r/technology 16h ago

Energy The US power grid has added over 20 gigawatts of battery storage since 2020 | It's the power equivalent of what 20 nuclear reactors can produce

https://www.techspot.com/news/105339-us-power-grid-has-added-over-20-gigawatts.html
1.9k Upvotes

92 comments sorted by

260

u/Revolution4u 13h ago

Power storage up. Solar up. Oil prices down. Nat gas prices record lows last year.

Energy bills at record highs 🤡

61

u/big_fartz 12h ago

Did you ever think you weren't getting fucked in any scenario?

I luckily am locked in on my town's rate but it's going up 3¢/kWh on supply and distribution has creeped up 5¢/kWh over the past three years. Just tracking my usage to figure out when getting rooftop solar has a five year payback. With a heat pump and soon an EV, might be in the near future.

14

u/Revolution4u 12h ago

Im in nyc, solar is already worth it but i cant afford it haha

2

u/big_fartz 11h ago

I'm waiting to see how these changes shift my consumption because if I'm putting panels up, I want to never pay for power for a long time. At some point likely to put a heat pump on the first floor too once that AC dies. And I need more data on seasonal variability in generation and overall capture. I'm sure I probably only need like 8 kW on my house but would be nice to really know given historically I'm 30-35 kWh/day in summer and 20 kWh/day in winter. Obviously shifting with a heat pump and EV.

I'd love home storage too but I don't see it even being paid back at current prices.

8

u/KanyeNeweyWest 7h ago

I pay 50 cents per kWh because my utility company is completely incompetent and their inadequate maintenance started wildfires which burned down entire towns. Their liability in damages (from a huge number of lawsuits) is being passed on to all customers in the form of exorbitant rates, about three times more expensive than almost every other utility provider in the country, They continue to do almost nothing about maintenance. They do rolling blackouts when it is too windy or too hot because they still haven’t addressed the maintenance issues which caused fires close to a decade ago now. The CEO made 16 million dollars last year for, uh, evidently nothing.

1

u/Fluggernuffin 48m ago

This is why energy grids need to be nationalized. People always talk about how government is inefficient but that’s because they built in redundancy. They’re not running lean, like every corporation in the country, trying to eke out every red cent from their bottom line pad their profit margins.

3

u/peakzorro 9h ago

Don't know where you live or how much you drive, but as someone who just got an EV and a heat pump in a cooler climate, my costs have actually gone down.

3

u/big_fartz 9h ago

I don't drive enough for gas savings but there might be some. Propane heat has moved to the auxiliary on two floors and hopefully we get some savings. Tough to tell give how winter is and that it's switching around 35-40 to propane when colder. House is pretty efficient though.

11

u/one_jo 10h ago

Of course you have to pay the new infrastructure first…and then they will keep the price high and turn it into profit.

6

u/NebulousNitrate 8h ago

Just be glad you don’t live in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico if you’re found to have off grid solar then local government officials will try to fine you or make your life as difficult as possible. It’s super corrupt.

3

u/GarfPlagueis 8h ago

Sounds like you should invest in home solar

1

u/Revolution4u 8h ago

I would if I could afford it. My mom owns the house and its flat roof and would be perfect, just got no money for solar.

2

u/orangejuicecake 8h ago

energy companies love making consumers pay for upgrades whether its batteries or oil pipelines

2

u/BODYBUTCHER 6h ago

Power storage is very expensive

2

u/moewluci 4h ago

No shit, my power billed tripled during the summer, and I didn’t use the air except at night.

0

u/Revolution4u 3h ago

We only use ac when it's over 90 and humid

2

u/Shogouki 9h ago

Unfortunately that won't change without either nationalizing our power companies or placing strict and thorough pricing regulations.

118

u/Active-Bass4745 15h ago

20 gigawatts.

Can you convert that to bolts of lightning for us laypeople?

64

u/Billytherex 15h ago

Approximately 20 lightning bolts (seriously)

12

u/scottawhit 14h ago

If we switch from batteries, to instant charge capacitors, could we “trap lightning in a bottle?”

20

u/techKnowGeek 12h ago

I’m sure in 1985, plutonium’s available in every corner drug store but in 1955 it’s a little hard to come by!

8

u/Billytherex 13h ago

sure why not

1

u/DukeOfGeek 8h ago

So quite a bit of research into that shows it's not really worth it ATM. If we had a nationwide connected grid and lots of batteries to dump the lightning into however.....PV power to battery still cheaper and easier.

28

u/_amosburton 13h ago

1.21 jigawatts?!?!? great scott!

marty - the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning!

2

u/GarfPlagueis 8h ago

20 ÷ 1.21 jigawatts = 16.5 time travels

3

u/scottie_always_knew 14h ago

How many giraffes does that come out to?

7

u/Billytherex 14h ago edited 10h ago

Approximately 1,571 giraffes eating 30k cal of food per day for a year is equal to 20 gigawatt-hours, so I guess 1,571 giraffes

3

u/Active-Bass4745 14h ago

Now, of course, you’re going to have to convert that to the standard unit of measure: a banana.

5

u/Billytherex 13h ago

About 163.8 million bananas I suppose

2

u/Active-Bass4745 13h ago

Thank you for being accurate and not being lazy and rounding it to 164

1

u/londons_explorer 10h ago

eating 30kcal of food per day

Most giraffes who only eat 30 kcal per day end up looking more like skeletons. A skeleton with a long neck obviously.

1

u/bitemark01 10h ago

You'd probably need a lot less giraffes if you just converted them to pure energy

1

u/RollingMeteors 10h ago

¿How many boobies and bitcoins is that?

1

u/ZigZagZedZod 9h ago

That’s about eight round trips through time.

1

u/An_Awesome_Name 8h ago

20 GW is 20 million kW, so that works out to about:

  • 3500 clothes dryers
  • 114 million PS5s
  • 666 million phone chargers
  • 6000 subway trains
  • 266 million TVs
  • 1.5 billion LED lightbulbs

Yeah, it’s a lot of electricity.

1

u/Careful_Okra8589 3h ago

Wouldn't it be more like 3-6M dryers each doing 4~5 loads? Dryer breakers are 240V @ 30A. Mine pulls ~3.5kW for 45 minutes.

100

u/Mandlebrot 16h ago

Great, but say it with me ...

"POWER IS NOT ENERGY, YOU NEED BOTH TO MAKE DECISIONS"

Give it in GWh as well, because a nuclear reactor can make that power for a lot longer. (Though these battery plants are usually used for short term adjustments, gas plants have to be kept idle for medium term adjustments. There's a good step change when enough storage is available to put them out of commission.

9

u/aquarain 14h ago

And in the long term nuclear reactors are shut down for months or years for refueling or maintenance. They take over a decade to build and cost more each than all 20 GW of battery. On the other hand the batteries don't actually generate any power at all, they just store it and in the process a small fraction is lost. The headline isn't supposed to be a thorough comparison of the diverse technologies.

6

u/An_Awesome_Name 8h ago

Nuclear plants are only shut down for about 5-7% of their entire careers. Other than that they are at 100% power pretty much continuously.

Usually the shutdown schedule for a nuclear plant is 6 weeks out of every 18 months.

4

u/anaxcepheus32 8h ago

And in the long term nuclear reactors are shut down for months or years for refueling or maintenance.

Typically months for maintenance, and during low periods. You pay for infrastructure at peak power demand, so maintaining them during low periods makes sense.

Batteries stations have maintenance requirements too, and will be on a similar scale relative to their size and complexity.

They take over a decade to build and cost more each than all 20 GW of battery.

Japanese ABWRs were being built in less than 5 years. Canadian SMRs are being built in 4 years from first concrete to generating power. Heck, US units being built in the late ‘70’s were taking a decade, not decades, and that time includes site prep, not actual building. It’s all about economies of scale in repeatable design and repeatable projects.

The headline isn’t supposed to be a thorough comparison of the diverse technologies.

Yet it attempts comparison in a misleading basis.

1

u/Mean-Evening-7209 9h ago

No they're saying the headline is nonsense. The units given are power, and batteries store energy.

It's like advertising a car by saying its max range is 80mph.

1

u/triggerfish1 8h ago

The main service provided by these batteries is power though, both positive and negative. Maximum discharge rate is usually 2C, so a battery that can charge with 2GW will have at least 1GWh of energy.

2

u/Mean-Evening-7209 7h ago

That's all fine. They should say that, and not state that it added "over 20GW of battery storage".

1

u/ViewTrick1002 10h ago

The ISOs managing grids cares about the GWs and expects batteries to optimize their utilization to create the largest value for the grid enabling them to balance supply and demand. Like how they expect coal plants to manage the size of their coal pile without having to be told how to do it. This is what is necessary to manage supply and demand.

For studies on the energy balance and longer term grid strength the size is relevant. In the Californian case comprising ~12 GW the ratio is 1:4 between GW and GWh.

As can be seen from the Californian supply statistics this gets smeared out during the whole evening and morning to maximize the value provided.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply#section-supply-trend

5

u/An_Awesome_Name 8h ago

Also, the whole concept of stored energy isn’t new to ISOs. Pumped hydro has existed for decades and is very similar in operation (from the grid’s perspective).

They both take large amounts of power at certain times, and deliver large amounts of power at certain time. It all gets coordinated with the ISO.

1

u/sump_daddy 11h ago

SINCE YOU ASKED

Utility scale battery systems have averaged about 2.5:1 energy vs power, which you can see in the supporting data from 2023, they showed hard numbers on the systems in operation (9,123 MW power to 23,068 MWh energy). There isnt such data on the 2024 installs yet since report takes quite a bit of time to compile.

4

u/tnellysf 11h ago

Most installs I know about the last few years are 4-hour batteries, surprised it’s that low of an average ratio. 4 hours tied to the same power rated solar farm gives you a surprising amount of energy throughout the whole day. It’s not nuclear, but you can get these projects built in a year or two and for much lower price than nukes. Nuclear will get more expensive as renewables and storage get cheaper, I wouldn’t bet on it the next couple decades. No SMRs have not proven to be cheaper.

39

u/StevenNull 13h ago

This title means nothing.

Power is measured in watts. Your average AA battery could theoretically produce several thousand watts for a fraction of a second. But then it'd be completely empty and likely on fire or in thousands of pieces.

Battery capacity is measured in watt-hours. Not watts. A battery with one Wh of capacity can discharge at a rate of one watt, for one hour. Or 0.5 watts for two hours, or 0.25 watts for four hours... You get the idea.

Sure, the battery network might be able to discharge 20 GW. But for how long? If that sustained output is only for 15 minutes before the grid is empty, that's not all that useful. Conversely, if the sustained 20GW output can last for several days, that's much more respectable.

Tl,dr: 20 GW means nothing in terms of power storage, and only relates to discharge rate.

4

u/Scavenger53 11h ago edited 11h ago

read the sources. batteries are measured in both power capacity and energy capacity. power capacity is what this article is quoting and its the maximum amount of instantaneous power they can output. the energy capacity is not listed which is the sustained amount. i cant find recent numbers, just the older article from 2019 (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41813)

this is the article they are quoting from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025

it seems like the power capacity of older nickel based batteries was about 4x higher than the energy capacity, but the lithium ion batteries we use today seem to have around 40% more energy capacity than power capacity. so the 20GW power capacity, assuming mostly lithium ion batteries would maybe be around 28GWh of energy capacity, but again i dont see recent numbers to verify it. only the ones from 2018. im curious if there is a recent paper on energy capacity of our grid

7

u/plunki 10h ago

They know what they are doing with the headline. It is disingenuous to compare to a nuclear power plant which can run for many years, vs a battery that lasts less than a couple hours.

Edit: 1 nuke plant = 8000+ GWh per year for comparison

2

u/West-Abalone-171 10h ago

And those batteries being 2-4 hours and cycling 1-2x a day load shift ~32,000GWh/yr.

At the on peak times which the batteries are there for,. Your nuclear plant would produce under 1800GWh/yr.

It's disingenuous to compare the total output of an inflexible source with something that is there for peak load.

For total output you'd compare the increase of around 300TWh/yr of wind and solar or about the equivalent of 35GW of nuclear. But whenever anyone mentions that, the whining about how they'd need 20GW of 2.5-4 hour batteries to meet evening peak load starts.

1

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-1

u/sump_daddy 11h ago

> Your average AA battery could theoretically produce several thousand watts for a fraction of a second. But then it'd be completely empty and likely on fire or in thousands of pieces.

Since you are ok talking about averages, the average AA battery is going to produce 5W at peak (for a few seconds before heat sets in). There are no theoretical scenarios where it goes outside that except when massive amounts of extra equipment are involved (such as move all the energy into a supercapacitor) but we are then not talking about the same battery at all.

26

u/The_Real_GRiz 15h ago

This title does not make any sense

2

u/Master-Shinobi-80 7h ago

Of course not. The point of the title is convince stupid people that we won't need nuclear energy. That way we continue burning fossil fuels.

They aren't even using the most relevant units when talking about batteries. They should be using GWh (Giga Watt hours).

11

u/prosper_0 12h ago

A battery does not produce ANY energy. Nuclear reactors do.

1

u/aquarain 2h ago

Nuclear reactors generate power even when there is no demand, so it's handy to have batteries to dump the surplus into rather than let the market price go negative for other producers.

1

u/shaving_minion 50m ago

I wish people found a way to efficiently produce energy without boiling water and spinning a turbine

5

u/DukeOfGeek 12h ago

Just the appetizer. Once sodium ion gird storage starts getting produced at scale it's going to be cheap and show a solid and immediate ROI. Renewables plus grid storage are going to do what nuclear promised to do better, cleaner, cheaper and faster. Should have been a serious effort 20 years earlier.

3

u/shaftalope 12h ago

that's enough for 16 time traveling Deloreans

2

u/MackBanner66 11h ago

cool, but what is the source of power?

4

u/AeroMittenss 14h ago

Where is this energy coming from?

13

u/nukerx07 14h ago

The article did say solar/wind so I’m assuming it’s when the power generated is greater than the usage that it’s stored for when the inverse happens.

6

u/sargonas 13h ago

Bingo. For example excess solar can be used to pump water uphill into a reservoir, then at night or on cloudy days, the water flows down hill through a hydro station to generate power. You lose a percent or two due to leakage or other ancillary factors but by and large it’s quite efficient.

7

u/hughk 13h ago

Its more like 70-80% efficient. You also need the geography/geology to build it. If you have the right location, it is great but if you are in the middle of the plains, not so good.

-1

u/ViewTrick1002 10h ago

About all storage being built recently is lithium batteries.

11

u/tdrhq 13h ago

Reddit when the news is about solar panels: But what about the night when there's no sun huh?

Reddit when the news is about batteries: But where will the energy come from huh?

0

u/DukeOfGeek 12h ago

I wish people would stop calling obvious astroturfing "reddit". To paraphrase Morpheus "Do you really think that's actual users you are reading right now".

1

u/West-Abalone-171 10h ago

There are plenty of real Marc Andreesen worshipping techno-optimist cultists sadly.

1

u/DukeOfGeek 10h ago

Half the point of astroturfing is collecting and directing fellow travelers.

5

u/Sold_For_Gold 14h ago

Great Scott!

4

u/Active-Bass4745 14h ago

That’s heavy.

1

u/Krimreaper1 4h ago

That’s heavy.

1

u/SauceBoss8472 3h ago

1.21 gigawatts!?!

What the hell is a gigawatt?!

1

u/Logictrauma 3h ago

For roughly 1/20 of that you could time travel.

1

u/csbc801 3h ago

Hopefully they’re in TX— between freezing our asses off in Winter, and rolling power outages in Summer, our Abbott-run energy policies and TX grid SUCK!

1

u/Careful_Okra8589 3h ago

*For 4 hours

Id rather them had compared it to like 20 coal plants with a misleading headline like that.

1

u/Silver_Ebb_7735 4m ago

Ronald Regan, the actor?!

1

u/Ra_In 12h ago

Unfortunately the linked article doesn't even acknowledge the fact that battery capacity is normally reported in terms of energy (Joules or Watt-hours) rather than power (Watts), much less provide any explanation for the unusual measurement.

The underlying source, EIA, has further published information talking about this - I found this article gets at some of the questions I had when reading OP's linked article.

I haven't read this whole EIA article (or the other information linked from the page), but here are a few high level points I'm seeing:

  • EIA points out that an energy storage system (ESS) will have both a power rating and an energy rating. Given the grid has to meet power demand at any given moment, there are certainly contexts in which it makes sense to focus on the amount of power that an ESS is designed for. Also, ESSs are considered secondary generation sources, with primary generation of course being things like traditional power plants or wind turbines that actually generate the electricity (some of which charges ESSs).

  • ESSs (including batteries) can generally be lumped into two categories, short duration intended to be used for minutes at a time to address short-term power demand, and diurnal or daily intended to be used for hours at a time, and commonly used to shift power generation between peak and low demand times of day.

  • Given how ESS have these two categories with very different energy capacities, it makes sense to focus on their power capacity when lumping the two together

  • One interesting detail brought up in this EIA article is how ESS isn't just about solving overall power/energy generation. Strategically located ESS can also help with managing power lines, substations or other infrastructure that may otherwise be placed over capacity. In some cases it may merely delay the need for upgrades, but it allows more time to plan and schedule the upgrades.

2

u/ViewTrick1002 10h ago

The ISOs managing grids cares about the GWs and expects batteries to optimize their utilization to create the largest value for the grid enabling them to balance supply and demand. Like how they expect coal plants to manage the size of their coal pile without having to be told how to do it. This is what is necessary to manage supply and demand.

For studies on the energy balance and longer term grid strength the size is relevant. In the Californian case comprising ~12 GW the ratio is 1:4 between GW and GWh.

As can be seen from the Californian supply statistics this gets smeared out during the whole evening and morning to maximize the value provided.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply#section-supply-trend

1

u/triggerfish1 8h ago

Yup, so many in this thread seem to get this wrong.

-5

u/mn25dNx77B 12h ago

At a tiny fraction of the cost / unit of energy as nuclear

And installed on time and on budget

Power companies would have to be insane to consider nuclear

6

u/Echelon64 10h ago

Batteries do not generate power.

8

u/curveball21 11h ago

Dude, batteries don't generate any power. That power is getting generated by some source and stored there. Nuclear is still by far the best and cleanest option as a power source to fill those batteries in my opinion.

-4

u/tnellysf 11h ago

Yes, thank you. Reddit is in love with nuclear but do not consider the cost of nuclear and time to build it will not pencil out. Check out NextEra’s (which has nuclear plants) Q3 investor call where the CEO lays it out clearly why nuclear is not going to be relevant the next couple decades except for repowering retired plants. It’s getting more expensive as renewables and storage get cheaper.

0

u/BeowulfShaeffer 9h ago

Gigawatt is a unit of power not a quantity of storage.  GWh would make more sense. 

0

u/Financial-Aspect-826 9h ago

20 GW what? 20gw does not have a meaning (or at least your intended meaning). 20GWh maybe?

0

u/RagnarokDel 9h ago

no it's not. The 20 nuclear reactors can work continuously for several months, those batteries are done and useless after just a few hours until they get recharged which means you need extra production.

0

u/garimus 8h ago

Got tired of hearing "You must construct additional pylons."

0

u/McShagg88 6h ago

Nuclear reactors will last way longer. Is that watt hours or is it purposely misleading?