough to keep the tire tread in constant contact with the pavement.

Much more sophisticated suspension systems are required on both cars and mountain bikes to handle bumpy paths and roads. Without some kind of suspension system the tires spend a significant amount of time detached from the road as the vehicle bounces up and down, and control of the system is lost. This causes crashes.

On a large regional electric grid the demand for electricity changes gradually throughout the day in predictable ways. The road is smooth. If you add large amounts of wind or solar power to the mix it makes the road bumpy and some kind of "suspension system" is required to keep all the immediate power resources fully engaged with the grid.

These kinds of suspension systems waste energy. A sophisticated 15 speed touring bicycle with narrow tires and no other suspension system takes less energy to pedal down a smooth bike path than a mountain bike with fat tires and a heavy suspension system.

The amount of batteries it would take to actually create a 99% reliable "renewable energy only" electric grid is entirely ludicrous.

A wealthy person might buy an "off grid" solar system for their home but that does not make them independent of the high energy world economy that supports them. Worse, these expensive resource-intensive systems are not scalable to all eight billion humans currently living on this planet.

In the long run all these large scale solar, wind, and battery projects are an empty gesture that will not save the world. Promoting these projects is just a light-as-in-beer form of climate change denial.