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Sure, battery production volumes are increasing rapidly. Going from hundreds to thousands of gwh annually. Basically twh territory. 32 GW at a capacity factor
by jillesvangurp 3y ago
Sure, battery production volumes are increasing rapidly. Going from hundreds to thousands of gwh annually. Basically twh territory.
32 GW at a capacity factor of about 0.25 (about right for solar, I think) pumps out about 70twh annually. Sounds like a lot but the US consumes about 4000twh per year. So this only represents about 1.7% of its overall energy production. The US is still catching up with other countries that source a larger percentage from solar already (e.g. China, Germany). I think globally it's around 5% currently. But undeniably the IRA is delivering big time in terms of economic stimulation and the bootstrapping of what are no doubt going to be very profitable businesses. And as a side effect, a lot of renewable energy capacity is coming online very rapidly.
Those car batteries could be cycled daily of course. There's will be an order of magnitude more battery on the roads (just in cars) than you can charge with this amount of solar. Of course those cars don't discharge all that much. Mostly they don't drive anywhere near their maximum range on a daily basis and are near fully charged most of the time.
So, that's going to be tens of twh that is ready to be used, in principle. We'll probably never utilize most of that available capacity for grid usage. Not because we can't but because there are more economical forms of storage than car batteries that are also becoming available. In other words, we'll have lots of redundant storage options. Domestic battery, grid battery, truck batteries, buses, ships, cars, etc. Tens, hundreds of twh of capacity.