Hacker News Reader

Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

"As of 2016, global lithium-ion battery production capacity was 28 gigawatt-hours, with 16.4 GWh in China."

UK current electricity demand is 30GW. So the demand for one hour is similar to the entire lithium battery production for a whole year.

How many hours worth of storage would we need to balance the energy grid using only battery storage? Off grid homes usually aim for around 3-7 days worth. Obviously that's excessive for a whole country where weather conditions vary across the country but I'd think several house would be required to account for peak in demand at times of low production.

Realistically distributed storage and load side control I think are more likely to be a bigger part of making it work.

View on HN

That's a fairly old statistic to pick, not sure if it was intentional or not, but the reality is lithium battery production has grown significantly since 2016 and shows no signs of stopping. The largest manufacturer in China, CATL is estimated to grow its capacity beyond 307GWh by 2028 [2].

"In 2019, LG Chem had the most lithium battery production capacity at over 50 GWh. LG Chem [is] increasing EV battery production capacity to as much as 110GWh by the end of 2020."

The design of a modern grid with battery storage would change as well - no reason to have singular giant storage plants. A mixture of solar, wind, and hydroelectric with distributed storage doesn't need to self-sustain 30GWh of storage, it needs to be able to smooth distribution and handle peaks. It'd be far more honest to look at seasonal average loads versus peaks, plus a buffer.

[1] https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103401/predicted-lithiu...

The UK has very little hydroelectric power and the undeveloped hydro resources are in remote areas of outstanding natural beauty (which is a shame because it's by far the best option for base load renewables).

The UKs current installed pumped hydro resources amount to some 28GWh. Clearly we need a multiple of that if that is currently required to balance a grid consisting of largely dispatchable power. Given that, I don't think my estimate of needing several hours worth storage is too far out.

That was the first statistic I found. Even if we say current production is 200GWh of lithium battery storage, that isn't going to go very far if the rest of the world also need to create similar storage infrastructure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com