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The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

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Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#31

Post by Toutouxc »

epups wrote: post #18
ChatGTP wrote: post #8

Anyone 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…

The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity. If this prediction holds true we will have 14 gigawatts of storage this year. You do the math and you tell me whether base load generation is still an issue or not.

> The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity.

It's roughly 3800 TWh (Terrawatt-hours) per year, no need to invent new units.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#32

Post by fbdab103 »

Y-bar wrote: post #28
dappermanneke wrote: post #21

a doubling of barely anything is still barely anything

Let's play chess. If I win, you send me some rice, ok?

In case anyone is unfamiliar: https://www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com/rice-and-chessb...

  "Oh emperor, my wishes are simple. I only wish for this. Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next and so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before."

  The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward - or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many many centuries!

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#33

Post by tsimionescu »

cycomanic wrote: post #29
XorNot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's take an absurd extreme case to illustrate - if you had a battery that could store 1GWh but could only discharge up to 1mW in an hour, how would you power an aluminum furnace with this battery?

Assuming you are using batteries for continuous solar power, you basically need the batteries to be able to store enough power to last through the night, and to be able to match the solar power plant's peak power - otherwise, the grid can't power the same things during the night that it can during the day, which was the whole reason we wanted the batteries in the first place.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#34

Post by modeless »

Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replace all non-renewables? I imagine it's still a lot.

Edit: this page claims we need 84 times what we had in 2022, the estimate for 2024 is ~3x higher, so call it ~5 more doublings after this year. https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-nee...

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#35

Post by jillesvangurp »

wolverine876 wrote: post #7

How long does the typical battery last before it needs significant new investment (major maintenance or replacement)? In other words, how long before we need to install another 30 GW not to increase capacity, but to maintain it? I'm not a pessimist but I know that at this stage in an adoption cycle, it's all gain, but that's not the long-term reality. I'm wondering what the long-term looks like. In part, if the capac…

If it keeps on doubling like this, a fraction of the installed base may be affected by this some 10-15 years down the line. That's kind of how the math works out. Most batteries around that time will be new ones. And that seems to be the time line that these things are sold for. They might have quite a bit of life in them beyond that of course. It's not like they just stop working.

In any case, we're talking about first and second generation products here adapted from batteries designed for the automotive industry. It works and it's great but there are better options coming to market that are more optimal for grid storage. Ten years from now, this market is going to be very different in terms of cost, performance, longevity, and volumes produced and deployed.

The world's electricity production per year is around 25 pwh (25000 twh) per year. So, you can do some back of the envelope math on that. We're going from hundreds of gwh to twh of battery produced per year in the next years (overall, not just grid). Each of those batteries is good for thousands of charging cycles. So if you were to charge and cycle each battery every day to add up to 1/365th of 25pw, you end up with a number of around 70twh of battery that is needed. We don't actually need that much of course since there are other options on the grid. But it just shows you that it could be doable and might be what we have in the field in a few decades. A few twh of battery on standby goes a long way and might just sit there fully charged most of the time.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#36

Post by colechristensen »

modeless wrote: post #34

Doubling in 2024 is great but the estimate for 2025 is nowhere near doubling again. How many doublings will we need to store enough energy that solar can replace all non-renewables? I imagine it's still a lot. Edit: this page claims we need 84 times what we had in 2022, the estimate for 2024 is ~3x higher, so call it ~5 more doublings after this year. https://www.alsym.com/blog/how-much-energy-storage-do-we-nee...

The opposite needs to happen, industry needs to adjust to taking advantage of regular daily energy price swings. Plenty of industries can.

Instantaneous pricing for electricity motivates people and industry to make better choices.

Very cheap energy will enable interesting things too.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#37

Post by Gare »

cycomanic wrote: post #29
XorNot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because grid batteries are currently used as peak supply - if a production of power plants suddenly falls of by 10 GW or there is 10 GW additional demand, you have to quickly provide that 10 GW of power before other (cheaper) additional production can be ramped up.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#38

Post by Gibbon1 »

cycomanic wrote: post #29
XorNot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My suspicion is battery life estimating is complicated and proprietary. So your depreciation due to wear depends on both the rate of charge and the rate of discharge.

My best guess is they shoot for a discharge rate of roughly C3. Meaning they can deliver the rated power for 3 hours. Suspect they keep the charge between 10 and 90%. So I think you can multiply watts by 4 to get watt-hours.

That said I've looked for actual numbers in kwh and not found much.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#39

Post by shatnersbassoon »

mathgradthrow wrote: post #2

Gigawatts are not a unit of energy.... something something zalgo.

It's presented in Gigawatts here, but I expect the actual metric is probably something like "Gigawatts available for 99th centile of duration of demand peaks", as this would allow you to talk about capacity in the same units as grid supply and demand. The whole point of grid batteries is for near-instant availability, so total energy available is moot if you can't access it right away - therefore a metric of energy would be less useful. Anyway, that's my speculation.

Re: The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again

#40

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

XorNot wrote: post #20
audunw wrote: post #4

Earlier 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".

Depends on who you ask. For the grid operators since they balance instantaneous supply and demand they only care about power available. Expecting the producers to maximize their profit and hence save the batteries until they are most needed.

When explicitly designing an electrical system, say an off-grid cabin, both the energy stored and instantaneous matching of supply needs to pencil out.

In the large scale grid example we expect the market to handle the energy balance. Adding transmission links, secondary markets and so on when the market does not adequately match demand.

Generally speaking today batteries used for grid scale storage store 4 GWh per 1 GW. This number comes from maximizing the utilization of the grid connection and matching the hours per day with highest electricity rates.

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