Nancy Skinner

There's a third episode of the Indicator series all about what it takes to produce lithium batteries. You can find that at the link in our show notes. And if you want to hear about how this whole series came together, check out our next bonus episode for Planet Money Plus supporters. We take you inside our reporting and share some fun stuff that we just couldn't fit into the series.

To hear that and get sponsor-free listening, sign up for NPR Plus. Just go to plus.npr.org. And finally, if you haven't already, go follow The Indicator from Planet Money in any podcast app. Five shows every week, always 10 minutes or less. These episodes of The Indicator were produced by me, Cooper Katz-McKim, and Corey Bridges. They were edited by Kate McKinnon and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

Today on the show, we go on a kind of road trip for electric battery storage. Two stories from two states. We'll begin in California, where battery storage first took off in the U.S., to see how the state supported its wind and solar energy markets. And then we'll look at how battery storage was put to the test in Texas.

They were engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Neil Tevalt. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Cooper Katz-McKim. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

These stories come from Planet Money's sister show, The Indicator, where we just ran a mini-series on batteries and energy.

I am back indeed from the very sunny California where there are enough batteries to power 13 million homes. I wanted to go because I have no idea how batteries actually work. And I hope you learned this on the trip. I did. I connected with a battery storage facility that's connected to a solar farm spread across 2,900 acres.

It's the equivalent of more than 2,000 football fields. It really did feel huge. It took a long time to drive through. The whole operation is called Cal Flats. It's owned by an independent power producer called Erevon. Justin Johnson is the chief operating officer there.

Justin gave me a tour of the facility along with Anand Narayanan, Erivan's Senior VP of Asset Management.

At the battery storage facility itself, there are rows of white containers not much taller than a person. I learned this is where it all happens.

Yeah, we don't have the keys, unfortunately. That was a pretty fast no-go there. I just wanted to open the door. I don't see the problem here. The do not press button was so tempting. If I see a button, I want to press it. Either way, they told me that each one of these cabinets holds the batteries themselves. They're about the size of a large briefcase and are manufactured by Tesla.

The batteries are similar to what would go in a Tesla car, which is also made up of lithium-ion.

I know, yeah. It is wild.

When the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, there's no power. Several people approached Nancy to raise this issue.

That hum you're hearing behind Justin is the HVAC system keeping the batteries cool because they're charging from that solar energy and probably also the heat just from how hot it is outside. The sun was very strong when I visited. Yeah, let's move to the shade.

Yeah, we put that question to Justin.

This new reliability in renewables is very attractive to tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They already use solar and wind power, but they have power-hungry data centers to feed things like artificial intelligence. So they're buying up battery storage, too.

In 2019, California had limited battery storage capacity. In April of last year, batteries could power 10 million homes for a period of time. Just six months later, that number grew to 13 million homes.

Nonetheless, Nancy was optimistic that eventually it would happen if you created a market signal. So she introduced a bill requiring utilities to purchase a certain percentage of battery storage when they bought electricity. Nancy remembers pushback.

Justin's company, Arrivon, believes in grid-scale battery storage so much it's invested $2 billion in the space. They already have five facilities in California, including Cal Flats, and it's looking at six more.

So let's go to Texas. I'm going to hop out here and Darian, let you and Indicator co-host Waylon Wong pick it up after the break.

In 2008, Nancy Skinner was elected to the California state legislature.

Still, in 2010, the bill passed, although nothing really happened. Grid-scale batteries remained a pie-in-the-sky concept for years. And then all of a sudden, in 2021, batteries took off. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Cooper Katzmachan.