“Grid” and “battery” don’t belong in the same sentence.
Maybe because, unlike MA and NY, TX actually gets meaningful amounts of sunshine to potentially convert to solar and store in a battery.
Freezing is a great motivator.
After they killed Reddy Kilowatt and brought in ERCOT and green, The Texas grid became much less reliable. People are just taking care of yourself.
“...solving climate change”
There’s nothing to be - or that can be - “solved”.
How is this for climate change:
South Texas is 8 degrees -eight-with precipitation. Ice. We native New Yorkers don’t try to drive in ice nor venture out in it with Texans who think they can. No one can. We don’t attempt to walk to the neighbor’s in the rain
Three days of it. The electricity goes out. That’s 8 degrees inside the house for three days
I don’t know what to say in addition to that
Except that the Texas authorities- the people in government- blames it on having switched to depending to a great extent on wind powered electricity generation
The article talks about gigawatts. Energy storage is measured in gigawatt-hours or the equivalent. In other words, how long can a “4.5 gigawatt battery” supply 4.5 gigawatts.
I don’t dispute the usefulness of their giant batteries but there has to be more to the story.
I also wonder what would happen if one of these giant batteries is hit with a large weapon. Quite an explosion/fire I imagine.
Nice and cool down there in the summer to keep these massive batteries cool, right?
The largest solar farm in Texas was built by ARCO in about 1989, and closed four years later, because they said that solar still needed a back up source that would be available whenever solar wasn’t and there were too many reasons why wind wasn’t an adequate back up. BP acquired ARCO Solar when they bought ARCO. BP reurbished the solar farms.
There are c omnpanies, like Tesla that make whole house battery packs that are of course re-chargeable through either solar panels or house electric. One or two of those can power a house for a week left uncharged.
For certain applications this makes sense. More rural locations with land for panels to keep the battery packs recharged could be a good choice for some.
This is a bottom up approach that consumers like—the cost benefit. For some, it doesn’t work—for others it does.
Man..... I miss the old days when N. Tesla was utilizing energy from the atmosphere. Oh wait....