Scalable storage (grid-scale batteries) is the game-changer for 24/7 renewables and deeper decoupling. Outside of the Paris Agreement, with a convicted criminal, rapist, madman at the wheel in the White House. Imagine how the US could lead under normal circumstances.
Mortenson was chosen as the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction contractor for both the battery storage and substation scopes for Calpine Corporation’s Nova Power Bank energy storage project. This 680 megawatt/2,720 megawatt-hour project is one of the largest standalone storage projects in the industry. It is set to power as many as 680,000 California homes across the Southern California Edison grid.
Built on the site of a decommissioned power plant previously known as the Inland Empire Energy Center, the natural gas-fired generators were decommissioned and removed so the site could be transformed into an energy storage project. Significant portions of the existing facility, including foundations, structures, and electrical infrastructure, are contributing to a highly sustainable transformation that will better serve the state’s peak power demand.
The project is a facility that will provide instantaneous, flexible power and grid reliability for the people of California. Repurposing existing assets comes with design and construction challenges, but it is a responsible and effective way to bring energy storage to those who can benefit most. The site uses nearly 1,200 battery enclosures, powered by BYD Cube Pro and Power Electronics 4200M2 technology, connected through three 500kV substations, each with seven feeder breakers.
Construction for the project began in August 2023 with phased turnovers starting less than 12 months after breaking ground. The first phases of the project came online in 2024, and the project was fully completed in June of 2025.
Valerie Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology
Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissions – and global temperatures with them – keep rising.
When it seems like we’re getting nowhere, it’s useful to step back and examine the progress we’ve made.
Let’s take a look at the United States, historically the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled.
Yet U.S. emissions from many of the activities that produce greenhouse gases – transportation, industry, agriculture, heating and cooling of buildings – have remained about the same over the past 30 years. Transportation is a bit up; industry is a bit down. And electricity, once the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has seen its emissions drop significantly.
Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so there’s room for improvement, and its emissions haven’t fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions have been down about 15% over the past 10 years.
Here’s how that happened:
US electricity emissions have fallen
U.S. electricity use has been rising lately with the shift toward more electrification of cars, heating, and cooling, and expansion of data centers, yet greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are down by almost 30% since 1995.
One of the main reasons for this big drop is that Americans are using less coal and more natural gas to make electricity.
Both coal and natural gas are fossil fuels. Both release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they are burned to make electricity, and that carbon dioxide traps heat, raising global temperatures. But power plants can generate electricity more efficiently with natural gas than with coal, so they produce fewer emissions per unit of power.
Why did the U.S. start using more natural gas?
Research and technological innovation in fracking and horizontal drilling have enabled companies to extract more oil and gas at lower cost, making it cheaper to generate electricity from natural gas than from coal.
As a result, utilities have built more natural gas power plants – especially super-efficient combined-cycle gas plants, which use gas turbines and capture waste heat to generate additional power. More coal plants have been shutting down or running less.
Because natural gas is a more efficient fuel than coal, it’s been a climate win, even though it’s a fossil fuel. The U.S. has reduced electricity-related emissions as a result.
Significant improvements in energy efficiency, from appliances to lighting, have also played a role. Even though tech gadgets seem to be recharging everywhere all the time today, household electricity use, per person, plateaued over the first two decades of the 2000s after rising continuously since the 1940s.
Costs for renewable electricity, batteries fall
U.S. renewable electricity generation, including wind, solar, and hydro power, has nearly tripled since 1995, helping to further reduce emissions from electricity generation.
Costs for solar and wind power have fallen so much that they are now cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas. Fourteen states, including most of the Great Plains, now get at least 30% of their power from solar, wind, and battery storage.
While wind power has been cost-competitive with fossil fuels for at least 20 years, solar photovoltaic power has been competitive for only about 10 years. So expect deployment of solar PV to continue to increase, both in the U.S. and internationally, even as U.S. federal subsidies disappear.
Both wind and solar provide intermittent power: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. There are several ways utilities are dealing with this. One way is to use demand management, offering lower prices for power during off-peak periods or discounts to companies that can cut their power use during high-demand periods. Virtual power plants aggregate various distributed energy resources – such as solar panels on homes, batteries, and even smart thermostats – to manage power supply and demand. The U.S. had an estimated 37.5 gigawatts of virtual power plants in 2024, equivalent to about 37.5 nuclear power reactors.
IPCC 6th Assessment Report
Another energy management method is battery storage, which is just now beginning to take off. Battery costs have fallen enough over the past few years to make utility-scale battery storage cost-effective.
What about driving?
In the U.S., gasoline consumption has remained roughly constant, but fuel efficiency has generally improved over the decades.
Sales of electric vehicles, which could cut emissions more, have been slow, however. Some of this could be due to the success of fracking: U.S. petroleum production has increased, and gasoline and diesel prices have remained relatively low.
People in other countries are switching to electric vehicles more rapidly than in the U.S., as EV costs have fallen. Chinese consumers can buy an entry-level EV for under US$10,000 with government subsidies, and the country leads the world in EV sales.
In 2024, people in the U.S. bought 1.6 million EVs, and global sales reached 17 million, up 25% from the year before.
The unknowns ahead: What about data centers?
The construction of new data centers, in part to serve the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, is drawing attention to future energy demand and the uncertainty ahead.
Data centers are increasing electricity demand in some locations, such as northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, and Atlanta. The future growth in electricity demand from data centers remains unclear, so the effects of data centers on electric rates and power system emissions are also uncertain.
However, AI is not the only reason to watch for increased electricity demand: The U.S. can expect growing demand for industrial processes and electric vehicles, as well as the overall transition from oil and gas for heating and appliances to electricity, which continues across the country.
Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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