3 ms·

But the capacity needed to top up that battery on a cloudy week is still less than having a gas plant having to meet peak demand. Kinda like the BMW i3 with Re

• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  That works in a car because a car's energy demands are bursty. The power to accelerate the car from a stop comes from the battery and then the car's energy requirements drop by 95% and the tiny engine can eek out a little more than the 5% needed to maintain cruising speed and use the rest to slowly recharge the battery. The power grid doesn't work like that. The base load is around half of the peak load. It never drops to 5%. That doesn't mean the batteries can't be useful. If the average load is 150GW but that's because it's 100GW at night and 200GW during the day, the batteries let you get away with having only 150GW of average generating capacity instead of 200GW, because during the times when the generation exceeds the demand you can put the surplus in the batteries. But you still need to maintain an average of 150GW of generating capacity or the batteries will get empty and the power goes out.