Batteries are a fast-growing secondary electricity source for the grid | Hacker News Reader

Batteries are a fast-growing secondary electricity source for the grid

eia.gov

29 pointstoomuchtodo15 comments

If you're wondering why the graph of growth seems to be decelerating very slightly at the end, they've graphed half a year of 2024 deployment in the same space as a full year.

Last weekend I read that California passed 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaic storage in April - enough to meet 20% of demand. (And the same month batteries also supplied 4% of the power for the entire state of Texas.)

https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...

California’s target is ~52GW of battery storage by 2045.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

Yes, and battery storage is why California got through a severe heat wave in July without rolling blackouts or major outages. There wasn't even a FlexAlert. Batteries time-shifted excess solar power from noon to the early evening, when air conditioning demand is at its highest.

What percentage is this of total usage?

Nice! Gravity-Batteries are a pretty good.

You need to lift a ton by a meter to store the same energy as an AA battery. This scales badly unless your ton is made of water and so can be easily pumped up a hill.

>This scales badly unless your ton is made of water and so can be easily pumped up a hill.

Or your Ton can sink into a body of Water/Mine/Mountain, pumping Water up a hill is a bit less effective (friction in pipes) if you have Water (however still more effective then loading a AA battery). And Pumping water uphill is a Gravity Battery too (PSH).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

>>EnergyVault is designing a LWS system using a tower built from 32-ton concrete blocks, stacked with 120-meter cranes. One commercial unit is expected to store 20 MWh of energy, or enough to power 2,000 Swiss homes a day.

Here's a great piece that does the maths on various approaches. And shows that pumped storage is basically the only option

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/06/10/gravity-storage-101-or-...

> Batteries are a fast-growing secondary electricity source for the grid

Going to school will be nice. /s

Especially learning about electricity production and transmission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't get what you are trying to say?

I assume that they mean batteries are not a net "source" of electricity, they only store electricity that has been produced in another way earlier. Like a farmer scoffing at someone who says they get their eggs from the supermarket, it's not like the supermarket produced the eggs.

GP could have been less of an asshole in the way they expressed themselves though.

I see, that is a bit ironic. He quoted it but I guess he didn't understand the meaning of secondary energy source.

Well he did express enjoyment about learning the topic, so probably he's on the right track.

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