3 ms·
A few hours of storage, every day, at a very predictable time of the day, does not fall into the bucket of "a lot" of storage. That is a very minimal amount of
by darksaints 5y ago
A few hours of storage, every day, at a very predictable time of the day, does not fall into the bucket of "a lot" of storage. That is a very minimal amount of storage. It can barely even be called a buffer.
The storage needs that OP mentioned...the kind that gets us from 80% up to 100% renewables is a lot of storage. We're talking multiple days, possibly weeks of storage.
- dragontamer 5y agohttps://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html The supply/demand graphs for the California grid are public for all to discuss. We can look at 9/05/2021, and see that 25GW was demanded at 12-noon, while 36GW was demanded at 7pm at night (hour 19 on the graph). The energy required between 5pm and 10pm on 9/5/2021 (from 17 to 22) is ~37GW per hour. That's 185GW-hrs of energy. Exactly what technology can both store-and-output 185GW-hrs each day, and every day? The "Tesla Megabattery pack" in Australia is 0.3 GW-hrs FYI, to give you what a "very very large" battery can do.
- darksaints 5y agohttps://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/energy_storage_ada.pdf https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/energy... California already has 4500 GWh of storage. They don't have those peak power levels (currently, 4.5GW) but that's a matter of capital investment into pumps and generators. Not that that is even needed. California has a very large coastline with extremely reliable wind power. For example, there isn't a single spot anywhere along the coast of California that is forecast to have <8kts of wind for more than a day this month. Overprovisioning of wind power is a much bigger part of the solution to the duck curve than storage is.