WA's clean energy transition will fail without giant batteries

To get a sense of an immense challenge facing the country's sprawling electricity grid, I want you to imagine you're on a giant teeter totter.

You - and by you, I mean everyone in society that is a user of electricity - are suspended in the air, legs dangling, in perfect balance with the person seated across from you.

That person - who's the embodiment of every single way our society generates electricity - is right at your eye level. In balance.

This analogy can describe all such electricity grids, including the one that serves the Pacific Northwest region. Those operating the grid must work to keep every power line you see in equilibrium, between generation and demand, every minute of every day.

More electric vehicles or heat pumps? The grid must produce the electrons to cover them. Take away a dam, or close a coal power plant? Something else must rise in its place to meet the load, or damaging blackouts could result.

Batteries are a key ingredient in helping preserve this grid stability. No, I'm not talking about the triple-As in your kitchen drawer. These are giant, utility-sized battery facilities that can hold energy when the grid demand is low and discharge power when it surges.

And if Washington state is successful in its multi-decade endeavor to eliminate fossil fuels, batteries will be a critical component.

Yet the mere prospect of battery storage facilities in several Western Washington communities has proved effective at charging up something besides electricity: the neighbors who would live nearby.

In April, residents in Snoqualmie, near the site of one such recently announced project, held a protest through its downtown; similar mutinies have successfully nixed similar utility scale projects in Covington and Renton.

Those who speak up in opposition have every right to do so. But the Puget Sound region's elected leaders also need to raise their voices. That's because this state's clean energy transition will fail unless battery storage becomes a more prevalent part of the electricity grid.

Here's why.

Majority Democrats in the state Legislature have been ratcheting down fossil fuel electricity sources utilities across the state can use to keep the electrons flowing. For example, gone from the grid is coal, thanks to the 2019-passed Clean Energy Transformation Act.

Meanwhile, Washingtonians have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of electric cars and heat pumps, eager to play their small but important role in fighting climate change.

In line with lawmakers' goals are feeding the electricity grid with more solar panel arrays and wind farms. But those produce intermittent power - only when the sun's shining and the wind is blowing, respectively. And they work best in hot and windswept areas east of the Cascade Mountains.

What that means is that electricity must travel across the Cascades to reach customers here on the more populous west side of the state. And the transmission lines comprising the highways of that power network are congested and will likely take years, if not decades, to upgrade.

So the idea of battery storage in Western Washington isn't a nice-to-have solution. It's an imperative, for three reasons.

One, it's imperative to get abundant electrons made in Eastern Washington to the west side of the state during non-congested times, where they can make the energy grid here more reliable.

Two, it's imperative that those electrons can be stored for times of high demand - the hottest and coldest days - when the batteries at the future Snoqualmie facility can discharge up to 130 megawatts for four hours, for example. Failure to do so not only risks higher energy bills but rolling blackouts that strain the grid and even risk lives.

And three, it's imperative those batteries be installed here - likely in dozens of such sites - if Washingtonians insist on a future free of hydrocarbon-based power sources.

And we should.

Local opponents to storage projects will point to the risk of fires, like one at Moss Landing in California in January 2025. But that fire served to galvanize new standards and regulations governing construction and operation of battery storage, to include compartmentalizing battery systems at such facilities. Even if fires would occur - which is still a statistical rarity - they would be isolated to small, shipping container-sized pockets of the overall system, according to Noah Ryder, a fire safety expert who studies the risks of battery storage systems.

Consider that California, whose abundant solar power cannot sustain its power grid once the sun goes down, has added nearly 14,000 megawatts of utility-scale battery storage in the past seven years. So all that renewable energy can be stored and keep the lights on for its residents well into the night.

It's likely residents from Snoqualmie, for instance, will not even hear or see the forest-surrounded battery energy storage system once it's constructed. But the project will inject an important new backstop into Western Washington's overall energy system.

To be clear, residents near these facilities can and should have their say on their construction impacts and operation. But Washington state's political leadership must grapple with a geographic reality: a cleaner, greener future is not possible without much more battery storage in Western Washington.

Either this side of the state becomes home to these energy storage sites, or lawmakers will need to start rethinking the state's clean energy mandates. Because these batteries are a necessity in the fight against climate change.

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