[MtnClimber]

What could go wrong?

[Leaning Right]

> It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers. <

It’s not that the math is hard. It’s that they don’t want to see the results.

[bk1000]

You simply cannot build traditional power plants fast enough to satisfy demand, particularly with the advent of “data centers” that will use unfathomable amounts of electricity. Solar, battery storage, and windmills are temporary stop gaps. Without these alternate resources we run out of electricity. I don’t understand all the hate for alternative energy. Nothing except fusion will replace good old coal fired power plants, but some help is needed in the interim.

[Tell It Right]

I'm having trouble processing in my mind the need or the feasibility of grid battery storage, at least for the purported reasons (i.e. powering the grid through the night for hours until the sun comes back up).

However, I do see a realistic use of some battery storage to provide seconds or a minute of power if the grid was to switch sources. I.e. Think of a solar farm providing power during a sunny day, but a sudden rain shower means having to quickly scale up a natural gas plant, and battery storage for the grid providing uninterrupted power for those seconds during the switch.

My decentralized/home solar does this. My inverters are set to pull power from the grid only if there's not enough solar coming in, and only if my battery stack's charge (SOC for strength of charge) is at or below 30%. So if my battery stack gets that low, my inverters start pulling from the grid, yet my inverters show pulling a hair more power than they "wanted" to from the batteries until the transition to the grid is complete. The same thing the next morning when the sun comes up and there's a gradual shifting of depending on the solar power. (My inverters might accidentally charge the batteries a little with grid power, even though they're set to not do it, because the battery power is the kind of slush fund to help the inverters with a little bit of the over and under on how much they can depend on solar in the early hours.)

But none of this is for people not willing to do their homework. Unfortunately, with the left it's more about their doomsday warmageddon cult than about practical engineering.

[AZJeep]

316 MW/2528 MWh
______________

Math
It will provided, if fully charged, 316MW for 8 hours.
Average customer consumes 886kWh per month.
So this facility can power like 3000 customers for month or 2 million customers for an hour.
The cost was never disclosed (?) but similar projects cost $312 per kWh, that will mean like 788 million $ (or close to Billion $)!!!

[LilFarmer]

So, on a much smaller scale, do any of you take precautions for power tool batteries?

We have stopped leaving them in their chargers or in tools. Last year I started putting in lithium ion storage bags individually and store them in a rolling cabinet that I can push out of the garage in case of fire. A friend of ours had his house burn down due to a faulty dewalt battery so, just trying to be careful

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[aquila48]

I just did a quick calculation.

I got rooftop solar and I live in sunny California. During the summer months it produces tons of electricity with most of it being fed into the grid. And it produces quite a bit more for the whole year than we use. But in the 3 winter months, it falls short of what I consume by about 400kwh/month.

That means that for me to go off the grid, I would have to store 1200kwh in batteries in the summer months and hold in reserve for the winter.

To do that it would take about 100 of the biggest Powerwall batteries at a cost of $13000/battery, or around $1.6 million!!

I managed to get the solar installed under the old net metering plan where pg&e credits me roughly one to one with the power I feed them, and I give them more than they give me so I pay them little or nothing during the year but I get some cash rebate at the end of the year for the excess I give them.

So pg&e is acting as an infinite battery for me (and people like me) and saving me (and hundreds of thousands like me) $1.6 million in the process.

In other words they’re getting royally screwed. No wonder electricity rates here are about 50cents/kwh double and triple that of some saner states. Actually it’s the ratepayers without solar who are getting screwed by having to pay the exhorbitant rates.

They did make a change in the new net metering plan. Now if you have solar, any energy you use from the grid you pay pretty close to the full amount, there is no one-to-one offset like the old plan. You do get a bit of credit for the excess you feed the grid, but it’s only 3cents/kwh!

This seems a lot fairer all around. It also makes little sense to go solar (too little benefit) and as a result solar installs have cratered here in sunny California.

But I’m glad I snuck under the old rules.

[Mean Daddy]

I was at a trade show about 10 years ago and there was a Texas utility looking at investing $1B in battery storage for similar reasons but they thought they could do it without raising rates. Didn’t work out.

[dennisw]

lithium on fire! ping