US Power Grid Added Battery Equivalent of 20 Nuclear Reactors In Past Four Years (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0175318289
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/24/1842244/us-power-grid-added-battery-equivalent-of-20-nuclear-reactors-in-past-four-years
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/power-grid-battery-capacity-growth
> People here and elsewhere have been yelling for more nuclear power, and that renewables can't meet demand. Surprise -- the corporations are betting on them, and massive numbers of batteries can be produced a lot faster than nuclear plants can be built.
The Guardian adds:
> Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts. From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having [2]installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid , with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America's electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.
>
> California and Texas, which both saw all-time highs in battery-discharged grid power this month, are leading the way in this growth, with hulking batteries helping manage the large amount of clean yet intermittent solar and wind energy these states have added in recent years.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~whitroth
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/power-grid-battery-capacity-growth
"'Bronze?' La dee dah, it's just tinned copper!" (Score:2)
Every single time. Fifty years of "completely impractical, no way this will ever be worthwhile", and then somebody does it, and then everybody's doing it, and then nobody can imagine doing it any other way. I suppose this phenomenon must be due to incremental improvements in effectiveness and affordability, or to government subsidies, but after the fact, it does feel like everybody was just being curmudgeonly all the time. Now I'm wondering how much of the tech from the Jetsons would be real if everybody
Re: (Score:2)
Incremental improvements go a long way when they produce exponentially dropping prices. Human brains have enough trouble with more than two categories, never mind actual lines. Lines that curve are witchcraft.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Inertia isn't just a physical thing, it has social and economic equivalents.
We never should have started burning oil in the first place, but it was more convenient than working on battery technology at the dawn of the 20th.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes batteries exist since many years.
But how would they have been charged when first oil came around, by coal fired generators.
Re: (Score:2)
We had electric motors before cars. Electric motors can also be electric generators... I'm going to suggest water and wind power.
At the very least, if power has been centrally generated rather than burning gas in millions of little engines, switching power sources would be a lot easier with the last mile all electric already. And before that, pollution reduction measures would be more efficient.
Re: (Score:2)
Hard for me to imagine bypassing coal and oil. But it is true that both water and wind power were used to generate motive force (e.g. milling grain and sailing ships) long, long before heat engines.
Re: (Score:2)
Come to think of it, I guess that's why "windmill" ends with "mill."
Re: (Score:2)
> Inertia isn't just a physical thing, it has social and economic equivalents.
So much this. I always shake my head when I read some of the more ridiculous comments like Solar power doesn't work when the sun goes down. It's like some folks are stuck in 1950, with selenium cells.
> We never should have started burning oil in the first place, but it was more convenient than working on battery technology at the dawn of the 20th.
Certain things like flight are an issue though. Petrofuels have one big advantage, and that is portability. Now we do have some airplanes now that run successfully on batteries. And they are apparently a real hoot. Here's one of the YT channels I watch - Mentor Pilot - reviewing a flight [1]https://www.youtube.co [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqF55MjU9jc
Re: (Score:2)
> Every single time. Fifty years of "completely impractical, no way this will ever be worthwhile", and then somebody does it, and then everybody's doing it, and then nobody can imagine doing it any other way.
It takes a long time for some people to accept that there are alternatives to nuclear power generation. We still have people that state that as soon as the sun goes down, there won't be any power available, when batteries are already available and being put in use.
It's just storage of capacity, and might even be compared to legacy turbine driven power generation. No power station has 100 percent power availability. Even nuclear stations have to shut down for things like refueling, and working on turbine
Re: (Score:2)
What part of
"the corporations are betting on them, and massive numbers of batteries can be produced a lot faster than nuclear plants can be built."
is going over your head?
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear will certainly be built to maintain a bse production, both are needed in the long term.
Re: (Score:2)
Fusion maybe.
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear isn't *needed* long term.
Short term you could make an argument - like the next 20 years or so as renewable and batteries ramp up. If we want to turn off fossil fuels as fast as we need too, nuclear may be the bridge. But we also may have enough nuclear already in operation or pipeline. That's the trillion/billion dollar question I think.
CA has already had at least 40% of daily demand supplied by renewable sources for entire 24 hour periods. that's baseload scale. Not exactly a small state.
[1]https [pv-magazine-usa.com]
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/CAApril.image_.1-1200x526.jpg
Re: (Score:2)
> What part of
> "the corporations are betting on them, and massive numbers of batteries can be produced a lot faster than nuclear plants can be built."
> is going over your head?
What is more, if power needs increase, emplacing more batteries and panels or wind turbines can be done on an as needed basis. Turbine based power generation is hella more expensive to build a new one.
In my area, we're seeing that increment process. One of our solar fields has just doubled its size in the last two years. No issues.
And for those worried about the little critters, the underside of the panels provides a nice place for birds to nest, and plenty of vegetation grows under the panels as wel
Re: (Score:2)
you will recycle batteries, it will be cheaper than mining when you have enough quantity... you will not recycle nuclear components (at least for a long time), as they are radioactive and it is still unknown on what to do to the nuclear waste.
Uranium also needs to be mined, purified, all requiring equipment outside the nuclear station itself, just like what is needed to get the components for a baterie or even solar or wind power
The cost of a single nuclear station is huge, enough to build many wind and sol
Re:That's a lot of materials and maintenance (Score:4, Informative)
> you also need a lot of whatever fills the batteries (like wind or solar)
Yeah, and we got that. Lots of it, actually. So much so that it's kind of a problem that we have all this renewable energy we can't use when it's available... hence the batteries.
> different exotic materials used
Either you don't know what "exotic" means, or you are completely unfamiliar with the kinds of specialty materials nuclear reactors require. Setting aside the actual fuel (which is a pretty exotic blend) the fuel rods and reactor vessels require specialty alloys rarely if ever used elsewhere that stand up to the heat and radiation. Batteries, depending on type, use materials like lithium, sodium, iron, aluminum, copper,, manganese, phosphorus, nickel, graphite... pretty common stuff.
> And you need to replace it all about every 20 years or so
Nope. You REALLY need to get a new talking point. It's embarrassing for you. Grid-level BESSs have been getting built for over 20 years already, with the only difference now being the scale of these facilities and popular media coverage. It took over 20 years but they're finally sexy enough to get some attention outside niche trade publications, and finally cheap enough that they're more economical than gas turbine peaker plants that would normally be getting built.
> Meanwhile you build a nuclear reactor once, on a small plot of land
50 acres per gigawatt. That's more land usage than battery systems. Oh, and there's no need to store radioactive waste on site for close to a decade while you wait for it to "cool" enough to safely transport elsewhere (assuming there IS an elsewhere; currently there is not so it just piles up on site)
The size of a BESS is also a LOT more flexible, meaning you have a lot more options when trying to find the optimal location for them. Finding a site for a nuclear plant is a lot more difficult because you NEED 150+ acres and also access to surface waters, natural or man-made, plus it can't be too close to population centers.
> If what you are saying was so simple would would so many tech companies be looking at nuclear reactors now?
My guess? Because they can get the taxpayers to foot the bill for virtually every aspect of them one way or another. It can't be because they're a superior technology, because to date they haven't actually built any and it's really not a known quantity.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
> we have all this renewable energy we can't use when it's available... hence the batteries.
No. We don't have very much renewable energy we can't use and there are very limited situations where that happens.
Batteries are being built because they are cheaper than a new natural gas plant for meeting peak loads. That is why the comparison here to their peak output in MW is appropriate rather than how long they can sustain it MWH. They can be charged by coal, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear etc. whatever is the cheapest available power during the rest of the day and night. Since power is generally cheap
Re: (Score:2)
CA is *already* at 123% of demand via solar during peak hours. [1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/20... [pv-magazine-usa.com]
As for "we don't have very much renewable energy" uh, more solar energy hits the earth in one HOUR than the entire human races uses in every form in an entire year.
That's an 8000 to 1 ratio. And that's *just* solar.
Of course, that's the entire surface so we won't collect all that. But that's the whole lot of efficiency losses down the line it can handle and still be more energy than we will ever use.
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/05/24/solar-peaks-at-123-of-grid-supplies-31-of-californias-april-electricity/
Re: (Score:2)
Be careful with industry propaganda. My understanding is that California "curtails" solar while continuing to use other power. There are certainly times and places in California where battery storage would be useful. But that isn't a general rule.
Re: (Score:2)
> No. We don't have very much renewable energy we can't use and there are very limited situations where that happens.
In California they have reached a point where they "throw out" (read: curtail) over 2 [1] terawatt-hours [eia.gov] of renewable energy annually because it's either available at the wrong time or the grid is saturated and they can't transmit the power from where it's being made to where it's needed. A lot of that wasted potential can be solved with grid upgrades or storage to time-shift loads, but a he
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60822
Re: (Score:2)
> t makes absolutely no sense to buy fossil fuel electricity when renewable energy is literally free or even price-negative during times of glut [cleanenergywire.org]. If in the worst case the BESS is tapped out and there's enough demand to warrant spinning up a gas turbine (the next cheapest option), then that turbine is better served powering the demand directly rather than charging a battery.
Base load plants don't get turned on and off to meet demand. Which, along with reduced demand, is why power is cheap at night even though there is no solar available.
> As an EV owner I don't have to. It's cheaper at night because of all the power plants that can't be turned off want to make SOME money, and so they lower prices to encourage more usage during off-peak hours.
>> That pretty much contradicts your claim that "tt makes absolutely no sense to buy fossil fuel electricity".
>>> Please think long and hard about that, until you realize how silly that comment is. Unless you're suggesting people evolve to sleep uninterrupted from 5PM to 9AM or something.
>> I think it is likely people evolved to be active during daylight since they didn't really have much choice. But that was hardly the point There are plenty of high energy activities that can be shifted from night to day and will be because of the high cost of storing power for later use. I don't think it makes sense to store solar power in a battery during the day and then use the power from the battery to charge an EV at night. Do you?
Re: (Score:2)
> it just sits providing power for 80+ years
Uh no. Nuclear Plants burn fuel. And while some nuclear plants may last 80+ years most won't. I am not aware of any power coming from nuclear power plants built in 1944.
Re: (Score:2)
Iron Air batteries. It rusts and unrusts iron to store energy.
Thermal SAND batteries. (junk sand too, so plentiful) 70% efficient over 6 MONTHS of storage. Literally store summer heat for winter...in Finland.
Some of the most common things on earth.
There are MANY different battery chemistries for different use cases.
As for land area....we all have roofs and fencing/vertical works in places as well for solar.
The fetish for nuclear without any questioning of it's downsides is insane.
No, not really (Score:3, Informative)
They are batteries, not generators. Something else has to fill them up before they can supply any power. Whatever is used must be replaced. Now, are they useful? Damned straight they are. But the generate nothing.
As usual, the article is mixed up (Score:2)
The stored water behind a hydro dam is like a battery. It is filled by rain whereas renewables can fill a battery instead. There is some big-ass electronics doing the converting. The battery's DC to AC inverters do function as generators and can be directly compared with the output of a classic electro-mechanical generator.
Sadly, the article conflates inverter power rating with battery capacity. In reality, those are two separate ratings.
Re: (Score:3)
Now only if we had renewables that can vastly overproduce the spot energy demand, so they could fill batteries on that excess generation.
Oh, wait...
Excess solar and wind power (Score:2)
Either goes somewhere or gets wasted. If it goes to batteries then that's a power generation win. And it's a victory for the batteries not the wind and solar since by definition it's excess power.
Re: (Score:2)
"Whatever is used must be replaced."
Look up. More solar energy hits the earth in an hour than humanity uses in all forms in a year. 8000:1 ratio. And that's *just* solar.
Batteries plus solar and renewables more than cover that 'replacement'
Grr! Gigawatt or Gigawatt-hour? (Score:4, Insightful)
Same problem time and again! Gigawatt (GW) is not a unit of battery capacity! It's the max power delivery of the inverters attached to the battery. Of course maybe they mean Gigawatt-hour (GWh) instead. In which case it is the battery capacity.
Both are valid measurements when it comes to specifying the equipment, so its not easy to determine if the article is talking about the combined battery capacities or the max power they can deliver.
Given it's a comparison against power generating stations then I can only presume it is GW as written, representing the inverter power ratings rather than battery capacity. In which case battery capacities are unknown.
Re: (Score:2)
I think they mean what they said, power. Which is important, after all, for smoothing out wind and solar unless you want brownouts.
The article addresses energy, a little: "Of course, wind and sun droughts can last longer than the longest-duration batteries currently available, meaning they are not a panacea." Which makes the direct comparison to nuclear annoying. It talks about expanding the grid to smooth things out, which will help in the US... Germany, less so.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but they screwed up by saying it's the battery capacity.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, that's why Germany is pushing the development of electrical connections between Europe and North Africa.
Surprise: it doesn't matter! (Score:1)
Nuclear is Baseload. Battery is Intermittent and Peaking. You need multiple different generation regimes, for many reasons.
Renewables are not Baseload. The reason is, the batteries can run out. Nuclear, gas, coal, etc doesn't run out.
Re: (Score:2)
> Nuclear, gas, coal, etc doesn't run out.
Tell that to Texas who "ran out" of natural gas during the last big freeze forcing multiple power plants to shutdown for several days. :)
All sources of power generation can run out. The trick is to diversify your power generation across multiple types of sources (nuclear, gas, solar, hydro, wind, tidal, etc) so that an outage in one source won't affect the overall grid. And interconnection between grids, between regions are also needed (again, see Texas for reason w
Re: (Score:2)
Everything can run out.
As the costs continue to drop, batteries are going to get a lot bigger over time. Lithiums will be shoved aside for much cheaper tech. Batteries won't be intermittent for long.
Re: (Score:2)
Lies, lies and more lies. Fascinating. And not in a good way.
Re: (Score:2)
CA has *already* hit 40% base load demand from renewables - over entire 24 hour periods.
[1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/20... [pv-magazine-usa.com]
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/05/24/solar-peaks-at-123-of-grid-supplies-31-of-californias-april-electricity/
Good news, with caveats (Score:2)
There is no such thing as "the battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors", because batteries don't generate power. This is an important distinction for people who don't understand technology, and who might think that batteries in and of themselves can solve global warming.
There's also the question of how much of the energy in those batteries comes from renewables, and how much comes from burning stuff. So it's great that they're managing to stabilize the grid, and to pave the way for smoother and more effic
Re: (Score:2)
The expectation is as the transition continues to 100% renewables then obviously 100% comes from renewables.
The stored water behind a hydro dam is like a battery. It is filled by rain whereas renewables can fill a battery instead. There is some big-ass electronics doing the converting. The battery's DC to AC inverters do function as generators and can be directly compared with the output of a classic electro-mechanical generator. It that respect it is completely equivalent.
Sadly, the article conflates inve
When Batteries Are Power Plants. (Score:1)
> But people need to be a little bit skeptical when they hear breathless assertions that batteries are equivalent to power plants.
First, I should say I 100% share your annoyance within this article and what actually generates the power vs what stores it.
That said, never before in history have we dealt with a power source that quite literally shuts off for several hours a day. Which is COMPLETELY out of our control no matter what we do. When solar is your energy source, the battery becomes the power plant in darkness.
So perhaps the confusion around terms, isn’t so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries are going to get a lot cheaper, and subsequently much bigger. Then they'll stop being intermittent. At which point they can assume baseload functionality.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would a for-profit company pay for fuel to burn to charge batteries, when they can use renewables that over-produce for current demand to do that, for free?
What's worse than cherry picking? (Score:1)
Up next, we proudly announce our new leather wallet as being equivalent to +$100/sec.
This is a Guardian article (Score:2)
Which is read by a lot of people who are scientifically illiterate. It's intended to boost renewables, so of course it will spin it this way.
Having said that, I'm more and more convinced that nuclear power is a boondoggle which needs to be rejected as soon as possible; the hidden costs of waste storage and cleanup remain impossible to estimate because NOBODY HAS DONE IT YET. Put the research into tidal and geothermal!
Re: (Score:2)
yeah nuclear shills come running out without dealing with the actual problems it has.
We need nuclear for at least the next decade, probably two. Until renewables and storage ramp up.
The question to me is do we already have enough nuclear in operation or pipeline to bridge that gap. Given how fast renewable and storage are scaling...we actually might.
CA recently had 24 hour periods with 40% baseload from renewable/storage. That's not a small thing.
[1]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/20... [pv-magazine-usa.com]
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/05/24/solar-peaks-at-123-of-grid-supplies-31-of-californias-april-electricity/
The numbers do not lie (Score:2)
But the nuclear fanbois do. Endlessly. And about everything.
Re: (Score:2)
Like you do, all the time?
The true headline: the US added a 0.04% of a nuclear power plant as batteries last year. The batteries can supply power for 4 hours, a nuclear power plant can work thoughout the year.
What a waste (Score:2)
20 reactors is nothing. Just build two power plants and you have that many.
False equivalent (Score:1)
So let's decommission 20 nuclear power plants with empty batteries and see what happens. Batteries store some amount of power over time and discharge it over another time. Nuclear power plants generate power over its lifetime. If I remove 20 nuclear power plants, there will be less power available to the grid, no amount of batteries can replace it. I know what you are saying - at noon on a sunny day solar can generate more power than the grid needs so you can store it in batteries - letting them dischar
20 gigawatts of battery capacity != 20 nukes (Score:2)
20 gigawatts of battery capacity is the same as the output of one nuclear reactor running for 20 hours. Battery storage is really no different than other grid scale storage. Duke Energy (my energy provider) has operated Bad Creek Hydro Storage since 1991. That's 1,065 megawatts of energy storage. Hyrdo is time tested and the expected lifespan of such a system is many decades. I've got nothing wrong with battery storage, but we really should be diversifying as much as possible.
This is great news (Score:2)
I have a 1980s boombox and this should power it for at least half an afternoon.
I don't think it's enough for my Atari Lynx though, that thing needs at least a couple of Dyson spheres for an afternoon portable gaming.
Gigawatts? (Score:2)
I thought the first measure of batteries was about how much energy they can store, gigawatt hours for instance, not in terms of the power delivery, gigawatts.
If they deliver gigawats, how long can they keep it up when no power is going into them?
With renewable energies the size of the buffer is everything.
Battery capacity is energy, not power (Score:4, Informative)
And should be measured in GigaWattHours not GigaWatts.
Re:Battery capacity is energy, not power (Score:4, Insightful)
When comparing it to another source of power generation GW makes sense. As long as it has enough capacity to soak up excess solar from during the day.
Battery prices are expected to plunge 50% by 2026 so this buildout will accelerate.
New cheaper chemistries are coming out quickly. Natron Energy claims 50,000 charge cycles for their Sodium-Ion batteries which means their batteries could last many decades.
I still remember being told 2 decades ago no power grid could have more than 30% wind + solar on it or it would fail.
Batteries will get us to 100% if we want to.
Re: (Score:3)
Then that's the battery's inverter power rating, not the battery capacity. The article is wrong to call it battery capacity.
Re: (Score:2)
They are separate ratings. One for the inverter power strength, one for the battery storage capacity. Both ratings are part of the installation spec.
Re: (Score:3)
Poster is correct though.
GW is speed. GWh is capacity.
A firehose is GW. The 40 gallon tank it pulls from is GWh.
i.e. a 40 gallon tank ain't putting out your house fire.
Re: Battery capacity is energy, not power (Score:1)
I did not say he was incorrect. I said that in the context of the current discussion he was splitting hairs between inverter capacity and battery discharge rate.
Re: (Score:2)
It's an article, not a technical paper.
The intended audience does not know or care what the difference is. They just want apples to apples, not a discussion of Fuji vs Granny Smith.
Re: Battery capacity is energy, not power (Score:2)
Journalists need to try a little harder a target an audience beyond a person with average intelligence and insufficient education.
We're a democracy with broad suffrage. We depend on a free press and on people knowing what the fuck is going on.
Re: (Score:2)
Battery capacity is equivalent to the lake size in a hydro dam. You don't get the lake size listed as MW or GW with hydro power generation.
Interestingly, someone further down in the comments has posted how stupid it is for a battery to be compared to a power station. He rightfully identifies that the capacity of a battery doesn't produce any power and therefore can't equated to what a power station produces. But of course the main problem is the article is incorrectly using the term "battery capacity".
Re: (Score:1)
It does not make sense without knowing the methodology they are using to compare to a source like nuclear. The Guardian article and the EIA article on which it is based are greenwashing here, and I know this because [1]I pulled the actual data they used [eia.gov] (caution - large excel sheet). They should not be greenwashing since this is ultimately good news (see below) but somebody got too enthusiastic.
The [2]EIA source article [eia.gov] states "In the first seven months of 2024, operators added 5 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to t
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/archive/xls/july_generator2024.xlsx
[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025
Re: (Score:2)
> When comparing it to another source of power generation GW makes sense.
And since batteries do not generate power, GW-H makes sense for them. That said, you need to know GW too, so you know how much power they can source and sink. I think it's clearest to rate them as "can deliver 1 MW for seven hours."
Thing is, I look at installing batteries not as a separate activity but as completing the installation of a solar or wind facility. Once the plant is big enough, you're not done unless you've got a mechanism to match production with load. To put it another way, batteries themselv