Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimy | Hacker News Reader

Batteries can’t cover a dunkelflaute that lasts weeks. Like what happened last year (or the year before, not really sure).

View on HN

How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.

Let's take the worst case scenario and use it as an Argument.

You do t have to handle dubkelflauten because there is still gas capacity and gas can cover the 1% of times that it is necessary.

As long as you add the cost of the gas infrastructure to renewables, sure.

The reason why we have been using fossil gas as peakers for decades are because they are about the cheapest we can build while offering acceptable running costs.

We also have an entire fleet of them, which lives are easily extended as long as we add for example capacity markets to ensure their survival as renewables push down their capacity factors.

And in those extreme circumstances batteries reduce the gas capacity needed, by letting them run efficiently and the batteries handle the peaks just like a hybrid car. They also let you maximise transmission line usage for imports from nearby countries.

If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.

Well, we don't have that capacity.

Yet.

But people are working on it.

Installed battery capacity has been skyrocketing in just the last few years. It's almost as if time is linear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com