PV and BESS, Early 2022

"The exception to this is if they enter into any long-range contracts (like power purchase agreements) that specify how their output (and input for BESS) are dispatched."

How can anyone know how their input is dispatched? Who is checking the contracts to make sure they're enforced?

Everyone seems to think we can toss energy into a blender, then pour it out onto the grid for everyone to use whenever they want, confident in the belief that because it's had a renewable sticker slapped on the outside, it's not generating any emissions.

I know for a fact that the Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) used by California guarantee at least half of all energy the state considers renewable, is anything but - that in California it's generated by gas plants in state, or coal/gas plants out of state, and imported. How?

1) On calm, windless nights, California utilities pay for electricity generated by fossil fuel plants to dispatch to their customers. For this example I'll use the quantity of 100 megawatthours (MWh).
2) The utility purchases #100 1-megawatthour RECs from a solar or wind farm, certifying that 100 MWh of renewable energy has been generated somewhere, sometime. This supposedly allows them to qualify 100 MWh of their dirty energy as clean - to take credit for the renewable attributes of that energy (the word "attribute" is an official designation in California Public Utility Code).
3) Obviously, this accounting would require the non-renewable attributes of the dirty electricity show up somewhere. Just because the utility bought a piece of paper, after all, doesn't magically scrub those emissions from the air - the solar or wind farm must, in trade, accept those dirty attributes for 100 MWh of its clean electricity. But it doesn't. That electricity is sold to customers as 100% clean, renewable electricity as well, as part of a PPC or some other arrangement. Two entities are taking credit for dispatching the same clean electricity.

This double-counting of clean electricity isn't hard to understand, and in 2008 the Federal Trade Commission, in a public statement that appears in the Federal Register,  acknowledged that electricity sold as "renewable" must include a disclaimer that RECs are intended to encourage consumption of clean energy, and may or may not represent actual electricity - the actual electricity which the public has been intentionally, deliberately misled to believe it represents. To my knowledge that disclaimer has never been provided, and the requirement has never been enforced.

"I believe most people understand that batteries are nothing more than energy storage devices."

You might be surprised. To fulfill the legal requirement that California's PUC "ensures" Diablo Canyon is replaced by zero-carbon electricity (SB 1090), the CPUC is including more than 1 gigawatt of storage capacity as a source of clean electricity - whatever its true source may be.