Wired: EcoBlock co-Principal Investigator (PI) and UC Berkeley professor Dan Kammen makes the case for ramping up battery deployment in light of the recent California heat wave.
According to Kammen, California can do more to strengthen the electric grid. He calls for optimizing diverse forms of distributed energy storage, including home-based and electric vehicle batteries, and points out that the state can store excess energy during peak generation to support loads during periods of lower demand. Noting that California got “lucky” for most of the heatwave, Kammen says that “[s]urviving this is going to send a clear message to regulators that we need to invest more in renewables plus storage.”