a doubling of barely anything is still barely anything
The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been in your boots for 15 years, and I barely convinced anyone. Even my thermal panels are viewed with suspiction, and people don't believe me when I told them my hot water come from them with a little help from an electric heater in the winter. They pay themselves once per year, easily. Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" At this point I gave up. I en…
> my thermal panels How cold is it where you're at? I'm weighing putting in a new tankless boiler system, as well as a rooftop PV, but thermal solar might be a better bet.
Solar thermal works well even in northern latitudes, for example this municipal bath uses them extensively: https://maps.app.goo.gl/w571B7hTXCUBpN7Q6
Edit: This building is of course a bit exceptional in that it is both well-aligned south-facing and has no trees or other things shading it. Another thing working in it's favour is that reflections from water, ice, and snow also provide a non-negligible boost in captured energy.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been in your boots for 15 years, and I barely convinced anyone. Even my thermal panels are viewed with suspiction, and people don't believe me when I told them my hot water come from them with a little help from an electric heater in the winter. They pay themselves once per year, easily. Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" At this point I gave up. I en…
Every time I bring up that subject, people get aggravated and point out that lower voltage means larger cables, which is true, but I wonder if the tradeoff of paying more for thicker cables is worth the simplicity it brings.
What simplicity? Houses aren't limited from being off-grid because of 120vac conversion efficiency, and the new hotness in batteries is HVDC which makes chargers cheaper because it aligns battery voltage to common DC MPPT voltages from solar panels.
The industry has been literally moving away from low voltage DC recently.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#24Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…
I don't think it's a scam, scams requires malice, and it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages — after all, even when people do learn about exponential growth, many say things like that it has a "knee" or reaches an "inflection point".
There's a survivor bias, many things do stop growing at some point, but these are harder to notice. You're more likely to perceive the things which did scale exponentially.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#25Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…
How much energy storage do you think those 14 gigawatts of batteries represent? How long do they provide 14 gigawatts for?
Then go cost out how much it would cost you to deal with say, 3 days of solar under production due to grey skies for your house. In most studies, the capacity factor of a solar plant is about 25% at best, so that 550W panel is worth about 137W over the course of a year, presuming you can store all of it.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installed capacity is sometimes measured by power output rather than energy storage capacity. Both measures are relevant.
And yet only one is ever mentioned when batteries come up, despite the context being heavily implied to be "energy" not "power".
I always find talk of power weird. It does make sense when you need to replace some plant going down... But in general storage capacity is much more important. That is how many hours and at what price can they provide demand for. With hours here being some reasonable number above say four...
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#27Gigawatts are not a unit of energy.... something something zalgo.
They’re a unit of power which is what is being described here. People want to know how much they can draw per unit time from each source.
Wind Turbines a GW
Nuclear Plant b GW
Battery Storage c GW
That’s a power measure so you use power units. It would make no sense to use energy units.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#28a doubling of barely anything is still barely anything
Let's play chess. If I win, you send me some rice, ok?
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installed capacity is sometimes measured by power output rather than energy storage capacity. Both measures are relevant.
And yet only one is ever mentioned when batteries come up, despite the context being heavily implied to be "energy" not "power".
What I've seen in several articles is that peak power production seems to be as much a limiting factor as stored energy. I'm still haven't found a good explanation why that is though. So if anyone could educate me, I'm all ears.
Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again
#30Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impres…
> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam
I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation.
Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times.
Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars.
In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.