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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC. And joining me is EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons. And also joining us is Richard Engel of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority.

We are here to talk about maybe one of my favorite subjects, which is how we are going to achieve our dream of meeting 100% renewable energy. And in particular, this is going to be a focused conversation of the role that batteries, in particular, industrial size batteries, can play in our renewable energy future. So perhaps as a background, we should talk about the limitations of some forms of renewable energy, wind and solar. This is why batteries exist and are important in the first place.

But for someone like yourself, you are dealing with energy procurement for Redwood Coast Energy Authority. You are buying energy from various producers and have to kind of stitch it together so that you have sufficient energy coverage over a 24-hour period. What are you thinking about when you think about wind and solar? And why are they challenging?

RICHARD ENGEL:

Yeah, intermittency is the word that comes to mind. On a normal predictable day, the sun rises and the sun sets. So you've got many hours overnight when the sun isn't shining at all. And then you've got the unpredictability of weather. So some days are sunnier than others. So you can design a solar system to meet a certain part of your load, but it's not gonna show up for you every day. And wind maybe is even a bit less predictable because the wind doesn't really have a set diurnal pattern the way the sun does. So yeah, you wind up with this problem to solve of how do you build an energy grid that's more reliant on those intermittent but clean resources? And they're pretty affordable these days too, to build, which is good news. But how do you keep the grid reliable when those are sort of the main underpinnings of this new emerging grid? And so.

WHEELER:

So we got to store that energy somehow.

ENGEL:

Exactly. Storing the energy is an important solution to that. I mean, there are other solutions too. There's getting people to adjust their demand and there are whole programs that are out there for doing that. And there are other forms of clean energy besides those intermittent ones. Things like geothermal energy and small scale hydro biomass energy. Those are sources of energy that can be considered baseload energy because they can be operated around the clock. But there are concerns there. Sometimes these are forms of energy that people might object to for various reasons. Or they might just be more expensive than the wind and solar. And typically they can be. So yes, energy storage shows up to save the day.

MATT SIMMONS:

So I think the flip side of intermittency is that sometimes we're actually generating more power with wind and solar than we need at any given time. And right now we do something called curtailment, where we actually don't use all the solar and all the wind that we could be using because there's nowhere for it to go. And batteries help with that part of the problem too. It's making sure we get the most bang for our buck out of our existing wind and solar and any new wind and solar that we build.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so I think about April every year, it feels like California is saying new records for total amount of solar produced, which is exciting and it's great. And also we are dumping that solar energy off on other states because we can't, we can't absorb it all. We can't use it or store it. And so we're functionally almost paying other areas to, to take our solar energy from us.

ENGEL:

And sometimes it's even worse than that. I mean, the curtailment that Matt just referred to generally means just telling the power plants to shut off, to flip the switch and not generate because there might not be the export capacity to send it out of state, or there might not be enough demand for it elsewhere that the grid can reach. So effectively, we're just turning off systems and wasting a lot of the investment that was made in those systems by having to curtail. So yes, storage also offers a solution to that by being able to take some of that energy that's in excess at some times of day and shift it so it can be delivered to the grid at other times of day when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing.

WHEELER:

And so when we talk about energy storage, up here on the North Coast, we're probably talking about batteries, but just to be fair to other forms of energy storage, how else can we store energy for future use?

ENGEL:

Yeah, there are some other interesting technologies out there. The only other thing besides batteries that's been deployed at a really large scale is pumped hydro storage. So this means having two reservoirs at different elevations, geographically close together, and being able to pump water uphill from the lower reservoir to the upper one during times of day when energy is in abundance or low cost. And then at other times of day, running it downhill to generate power when grid power would otherwise be expensive or not available.

PG&E has a project called the Helms Project that's in the Sierra Nevada that was, I think, built in the 1980s and so has been operating for many decades. And they've even been talking about upsizing it recently. And there are other pumped storage projects around the country and around the world. It's expensive to build and it's also very geographically limited as to where it can be deployed. I mean, I've heard interesting things about having underground caverns at different depths that you could do the whole same thing subterraneous, but nobody has really done that at any commercial scale.

So yes, batteries and pumped hydro are the things that are being used today on the grid at large scale. And batteries have been growing much faster. They haven't yet surpassed pumped hydro in terms of total capacity nationally, but they're well on their way. But then there's a whole other fleet of emerging technologies. One of them is compressed air energy storage, where you can have tanks or underground caverns that you can compress air into using cheap energy and then let the air back out and spin turbines with that.

WHEELER:

I think that like entrepreneurs are looking at any sort of way that you can store energy, right? Superheating salt until it gets molten and storing that in an efficient way. And then converting that heat energy to electricity and

ENGEL:

Flywheels, ultracapacitors, there's all kinds of things out there. One that I spent years of my career working on actually here in Humboldt was hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers. The idea being that you could use electricity to drive an electrolyzer that just splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. You store the hydrogen and then at a later time you use the hydrogen to run a fuel cell and make electricity, which is a great technology. It's wonderful. I've worked with that a lot for years, but it's expensive and it's not very efficient in terms of the round-trip efficiency. You only get maybe 30 to 40 percent back of the energy that you put in, whereas batteries can give you better than 80 percent, even potentially better than 90 percent of your energy back. So that round-trip efficiency is an important consideration in choosing a storage technology.

WHEELER:

I will put out there, I remain interested in hydrogen production myself. I can imagine a future with offshore wind where we might have to curtail the wind turbines at some point because they're capable of producing just such absurd amounts of electricity. And wouldn't it be great if instead of curtailing those, we could just send it to a hydrogen production facility where we create green hydrogen that can then be used in Humboldt Transit Authority buses to run routes? I feel like this is some sort of a techno-optimist future, but I'm in for it.

ENGEL:

How about the wind turbines being like floating fueling stations for hydrogen-powered ships that can just fuel up out at sea? Yeah, why not?

WHEELER:

Let's make

ENGEL:

The limit. Yeah. Yeah.

WHEELER:

Why not? Let's dream big. All right. So, so we have other forms of energy storage, but, but here in Humboldt County we have batteries and we have some existing battery storage already at, at both fine scales. Individuals in Humboldt County have long been kind of pioneers in doing home energy storage. We have a lot of back to the landers, off grid families and farms and whatever else that have been collecting and storing solar energy on site. And we also have these bigger battery storage locally at the airport, for example. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the history of battery storage locally.

ENGEL:

Yeah, you're right, Tom, that Humboldt was an early adopter because we had the back to the landers starting in the 60s and 70s who were putting up solar back when solar panels were super expensive, but they were just buying tiny little panels and being able to run a few lights to light up their cabin. It was a very simple, low-tech way of using renewable energy back in the day. They pretty much had to have batteries for this to make any sense. What they would typically have would be lead acid batteries, similar to the ones that we use in conventional automobiles, except they were deep cycle batteries that were designed to be able to cycle all the way down, draw all the energy out, essentially, and then fill it back up, which is not really a way that you use the energy from car batteries. A little bit different, but that was the first way that we saw batteries widely used around Humboldt County.

More recently, of course, as people have been putting up grid-connected home solar systems on their homes, they want to, in some cases, be able to just minimize how much energy they're exporting to the grid because under the current net metering rules, you don't get as generous of a payback for putting that power into the grid as you used to. There's more of a financial argument now for adding energy storage to those grid-connected home solar systems. Redwood Coast Energy Authority partnered with a company called Swell for a while on deploying several dozen of those systems in people's homes to capture that energy and just improve the economics of going solar. That's a great way to use solar. If you're really trying to be economical about it, there's a good argument for doing some larger scale centralized energy storage and not just having it deployed out to everybody's individual homes and businesses.

WHEELER:

Let's talk about what are the advantages of having the industrial energy storage.

ENGEL:

Yeah, well, similar to solar, I mean, we do have some advocates in the community who just say we can solve all of our problems by just putting rooftop solar on everybody's house. One of the problems with that is it's just an expensive way to do solar. If you look at studies that have been done by like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and others, they find that dollar per dollar, you can get a lot more solar deployed if you're doing it on central projects rather than having it distributed out where somebody has to come and custom design each and every little five or 10 kilowatts of solar that's going up on a rooftop as opposed to just having one design deploying acres of it in one place.

There's a place for all of these approaches, really. I mean, we certainly want rooftop solar and I'm not going against that, but just saying if you're trying to get as much renewable energy deployed for a given amount of financial resources, you're better off doing some of it as central energy. Same with batteries. It's just the economics are better. There's economies of scale in deploying central systems. But there's some other advantages too, one being that an operator of that system can more easily dispatch it optimally so that it's really capturing the energy at the right times and dispatching it to the grid at the right times to solve grid scale energy problems.

And this is a little bit down in the weeds, but we as an energy provider, in addition to just buying enough kilowatt hours for everybody that's our customers, we're also required by the state to procure something that's called resource adequacy, which just means capacity, like megawatts of capacity that we can assure the state will show up when it's needed for the grid. And when we do central systems that are energy storage systems or generation, solar, wind, what have you, we're able to get that resource adequacy as part of the project's characteristics and get credit for that and meet this regulatory need that we have. And it's not just an abstraction, it really is ensuring more reliability for the grid.

SIMMONS:

Just another point on that. I think something that I've thought a lot about is with, so take rooftop solar, like not everyone owns their house. And so not every individual is able to take advantage of rooftop solar. And I imagine with sort of personal batteries, it's sort of the same issue, where not everyone's gonna be able to afford a Tesla battery in their house. But if you have a utility scale battery system, that can then become the community asset in a way that personal batteries aren't. And so we've seen like with the Blue Lake Rancherias microgrid that has been able to help out the community during power safety shutoffs. And I think during our airport microgrid could have a similar benefit. And so that sort of communal nature of these in some situations is an advantage, I think also over individual, just keeping the lights on in your own house versus keeping the lights on for the community.

ENGEL:

We have a system that's nearing completion just a couple of miles away from where we're sitting right now, the Foster Avenue Solar Plus Storage Project, which is just west of Arcata in the bottoms on land that was formerly part of the Sun Valley floral farms. And that's a 30-acre project with 7 megawatts of solar and 2.5 megawatts of battery energy storage, which translates to enough energy for a few thousand homes. And so this is an important addition to our portfolio, and it's local, which is definitely part of RCA's goals. So we're really excited about this. And yeah, it effectively functions as sort of a community-wide solar and storage system. And just like you say, it's kind of providing an alternative for people that can't put that on their own rooftop. And we offer an opt-up option, which is if people want to pay a little bit more for their electricity, they can sign up for our Repower Plus service, which is a mix of solar and wind and small hydropower and 100% renewable. And certainly that Foster project is going to be an important component of that going forward.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are gonna talk about how we are going to achieve our dream of meeting 100% renewable energy and the role that industrial size batteries can play in our renewable energy future. Joining us is Richard Engel of the Redwood Coast Energy Authority and EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons.

So I feel like we should address a little bit of the elephant in the room, which is there was a battery proposal for Blue Lake and it ran into a head of community opposition and the project is not moving forward. Blue Lake is not moving forward on this battery project, but I don't think that Blue Lake will never have a battery moving forward and I don't think that that's gonna be the last proposal for a large-scale battery in Humboldt County. So this is obviously a topic that RCEA cares a lot about addressing. Schatz Energy Research Lab cares a lot about addressing. Perhaps we can talk about some of the misconceptions and misinformation that floated around the community around that project in particular and address some of the rightful concerns too that people may have had about that project or battery storage more generally.

ENGEL:

Sure, like we've talked about, it's certainly not the first energy storage project that's come along in Humboldt County and there hasn't been very much controversy about the other projects as they went through their permitting processes, you know, like the Foster Avenue project was presented from the outset as solar plus storage and pretty much sailed through its permitting process with the county. I think there was a little bit of unfortunate timing with the rollout of the proposal for the Blue Lake project because there was a significant fire at what was California's largest energy storage project close in time to when the Blue Lake project was getting aired publicly. So there was this location in Monterey County that had formerly been a gas-fired power plant and it's called Moss Landing and a company had built a large energy storage project. They were repurposing some of the existing infrastructure from the natural gas plant. I mean, the real key reason for putting it in that location was because it just had an existing interconnection to the grid.

WHEELER:

Which was also, I think, part of the reason why this area was being proposed for blue.

ENGEL:

Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. RCEA has been in a memorandum of understanding with the city of Blue Lake that owns that project site or proposed project site, formerly a biomass power plant. So we've had this memorandum of understanding in place for a few years now. The idea was to collaborate on building a project that could become part of our portfolio and meet our energy storage needs and also provide some lease revenue to the city of Blue Lake, which they wanted to see keep coming in since they'd lost their lease revenue stream from the old biomass plant. So it seemed like a win-win.

What happened with Moss Landing, the project down in Monterey County, was that they put in these batteries, they're lithium ion batteries, but a particular type of lithium ion battery called nickel manganese cobalt. And that was kind of the main technology that was being used around the start of this decade, around the time this project went in. Also, they used some existing buildings on the site there to house the batteries. They weren't purpose-built structures for batteries. So what happened was they had this type of battery, which we have since learned is somewhat more prone than some other battery types to what's called thermal runaway, which is where you can just have heat accumulate and it just kind of becomes a chain reaction and can result in a widespread fire that can spread from battery to battery. The way they were housed, I think, kind of exacerbated that problem.

WHEELER:

Because they were in a former gas power plant and so they were more tightly packed together than what would be a normal design outside of a power plant.

ENGEL:

I don't really know about the physical spacing, but just the fact that they were in a common enclosure together, I think, increased the hazard. There's new codes and standards that have come out for batteries that all new projects have to comply with now that have just emerged in the last half decade and since that project was built. Under these new codes and standards, battery systems would not be housed inside a building like that. They would typically be in containerized enclosures and the containers are separated from each other by a set distance. You can see an example of this up at the airport microgrid here in Humboldt.

Another thing that's changed is there's a different battery chemistry that seems to be safer and less prone to that thermal runaway. That's what's being used now for most new battery storage projects and the Foster Avenue project that's getting built right now is using that newer battery chemistry, lithium iron phosphate. And so that in itself, that combined with just housing the batteries correctly, greatly mitigates these issues. There's also all kinds of other things like putting in monitoring systems and alarms and things that having protocols for disconnecting these things or having automated disconnection if certain conditions occur, you know, short circuits or high temperatures.

WHEELER:

On misinformation, I've seen folks in the community say this location was chosen because they wanted to put a pipe in the Mad River and use the Mad River water for cooling and they were going to return hot water from the batteries back into the Mad River. Was there any truth to that as a rumor?

ENGEL:

Redwood Coast Energy Authority was not involved in designing this system, this was a private company.

WHEELER:

Yes, batteries, do they do they require cooling water like a power plant does?

ENGEL:

That would not be the case here. Typically there is some cooling and ventilation that's needed, which might use liquid or might use air. I'm not aware of battery energy storage systems that need to like pipe in water, cool it, and dump it off-site or anything like that, so that does not sound feasible to me. I also heard that people were concerned about just the location of this being adjacent to the Mad River and that under flood conditions that this might pollute the river. One thing I learned in having conversations with different parties about this was that the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, which has its Ranney Wells downstream from there, the pump stations, and gets that, yes, Tom.

WHEELER:

Full disclosure, I am a board member of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District.

ENGEL:

... which has its own battery energy storage system at their facility where the Ranney wells are located. So clearly the water district themselves deem battery energy storage to not be incompatible with safe water system operation. So I don't really think that there was much of a concern really there. But having said that, certainly we do want to make sure that batteries are sited in safe locations and that all environmental hazards get taken into account and thoroughly vetted in figuring out whether a site is appropriate. Now we're not the ones that build these systems ourselves. We contract for services from private developers that build these projects like we are doing with the Foster Avenue project. In our solicitations, we do like we just did an energy storage solicitation recently and shortlisted a couple of Humboldt County projects which I can talk about. But we put requirements in there that they have to be compliant with all the codes and standards for safety. And we also looked at the information they provided about safety in their offers and used that as part of our scoring criteria for choosing which projects to shortlist.

WHEELER:

Let's maybe get to some of those projects and the relation between RCEA and how these projects ultimately come to be. Our RCA is going out into the community or out into the developer world and saying, we want to see X amount of batteries being developed. Can you come help us? Is that the way that we are, we're bringing in battery projects or our developers looking at Humboldt County and saying, Oh gee, it doesn't seem that they have that much energy storage or that, Oh, maybe they're having a offshore wind project on the horizon. Maybe this would be a good time to get in and develop a project. How are these being developed?

ENGEL:

I think the former is closer to how things work. We determine what our needs are for new resources. And part of that is driven by our own strategic goals that our board adopts. Sometimes it's also driven by regulatory mandates that we get from the state. The Public Utilities Commission occasionally issues procurement orders saying every load serving entity in California needs to procure some new capacity and it needs to meet these criteria. So we've done some storage procurement in response to those procurement orders from the state, and then some of it has been more just focused on wanting to build out our local Humboldt County portfolio, which was really the driver for that last solicitation that we just did.

So, yeah, typically we'll put out a solicitation, we'll put it on our website, we'll email it out to a couple of thousand developers that we have in a database that we have just to get it out there as widely as possible. And then we give them a month or two to put together offers, and then we take a look at what comes in and just sift through it according to our evaluation criteria and figure out what to shortlist, meaning which of these projects are we going to enter into serious negotiations for projects with. It's not a done deal until we've come up with a contract that we and the seller agree to and that we take to our board for approval.

WHEELER:

So do you have any idea, as RCEA, as you, as RCEA, move towards trying to get 100% renewable energy, how much battery storage we're going to need to have as a community to achieve that goal? Is that, do you have any idea of that, or is it just, we know that we need more?

ENGEL:

I'd say at this point, we know that we need more, but we're taking a giant leap towards fulfilling that need with a project we have under contract now, which is not local. And it's actually located in Kern County and it's co-located with the Sandrini Solar Project, which came online last year and is now providing about one third of our total electricity need for Humboldt County customers. Now, that can lead down a long rabbit hole of discussing how does the electricity get from Kern County to here? Infrastructure constraints, import-export, yeah. And the short answer is the electricity doesn't come to Humboldt County.

I use the ATM analogy, which is when you go to the bank and give them $100 cash and put it in your bank account or credit union account, and then you travel to, say, San Francisco and go use an ATM, you don't care that the $20 bills that it's dispensing are the same $20 bills that you gave the bank. It's just money, it's fungible, it's just a resource. It's the same with electricity. If we're putting clean electricity into the grid in Kern County, we're helping solve the global climate crisis by generating that with clean electricity instead of some dirty source. And it doesn't really matter for purposes of environmental quality that it's happening in Kern County instead of here. And people are taking different electricity out of the grid to power their homes in Humboldt County, but they're paying RCEA, who, in turn, is paying that developer for that project in Kern County.

So the finances all work out. Everybody gets their electricity they need. So that's how it works. Having said all that, we do wanna build stuff locally as much as we can. The more we build locally, the more we can eventually achieve one dream that's been articulated quite a bit over the years by a lot of our stakeholders, which is to eventually be able to shut down the Humboldt Bay gas plant. So that's an advantage building locally because the electrons do need to be flowing locally to be able to take an existing generating resource offline. But be that as it may, for the time being, we've got this non-local storage resource, which is gonna go a very long way towards fulfilling our storage needs, but it won't be the end of the story.

SIMMONS:

Is building new transmission also help with that congestion issue and so the proposed transmission lines to help facilitate offshore wind can also help us with that dream of shutting down the natural gas plant?

ENGEL:

Yeah, I mean power lines are two-way streets, so we could have power from elsewhere flowing in here more readily, and it might make it easier for us to get that deliverability that I talked about that lets us count these resources as meeting the state's reliability needs. So I think there are potentially a lot of incidental benefits to getting that transmission build-out done besides just being able to export offshore wind to the rest of the West.

WHEELER:

Well, obviously there's more than a half hour worth of talk that can be had for batteries. And so there's an opportunity to learn more about batteries. Richard, our CEA in Shots has a talk coming up in Arcata. I would like to give a plug.

ENGEL:

So, this will be on Wednesday, July 23rd, 5.30 to 7 p.m. at the D Street Community Center in Arcata. We're going to have, in addition to a presentation that I'll be giving covering some of the same ground that we're covering in this discussion and some related topics, we'll also have a panel discussion with a couple of subject matter experts from the Schatz Energy Research Center, as well as our county supervisor, Natalie Arroyo, who has some hands-on experience dealing with energy storage, batteries, in the aftermath of the L.A. fires. All right.

WHEELER:

Well, I hope to see everyone there next week at this discussion. Richard Engel, thank you so much for joining the EcoNews Report. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Matt. All right. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.