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Comment by runtime_terror | Hacker News Reader

Batteries, having a mixed grid of renewables, and new advances in nuclear solves this

To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.

New advances in nuclear is what I hope for. First experimental SMRs are being installed in several places of the world, others are in design stage. Looks like a hopeful technology.

> To scale battery storage to a level that is capable of bridging, say, 48 hours of "Dunkelflaute" (darkness and no wind) on a regional scale (e.g. the entire Scandinavia) is probably unrealistic. Just the amount of lithium needed would be insane. And there were longer Dunkelflautes in recent history.

48 hours in Scandinavia is roughly equivalent to turning all their road vehicles electric. And that's even with Norway using the second highest per-capita rate of electricity in the world let alone Scandinavia (second to Iceland, whose electricity is 100% renewables thanks to abundant geothermal): https://www.statista.com/statistics/383633/worldwide-consump...

Given nobody is suggesting an instantaneous transition, this is not at all unrealistic, and I don't know why anyone might consider it to be.

Good luck with new nuclear, but with all the politics in that domain, I don't expect that to work out even if e.g. Helion Energy supplies working shipping-container-sized aneutronic fusion.

Batteries help, but they still cost way more than direct solar and wind. We still need way more solar and wind to use directly.

Costing less than the most expensive thing they replace is the interesting threshold.

That's evening peaker gas plants in most places. After batteries push gas out of that market they go on to morning peaks and so on.

This is the exact scenario they are being used in at scale. The company removes their gas peaker plant infrastructure and replaces them with batteries. Already have the grid interconnect and now can dispatch power on the millisecond level instead of hour level.

A "peaker" or Open Cycle Gas Turbine is much less efficient which is doubly expensive in Europe. Firstly you need more fuel, and the fuel is expensive, but also you're making more pollution and that's expensive too.

The UK for example basically doesn't have "peakers". Right now it's early evening, demand is high as people cook evening meals but haven't yet retired to bed where they stop using electricity, but renewable generation is reduced as the sun approaches the horizon. So there's 8GW of combined cycle gas power plant production, but only about 100MW of "peakers" and it might grow to 200MW or so at absolute peak.

batteries are not yet competitive with fossil fuel

This is not true. Batteries are cheaper than peaker power plants using fossil fuel. They also allow the operator to fulfill market demands at the minute level versus the hours previously that it took to turn on a peaker plant.

This is being done at scale in California and Texas.

Fore more than 2 hours capacity, batteries are expensive than most other and cost keeps increasing as more hours of capacity needed. Without gas or coal to burn when 1hr battery capacity runs out, battery storage is expensive.

Are you saying that the cost/MWh of battery storage goes up the more batteries are installed?

It's simple power vs energy equations. Let's say you need to supply steady 1MW to town for 1hr, 2hr or 10hr. This needs total of 1MWh 2Mwh or 10Mwh respectively. Let's say battery would cost $200/kwh, then this would cost 200k, 400k or 2M resp. Battery storage is generally used for less than 2hr duration currently where they are price competitive. For the rest, either gas peaker, coal or hydro is used.

interesting, so most power in Texas at night comes from batteries?

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