“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” - Often attributed to Plato but likely from Ian McLaren (pseudonym of Reverend John Watson)

## Sunday, January 18, 2015

### California's storage mandate solved!

This post won't be the first time I've expressed my annoyance with the California Public Utilities Commission over their storage mandate of 1.325 "gigawatts of storage" (scare quotes because this is already mixing apples and oranges - it's analogous to saying "65 miles per hour of distance") by 2020.

The linked post gives my more detailed thinking, but this one is just a quickie to bring home the inadequacy of only giving the rate of delivery of electrical energy in the mandate with no reference to the period for which this energy could be delivered. It's obviously (as you'll see) an extreme, but I can meet the mandate as stated for a bit under $2M! How? A photographer's flash unit takes electricity and stores it in a capacitor. When it's triggered, it quickly (quickly is the key here) discharges the capacitor through a flash tube. Here, we see the Elinchrom Pro HD 1000 flash unit. It can discharge 1000 W-s (photographers use "watt-seconds" but a watt-second is just another name for a joule) through the tube in 1/1430 second. This rate is 1000 watt*second/(1/1430 second)=1.43MW (megawatts). To get to 1.325 GW (gigawatts) I need 1,325/1.43=927 such units. I can purchase each for$1,049.88 ($964.88 if I order no later than January 31) for a total of$973,238.76. Of course, that doesn't include shipping and some rewiring, so double it.

Now, these units are set to power flash tubes but there's no requirement for that. They simply store energy and discharge it quickly. So, wired in parallel, they could supply the 1.325 gigawatts for about 2/3 of a millisecond. Problem solved!

Of course, the total energy delivered is a bit lacking. It's the 1000 joules*927 Elenchrom flash units=927,000 joules or a bit over a quarter of a kilowatt hour. Still, it meets the mandate and I bet I can have them delivered this year, beating the deadline by some five years.

It's rather shocking to me that our esteemed CPUC has managed to put this mandate in
place with no reference as to capacity. I will agree that rate is important (as I mentioned in the post linked above) but it's foolish to not also include capacity. However, I'm speculating that they aren't even aware of the problem. They are, after all, political appointees and, among the five of them, only Carla Peterman appears to have any sort of energy related experience or education. Mostly, it's attorneys. This is, after all, California!

If you know anyone from Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, or San Diego Gas and Electric, please don't tell them. I want to get a good earnest money deposit on my simple solution to their storage mandate woes.