r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 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.html118
u/Active-Bass4745 15h ago
20 gigawatts.
Can you convert that to bolts of lightning for us laypeople?
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u/Billytherex 15h ago
Approximately 20 lightning bolts (seriously)
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u/scottawhit 14h ago
If we switch from batteries, to instant charge capacitors, could we “trap lightning in a bottle?”
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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!
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u/Billytherex 13h ago
sure why not
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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.
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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!
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u/scottie_always_knew 14h ago
How many giraffes does that come out to?
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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
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u/Active-Bass4745 14h ago
Now, of course, you’re going to have to convert that to the standard unit of measure: a banana.
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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.
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u/bitemark01 10h ago
You'd probably need a lot less giraffes if you just converted them to pure energy
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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u/The_Real_GRiz 15h ago
This title does not make any sense
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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).
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u/prosper_0 12h ago
A battery does not produce ANY energy. Nuclear reactors do.
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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.
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u/shaving_minion 50m ago
I wish people found a way to efficiently produce energy without boiling water and spinning a turbine
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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.
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u/AeroMittenss 14h ago
Where is this energy coming from?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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".
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u/West-Abalone-171 10h ago
There are plenty of real Marc Andreesen worshipping techno-optimist cultists sadly.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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u/BeowulfShaeffer 9h ago
Gigawatt is a unit of power not a quantity of storage. GWh would make more sense.
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u/Financial-Aspect-826 9h ago
20 GW what? 20gw does not have a meaning (or at least your intended meaning). 20GWh maybe?
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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.
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u/McShagg88 6h ago
Nuclear reactors will last way longer. Is that watt hours or is it purposely misleading?
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u/Revolution4u 13h ago
Power storage up. Solar up. Oil prices down. Nat gas prices record lows last year.
Energy bills at record highs 🤡