More Solar and Battery Storage Added to TX Grid Than Other Power Src Last Year
insideclimatenews.org
insideclimatenews.org
That’s impressive. And fairly green-friendly for a state that gets a bad rap for being in bed with oil/gas
By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply.
It is a much more flexible structure that allows municipalities to do cool stuff like this: https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitec...
Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.
Texas has no income tax which is why they have high property taxes.
In a place like New York, Massachusetts, or California, you have alot of intellectual property driving the economy, so you need to tax income. New York's discretionary budget is essentially derived from income taxes on a few thousand people. New York/Mass vs. California shows why each thing is important -- NY and Mass are leaders for K-12, California is ranked like 35-40 among states.
Local control of property taxes mean that the former can fund education effectively, which they do outside of the hood. California schools are stuck with trying to extract dollars from the state legislature, as the boomers effectively pay no property tax.
CA, NY, and MA all have terrible problems with housing and land use in general, largely caused by poor allocation of land due to extremely poor taxation.
Land in Manhattan, Cambridge, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles is some of the most productive land in the world, but the extraction happens because of the network effects of bundling people together.
By taxing the land rents, poor uses could be replaced by far better ones, increasing the land value and economic output even further.
Property tax isn't quite as good as a land value tax, but it's at least getting towards taxing the right thing.
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because of propaganda by the narrow group of people paying top marginal rates directed at the broad group of people who pay closer to the median rate, because the former group wants the latter group to act against its own interests.
This was another California Republican idea, namely Reagan's, and I think he implemented it nationally when he was president too.
This means that in boom cycles with lots of IPOs and acquisitions, the California state coffers are bulging with money, but in a broad economic downturn there are a few news cycles of "California has a $XYZ billion state budget deficit" before the new budget is set since that deficit is how the new budget is set (no news articles on the balancing, though). There's a big appetite for anti-California news and I have little patience for the assholes who gobble up that misinformation...
With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.
That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.
People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
Where are you getting that from?
In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.
That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.
It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.
Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:
https://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/budgetr...
Texas has actually done a lot better at producing supposedly "liberal outcomes" by acknowledging the reality of economic incentives. We've built a ton of renewables. We've also built a ton of housing that have shown the stark contrast to the idiotic housing policies of California. I'll also give a shout-out to the "Sunset Commission" of the TX legislature, which reviews government/regulatory bodies every 12 years to ensure they're still fulfilling their original mission.
At the same time, we have idiotic laws that force women to leave the state to get healthcare that will save their lives. Our educational financing system is a disaster.
Point being I don't consider myself a "centrist", I just want to choose policies that actually work, regardless of tribalism.
Additionally every time I hear someone claim that companies running everything will be more efficient, when I dive into their beliefs I find out that they expect organizations they call “governments” are required to do many tasks that would not be required of organizations they call “corporations” and that is where all the “efficiency” comes from.
If this was supposedly so much more of an “efficiently system then why has Texas experienced years of outage causing problems in their electrical grid?
I'm not saying the government can't be efficient, but taxes represent a cash flow that is close to completely unbound to the results of their spending, so it's much easier for them to be used poorly depending on who's in charge.
Part of the point I’m trying to drive to is that many of the problems people have with governments are actually problems with organizations operating at scale
(And obviously that can be largely fixed with a carbon tax, but good luck getting that to happen.)
I would say I am progressive politically but the ostensibly progressive mindset that led to denying that housing supply could help with the cost of housing has been crazy harmful. Even with the newfound acknowledgement that housing production is necessary, it's going to be harder and more expensive to catch up - peakier demand for trades labor and materials also drives up prices!!
Another key point, look up net migration in Austin. During the pandemic and remote work, everyone and their brother wanted to move to Austin, it was super trendy and a lot of tech was moving there. Look it up now. In Q4 2023 not only did grow to slow but it reversed to net outflow. Thats a massive difference in demand for housing and a massive difference in supply of housing. [1]
Yes, more homes got built, but there were many other factors at play than something simple like “let them build houses”.
1. https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-migration-trends-q3-2023...
True but also doesn't explain the Austin housing market. Austin added more new apartments just east of downtown in 5 years than San Francisco built in the entire 1990s. The differences between pro-housing and deeply anti-housing local attitudes do not come down to geography.
Either way it seems like housing prices started to decline spring 2022, about 1 year after the massive spike in building permits started in earnest.
There are a lot of impediments to doing the same thing in say, the Northeast, where I am. Labor is insanely expensive. This land has been occupied by city for hundreds of years, and greenfield does not exist nearby, nor is there the appetite to Ctrl C Ctrl V build massive subdivisions, especially out of reach of transit here.
Austin proves a relationship between supply and housing prices, but it will always be incumbent upon cities and states to pave the way for massive construction of housing in times of need. I think that long term, that means working to develop the labor pool and participation in the trades, streamlining permitting and inspection (I just finished a gut reno and this was a fucking nightmare), and yes, changing zoning so the mass housing projects actually can get built.
Actually maybe I should build something - like a ratings site.
California did that for a few years. Auctions every half hour, everyone pays the spot price. It was too exploitable by energy traders and resulted in blackouts. Also, PG&E went bankrupt, after a century as a regulated utility. The current system trades energy mostly on a day-ahead basis, which is more stable.
Ask Houston about letting developers build with little oversight. Or, ask the home owners that bought some of that property.
Ask homeowners that live on wells that have become polluted because of Texas being in bed with oil and the little oversight applied. The rap is well deserved not unfortunate.
Land use isn't nearly as free-wheeling as people both here and elsewhere like to pretend. There's loads of restrictions, both good and bad, and permitting is not quite the nightmare as it is in (from what I hear) New York City, but it's still no walk in the park if you are trying to do anything unusual.
If your house flooded in Allison, Harvey, or the Tax Day floods, I am sorry that you went through that, but I am curious: when was it built?
Entire countries [1]. (Hell, our nation's capital.)
I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents.
Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
The Griddy incident wasn't quite "price gouging" if you want to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy_(company)#2021_Texas_po...
> Griddy advised customers to remove themselves from their system during the storm, and says that over 9,700 accounts did by February 15. On February 17, they asked for PUC approval to switch the remaining customers to a traditional energy provider, but the PUC, which was overwhelmed by the situation, was unable to discuss the matter.
Outages do cause deaths, that is for sure. PG&E has killed a lot of people by that metric and unfortunately PG&E's problems are a little harder to fix.
For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge problem was that no power producers had any incentive to weatherize their systems, resulting in a huge chunk of them all going offline at the same time. It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization, and to provide incentives to producers that have better weatherization.
This is kinda my point - I'm not arguing for a totally deregulated free-for-all, as the unregulated free market is notoriously bad at dealing with "black swan" events. But that doesn't mean that sensible regulations can't be put in place that still use economic incentives to achieve their goals.
Regulation on a minimal level of weatherization is not an economic incentive.
I.e., if you want to participate in the electricity producer market in TX, you need to have X level of weatherization. Call that regulation, fine, but essentially every private, non-governmental-run market has a set of rules that all participants need to adhere to in order to participate in the market, and the penalty for non-compliance is getting kicked out of the market. That's basically what I'm arguing for here.
1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining 2) west Texas is very windy
One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
[1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.
Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape.
Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar.
This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape.
The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution.
As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...
You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.
Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not:
"We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi...
You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year.
No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused.
Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.
To block solar, some states are putting high fees on base connections, and low per kWh costs. If the grid-connection fees subsidize the per-kWh generation fees, it breaks the economics of lowering your consumption from the grid with your own generation.
I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.
Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.
Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.
But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations!
So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
In that environment, also awash in super cheap natural gas, capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts.
A lot of people's worldviews need to open up to the new technology landscape for energy. It's a bright future, with cheap, clean renewable power, if we are willing to let the market choose it.
Another thing to be wary of in this title: headlines like this are written specifically to sound like renewables are winning this ideological battle against fossil fuels. It's so vital to understand: that is not happening at all. Renewables and fossil fuels capacity are BOTH increasing (though renewables at a faster rate - don't confuse the derivative with the scalar value of interest). We are not "replacing" fossil fuels by any metric, and saying so is outright greenwashing. The atmosphere responds to CO2 concentration, not good intentions.
It takes a long time for people to adapt to new reality, and I would expect natural gas to continue to be build even after it is no longer economically feasible until people learn the hard way.
Also, batteries are continuously dropping in cost. Gas might be able to reach a tiny decrease, but it does not benefit from the continual improvement of technology like batteries do.
We are not replacing fossil fuels, yet, but only becuase energy use is expanding, and the energy capacity additions are eating up our entire production capacity of renewables.
As we build out more and more factories for renewables, and as existing natural gas turbines reach end of life, the switchover will happen.
Globally, fossil fuels are barely expanding. The IEA, a famously pro-fossil fuel org, thinks that China reached peak fossil fuel consumption in 2024, and will decrease fossil fuel use in the future even as every consumption grows.
IEA also thinks that more than half of electricity generation will be carbon free, worldwide, by 2030:
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2...
We are not transitioning the energy system fast enough to get the cheapest possible energy, or to meet reasonable climate goals, but that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility.
The media and US political parties frame our energy futures as either renewable or fossil fueled. Do I even need to explain this? Compare the official climate positions of the two major US political parties. Read the headline, it literally positions the story of renewable growth in relation to other energy sources.
The real story is that both renewables and oil and gas are growing to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for energy. We evidently need growth in both just to keep up.
> that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility
True. We've tried working within the system for decades, it has clearly not worked. Perhaps we should examine the status quo more critically? The earth's atmosphere doesn't give a shit about our intentions, good or bad. Just the pollution we emit. What we need desperately is a real strategy for emissions reduction based on physical evidence. Instead, we have the "green new deal" and "drill baby drill" - both of which are positions in the great US culture war, not evidence-based strategies for the energy market.
Thankfully there are rational scientist and engineers working on our energy system - they don't have the luxury of picking sides in a culture war. They use the best of renewables and gas to build resilience into the system while gradually increasing renewables year over year. There is no ideological choice to be made - so long as we demand energy, we need growth in renewables and oil. Acknowledging that fact is politically toxic to both the left and the right.
The future of resilience is batteries, not gas. Most of these new gas generators will be stranded assets within a decade.
Additionally the part of the picture missing in this announcement is retirements, which are of course all fossil fuel.
The green new deal envisions us driving around in EVs.
The drill baby drill folks picture us driving around in our pickups.
And the reality (if we want any hope of meeting our climate goals) is probably no more driving, or at least significantly less. We saw what covid lockdown did to our supply chains. Do we really think we could handle a drastic reduction in mobility and economic demand? I don't see that happening anywhere today, do you? I see us getting less resilient to oil decline by the year. You can no longer live a normal life in most American towns without a car. Want to eat and send your kids to school? You drive. We're not prepared to have a conversation about consuming less, let alone actually achieving it IRL.
Texas is building massive amounts of natural gas, too. Solar + natural gas makes sense for America. (It doesn’t for Europe, but whatever.)
I think those are a good thing, and there should be more of them and more effort removing the explicit and implicit subsidies on gas that they seek to counterbalance.
(I'm also now wondering how much the solar panels paid in tariffs and if the two government interventions cancel out)
But probably worth acknowledging they exist. Here's a right wing take on it:
https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies...
I think Lazard has info on costs before and after incentives.
Fossil fuel subsidies are much larger than renewable energy subsidies, as a total dollar amount, but then right now we get much more of our energy from fossil fuels.
> For fossil fuels, the nature of subsidies differs. Tax provisions like the expensing of intangible drilling costs defer expenses rather than involve direct payments. Critics argue that these measures should not be classified as subsidies since they do not provide government cash infusions. However, any form of subsidy, whether through direct spending or tax incentives, skews the energy market and undermines the principle of free enterprise.
The most shocking thing is the battery, to me. Because the battery subsidy is at most 1-2 years of price drops. So if today, batteries are cost effective, but only because of subsidy, in a short time they will be cost-effective without any subsidy.
However, if we want cheap energy we should keep the subsidies in place. Batteries and solar get cheaper the more we build of them, so the faster we make the investment, the faster they get cheaper, and the sooner we have a cheaper energy source, which all in all saves us massive amounts of money.
The "Inflation Reduction Act" was a funny name for Biden's on-shoring of massive amounts of factories for renewable energy, but I think in the end it will stop future inflation, long after he has died. Energy price spikes are frequently the cause of inflation, but once we have the coming energy abundance, and most of the cost of electricity is in storage rather than generation, we don't have to worry as much about global geopolitics cutting off our supply. The worst will be a week-long shortage due to a continent-wide weather event that we have not yet seen the likes of, but likely will in the future due to climate change. Or, a volcano eruption that also at the same time destroys crop production, in which case lower electricity levels won't be much of a concern...
"Electrification is anti-inflationary."
> Unpacking the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act: What was in it? What could it mean for Australia?
> Clean electrification is the transformation of our energy economy away from one based on low-cost fossil-fuelled machines that require expensive future commitments to fossil-fuels, to higher-cost electric machines that are powered by clean electricity. This turns the energy economy from one of fuels to one of finance, and the beauty of finance is that it locks in the cost of something for the period of that finance. It is literally anti-inflationary as can be seen in Figure 2.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/612b0b172765f9c62c1c20c9/...
Technology can solve questions of producing maximum energy with minimum environmental effect. It cannot solve the problem of just how deeply Americans hate each other.
Those sorts of argumets are definitely made at the fringes, but they definitely are not the voices of policymakers, and rarely if ever make it into final policy, fortunately.
The extreme leftists hate Democrats for it. See for example, this popular leftist Carl Beijer's view of trying to work with Democrats:
https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-l...
They can barely bring themselves to work with liberals, but try to at times.
And to this day large employers in the Bay Area run private shuttles for their employees, to get around the terrible balkanization of transit systems in the US.
I would definitely like to see more. But the biggest impediment to that are the cultural and legal status quo of car-dependent urban design, which mightily resists change. At the state and local levels I'm advocating for massive change to planning laws to make density possible, which makes mass transit possible, but it's a long slog and slow and not making much progress.
> making the network one of the world's costliest on both a per-kilometre and absolute basis. The system is managed in conformity with a semi-nationalised hybrid regulatory framework; construction and procurement fall under the purview of the Land Transport Authority (LTA), a statutory board of the government that allocates operating concessions to the for-profit private corporations SMRT and SBS Transit. These operators are responsible for asset maintenance on their respective lines, and also run bus services, facilitating operational synchronicity and the horizontal integration of the broader public transportation network.
Privatization doesn’t work for infrastructure that has no competition. That’s why the cheapest broadband is when the city runs and maintains the fiber & companies pay for access to the customer base.
The ~only parts that are not privatized are land acquisition and expansion. That makes sense. Like if you haven't been to singapore (or Tokyo or Hong Kong) you just don't understand how different public transit is, and you don't understand the scheme behind how it's privatized, and why that creates alignment between the commuter and the company (and how the US fails to do this in every city), then you should go there and see for yourself.
As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.
Completely false. There have been fires at in battery storage systems. They have never, ever escaped the containment of the metal unit that comprises a given module. There is really no mechanism for a fire to spread either.
The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree.
I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market.
> Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar.
There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology.
The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation.
> As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site.
That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads.
A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place.
> Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up...
Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground.
Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread.
There are good ways to do this but using small communities in another state as R&D isn’t one of them.
People are full of environmental concern for batteries (good!) but rarely question the status quo.
We don't yet know the impact of the Vistra disaster, but it's being monitored closely and we will find out. Freaking out before there is any reason to freak out is a specialty in my area. Interesting examples are WiFi sensitive people that have no problem with standing in the sun. Or the X-ray technician that is concerned about cell phone towers causing cancer.
If there are any negative effects from the fire, they will be found, but they haven't been found yet.
While the Moss Landing BESS does seem to have been one of the worst built anywhere on the planet, the recent fire there did not (a) "completely destroy the entire plant" nor (b) "dumping toxic chemicals into the local estuary".
When a modern vehicle (let alone a manufactured house) goes up in flames (which happens fairly often), it releases significantly more toxic gases than a BESS fire.
These corrections bought to you by your friendly not-in-your-neighborhood IFSAC Firefighter II.
One technical issue with the article, and I see this a lot, is the unit of measure used to describe the storage capacity.
> Texas added nearly 1,500 megawatts of battery storage
In the addled, quasi-imperial units of the US, shouldn't this be megawatt*hours?
I once asked an english person about BTUs, they had no idea what I was talking about. Even though that is an allegedly British Thermal Unit.
Of course, in rational units this would be something like gigajoules:
1.0 Megawatt-hours (MWh) = 3.60 Gigajoules (GJ)
No, that's actually megawatts. Grid assets are measured primarily by power, because the grid is operated on dispatch of power.
For storage, the storage capacity doesn't matter from the grid side. Grid operators have an ever-changing mix of resources that bid into the market, and select the winning bids, based on their bid price and power amount, for fixed duration dispatch. When the battery operator is out of power, they drop out of bidding.
If for some reason the energy content is your only concern, and an article doesn't mention the energy capacity, multiple the power quantity by 4 hours. That is the median amount of duration at full power for batteries, due to cost-optimal design. The very first few installations on the grid may be smaller, as in only 1-2 hours, because there's a fair amount of power demand at the beginning for frequency regulation, which requires very short duration. But as more gets deployed, frequency regulation is no longer needed, and 4 hours tends to dominate. I've seen a few 6 hour duration installations too, which may make sense depending on the specific local market needs.
1. How much power output the storage can replace (i.e. discharge capacity) . The appropriate unit for that is watts (or megawatts, etc.)
2. How long can it do it for (i.e storage capacity) - as you point out, the appropriate metric for that is megawatt-hours.
Edit: 1-2 hours of storage seem to be the current state in Texas at the moment: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/texas-co...
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