5 ms·
The entire United States has something like 3 seconds of energy storage, total. Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amo
by mlsu 4y ago
The entire United States has something like 3 seconds of energy storage, total.
Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amount of connected grid storage. Good luck finding that much pumped hydro! The easy spots are taken already!
An hour is not enough, of course. That might handle some small variations in wind only. Of course, one diurnal solar cycle means you need to store power for 8-12 hours. That is another order of magnitude. So in order to do this, we need to increase our battery capacity by four orders of magnitude. Multiple days? Weeks?
Now consider that the demand curve will become even more extreme, as climate change increases demand for electric heating and cooling. And consider that you will also need to account for electrifying the cars on the road (because building out storage like this is a multiple decades project), which will place additional capacity demands on the grid.
The thing with storage is not that it's difficult, it's that it's big. Like the scale is you need to nationalize your extraction industries and turn your economy into a wartime economy whose singular purpose is producing batteries big. It's not a Tesla or Google or even a DOE scale problem.
- cauch 4y agoWell, 3 seconds if you turn everything off, but it is not what we are talking about here, especially if the question is peak shifting. The majority of peak shifting is done at local level, with solution like, for example, domestic wall battery like Tesla or electric-vehicle-to-grid. Still not ideal, but I don't think your depiction of the situation is very fair if it presents it in a totally unrealistic way. I also don't understand your argument about solar cycle: solar is producing close to peak hours, while nights are non-peak hours. So, in practice, it's not like you need to store the electricity locally for more than a couple of hours. I guess you are talking of a situation where the grid is 100% solar, but that's obviously a ridiculous scenario that no one has never pushed for. I agree with the fact that the demand curve will become more extreme, and it is exactly the reason of my intervention here: this is a complicated situation, and it does not matter if the grid is mainly nuclear or mainly renewable, it is still problematic. I agree that the storage problem is tricky and that the scale is a challenge. But this challenge still exist in full nuclear grid, unless we end up with a lot of idle nuclear plant running only few hours per day.
- VintageCool 4y agoThe United States added more battery energy storage to the grid in 2021 than the United States had at the beginning of 2021. The situation here is one of rapid transition.