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I'm not quite sure how to precisely calculate the need, however I'm afraid that you are over-estimating battery capacities. Tesla's Giga Factory planned annual

by Xixi 9y ago

I'm not quite sure how to precisely calculate the need, however I'm afraid that you are over-estimating battery capacities. Tesla's Giga Factory planned annual battery production capacity is 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). Assuming one cycle per day, and a life expectancy of 1000 cycles, dedicating all this plant production to replace peaker plants will give you a storage capacity of about 100 GWh. While non-trivial, it's still dwarfed by US daily electricity consumption: about 11,350 GWh [1]. Not sure how much would be needed for peaks, but 100 GWh sounds small. And the Giga Factory production is not going towards trying to absorb peaks in the US, but in cars used all around the world in non-optimal patterns. [1] Based on an annual consumption of 4,144.3 TWh in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

greglindahl 9y ago
Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.
freeflight 9y ago
Tesla batteries might not solve the storage problem on their own, but there are plenty of additional ways to store energy. Imho up until recently, we didn't even have that much incentive to research and innovate on large-scale energy storage (outside of storing it as fossil fuels), as we would just generate it when we needed it, so no real need to store it, no need to innovate on that front. But with the abundance of energy created by renewables, we will need to rethink our approach to energy production and consumption, putting more of a focus on storage than was needed before.
- Xixi 9y ago
  Indeed, I was specifically talking about batteries. But there are many other ways to store energy. They don't even need to be as efficient as batteries, as long as they are cheap/scalable. Found an interesting study after some googling: https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of-storage-v20.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of...

by Xixi 9y ago

greglindahl 9y ago

Most cars are parked during the solar peak and during the overnight wind peak, so there's plenty of opportunity to use ordinary electric car charging as storage.

freeflight 9y ago

Tesla batteries might not solve the storage problem on their own, but there are plenty of additional ways to store energy. Imho up until recently, we didn't even have that much incentive to research and innovate on large-scale energy storage (outside of storing it as fossil fuels), as we would just generate it when we needed it, so no real need to store it, no need to innovate on that front. But with the abundance of energy created by renewables, we will need to rethink our approach to energy production and consumption, putting more of a focus on storage than was needed before.

Xixi 9y ago
Indeed, I was specifically talking about batteries. But there are many other ways to store energy. They don't even need to be as efficient as batteries, as long as they are cheap/scalable. Found an interesting study after some googling: https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of-storage-v20.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/438042/lazard-levelized-cost-of...