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Comment by charlesetc | Hacker News Reader

Why do you all rely on oil? Just use batteries...

I think it's important to note that they are not "replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries".

They are putting fossil-fuel supplied electricity into batteries to use at a later date.

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The biggest need for storage is to offset the intermittency of solar and wind, and to help shift peak solar generation (typically 12-2pm) to match peak demand (typically 4-8pm). Reliable and affordable storage is a prerequisite to wide scale solar and wind generation.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/californias-duck...

Sure you want to smooth out intermittencies, but this plant is way too tiny to actually store energy when it's windy and releasing it when it's not. It's more likely to handle peaking on a minute-by-minute basis.

Considering that a single big wind turbine produces 8 MW, this 80 MWh storage facility can only store 5 hours of production from two wind turbines!

And one of those turbines only costs about half of the Tesla storage facility.

Chicken meet Egg, we have to do both things does it matter in what order it is done. Oil can be stored in a tank, renewables really are playing catch up in terms of storage.

This is a great step forward for getting off oil.

Exactly.

Thermal power stations (oil, coal, gas, nuclear) cannot start up or shutdown quickly so they have to run enough to meet peak demand 24/7. Lots of energy is wasted in the small hours.

Sure - but I think alternative source folks are excited about this because at scale batteries allow solar and wind to be used to power larger swaths of the grid more dependably. That's a pretty exciting concept.

That's 99% true, but Southern California also has periods of time when there's too much _solar_ power and they need to take some solar systems off-line!

(See http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11376196/california-grid-expansi...)

This may alleviate that problem

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