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The best number I could find quickly for the current total grid-scale battery storage for Germany is somewhere around 750MWh[1], so they only need to build 13,0
by Zanfa 4y ago
The best number I could find quickly for the current total grid-scale battery storage for Germany is somewhere around 750MWh[1], so they only need to build 13,000 times as much storage as they have as of 2021. That would also only give them a worst-case scenario of around 4 days of battery-only power. That sounds pretty optimistic.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.06762.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.06762.pdf
- bryanlarsen 4y ago750 MWh is about how many cells the Tesla Brandenburg factory will produce in a single day. And that's not primarily a battery factory, it's a car factory with battery production on the side.
- Zanfa 4y agoNot sure where the 750MWh/day figure comes from, but if Tesla aims to build 500k cars there annually, that’s only around 42.5GWh total capacity if they’re all top-of-the-line 85kWh models. Or 116MWh daily. Also, at 750MWh/day, it would likely be the world’s largest battery factory.
- runarberg 4y agoThen build the world’s largest battery factor. Germany can afford it, an there is an emergency that requires such actions.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago250GWh/year isn't quite 750MWh/day, but it's close enough for rhetoric since the OP mentioned 750MWh as the total storage capacity currently installed in Germany. 250GWh/year definitely would be the world's largest battery factory if it was operational today, but by the time Brandenburg ramps up to that it likely won't be.
- trashtester 4y agoSo, after 13000 days they will produce enough batteries to power Germany, if they're not putting any of them in cars or sell to other customers?
- bryanlarsen 4y agoThere are 140 battery plants in various states of planning and construction in Europe, you don't have to rely on a single one.
- heavenlyblue 4y agoWhy would they need to have more than a day of storage?
- Zanfa 4y agoBecause solar and wind are intermittent. UK for example had 11 days in a row in 2021 where wind farms stayed under 20% of capacity during Feb-March [1], the low-season for solar power and high-season in power consumption due to heating. At the national grid level, you should also want to account for rare, once-every-few-decades scenarios. [1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind-goes-gas-fills-in-the-gap/ https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
- ben_w 4y agoSure, but one of the two options in this report is to halve the battery requirement by building five times as much PV, for an overall cost increase of 20%.
- Zanfa 4y agoI think the report suggests building 5x capacity of the current electricity consumption, not the final consumption when heating and transportation have also been converted over from fossil fuels.
- ben_w 4y agoThe main page talks about both, starting with the two options I stated for just electricity after 10 years, and making everything else also renewable after 15. (On the one hand, if you can build that many batteries, fully electric transport is fairly easy; on the other, I don't think there's a plan to ban fossil fuelled cars soon enough to actually hit fully electric transport 15 years from now, but that's probably an unimportant quibble on this scale of change).