Jigar Shah & CEC’s Robert Chun on Battery Storage Deployment in California
On May 7, Verdexchange, EPRI, and Deploy Action hosted a reception and dialogue among California marketmakers and technical experts for an informational knowledge exchange on battery storage solutions in Southern California and beyond as the region endeavors to rebuild and deploy clean energy infrastructure for resilience. Here, VX News shares framing remarks from Jigar Shah, co-host of the Open Circuit podcast and former director of the USDOE Loan Programs Office, and Robert Chun, Chief of Staff to California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild, who elaborate on the necessity and advantages of battery storage for meeting the state’s energy and affordability needs as well as actions taken by the state and the CEC to ensure safe deployment of grid-scale battery technology.
“Batteries are the single most powerful tool necessary to be able to make our electricity rates in the state of California more affordable.”
Jigar Shah: I just want to make sure that everyone understands why this conversation [on batteries] is so important.
In the 1980s, we decided that air conditioning was a great thing, and so a lot of people installed air conditioning. As a result, we started getting peaks. We went from 70% asset utilization of all of our generating assets, transmission assets, distribution assets, down to we’re probably at 40% asset utilization today, right? So, we pay for 100% of the thing and use it 40% of the time. And we’re totally fine with that because we’re crazy.
Right now, the way distribution grids work in this state is that you can turn everything on in your house, and the utility is responsible for making sure that you have enough capacity to make that work. That’s nuts, right?
A lot of what we’re trying to do is figure out how we use batteries to actually smooth that out. We spend $50 billion a year right now on distribution system upgrades. If we used batteries, that number would drop to $25 billion a year—just the stuff that’s necessary to upgrade.
The reason we care about this isn’t because we all love batteries or figuring out how to use them. It’s because batteries are the single most powerful tool necessary to be able to make our electricity rates in the state of California more affordable.
That’s why we’re talking about this. And thank our lucky stars, we’ve got these extraordinary people at EPRI who spend every waking hour trying to figure out how to test—not just lithium-ion batteries, —but also zinc-bromide batteries, redux batteries, iron-air batteries like Form Energy’s, and all sorts of other technologies.
We’ve got great technology. What we don’t have is a fantastic framework by which to deploy it at scale. The thing I’m most excited about today is the great work that Arnab and Ross are doing to create that framework within the state.
The state of California has been extraordinary in deploying batteries—we’re at over 10,000+ megawatts of batteries deployed. But 3000 megawatts of that is behind the meter—in people’s homes and businesses—and none of them get compensated unless the governor writes a letter saying we’re in an emergency, and then they get paid $2 a kilowatt-hour. That’s crazy.
Think about how this works in Texas. If you’re on Tesla Electric right now and you have a battery in your home, you literally set it on your app and say, “When wholesale market prices get to 15 cents a kilowatt-hour, dispatch my battery.” People have negative electricity bills in Texas.
Think about that for a second.
For all of you who are paying $1 per kilowatt-hour from 4:00pm, to 9:00 p.m.—negative electricity bills. You can have that too in the state of California. That is what this dinner is about. This dinner is about the fact that we just went through a horrific wildfire in Los Angeles. We’ve gone through a horrific book tour from Ezra Klein and Derrick Thompson. So, we’re in this moment where we just want the state to make things better.
We’re very excited to have you all here. We have all the technologies we need. We invented them, frankly, here in the state of California. But now we’ve got to figure out how to actually deploy them at scale to provide affordable electricity.
Robert Chun: Thank you very much. My boss sends his apologies. My name is Robert Chun. I’m Chief of Staff to David Hochschild—someone I know many of you know very well.
I’m one of the state voices here. I think my role is to share a little bit about how the State of California is thinking about batteries in 2025—particularly in light of what we just talked about with safety. I just want to provide a little bit of framing.
In 2020, we had a hot summer. CAISO sent out ten Flex Alerts—ten times we asked Californians to turn down thermostats to save the grid. Last year, we had a hotter summer than we had in 2020. The number of Flex Alerts that went out last summer? Zero. What happened between 2020 and 2024? You all know the answer: batteries. We have approaching 15 gigawatts of batteries in the State of California—about 85% of that is utility scale. That’s more than a quarter of our peak load. It’s the equivalent of having six Diablo Canyons in terms of nameplate capacity that we’re ramping up and down. These things are essential. They’re the workhorses of the grid—and we need a lot more of them.
We’ve got a planning goal of 52 gigawatts by 2045. So the Energy Commission—my boss and I—are spending a lot of time thinking about: how we get to 52 gigawatts? What’s standing in our way?
One of the challenges is what happened in January. On January 16, when Moss Landing caught on fire, the conversation on batteries changed in this state. My boss was there for two days after Moss Landing caught on fire, and his direction to our agency—was simple: Nothing like this, certainly not at this scale, can ever happen again in California. Now, if my boss were here, he’d want to make a couple of important points about Moss Landing.
First, the investigation is underway—we don’t yet know what happened. Moss Landing has some unique characteristics: it’s an indoor facility, high energy density, and it predates many modern codes and standards. That being said, we as a state are not taking anything for granted.
So what are we at the CEC doing? First, we’re part of the Governor’s statewide Battery Safety Collaborative. This is a statewide collaborative that Governor Newsom kicked off that includes CEC, CPUC, CARB, Cal Fire, and others who govern battery safety.
Our role—the role that we play most importantly—is permitting. Some of you may know we run the Governor’s fast-track permitting process, including for batteries. What this means for developers in the room is that from Day Zero—the day you give us a completed application—we will vote on your project and complete all environmental review within 270 days. This is the process through which most of the batteries are now coming. We’ve got 3.5 gigawatts that have filed in our process. We have line of sight on seven or eight more projects that have told us they’re going to file. What we’re doing as an agency is making sure that every project that comes off this line is the safest it can possibly be.
We’re currently permitting the Darden Clean Energy Project in West Fresno County. That’s a 2,300-megawatt solar-storage facility. We are requiring best-in-class codes and standards: telemetry and detection systems, world-class firefighting and fire response infrastructure, and collaboration with the local community and local fire department.
Folks are asking if the state should be in the business of permitting batteries, especially at this moment when there could be local opposition. And our answer is a resounding, yes, from our perspective. Our conviction is that the CEC is the best place to permit these batteries in the safest, most effective way.
The last thing I’ll say is this: this is not our first rodeo when it comes to battery fires. We’ve had other battery fire crises in the past. Remember the mid-2010s? People’s phones were catching on fire—remember the Samsung Galaxy 7? Hundreds of thermal runaway events. Two to 3 million recalls. There was a time when you couldn’t even take those on an airplane. What happened? The technology improved. The standards improved. And nowadays, I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wouldn’t carry one in their pocket or hold one up to their face.
That’s what we want to see: batteries on our grid, in our neighborhoods—and we’re confident we can get there.
