YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Electricity is woke, that's why.

Diesel is the future.

I was snobby and looked up the numbers because I didn't think this is relevant. But it is.

Space-Tesla installed 3 GWh in 2026 alone.

https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou...:

- The utility-scale market continued underpin growth, with 18 GWh installed, largely supported by seven gigawatt scale projects. Arizona installed over 6.2 GWh of utility scale projects, the largest quarterly deployment for any state in history.

- In the BTM space, residential storage added 657 MWh and commercial and industrial (C&I) added 1.8 GWh, largely on the back of demand from data centers.

⇒ it includes data centers

So if ALL power generation of the US would stop right now, EVERYTHING would still have power for 25 minutes. (ignoring all safeties tripping, and perfect load balancing)

That sounds so impressive.

That means a huge ability to absorb production or consumption peaks!

Compared to what is this a good measure?

"How much is needed during no sun and no wind" could be reasonable comparison.

I mean, both is important. Pumped hydro can have quite large amounts of storage, but supply comparatively little W of power.

One reason they report in MW instead of MWh, is that grid operators primarily spec systems by their continuous MW, and only secondarily mention their cumulative MWh. So that's the way they talk about them, and reporters just mimic that. Both are important, but the top-line number is MW, for sure.

One reason for this is that for a lot of grid-support functions, instantaneous or short-term power is vastly more important than long-term energy capacity. The other reason is that traditional generation is only sized by MW; you just keep pouring fuel into it forever, so the notion of MWh doesn't even enter the picture. They're not even thinking in those terms.

You and I, as battery natives, think about it the other way around. But we're not grid operators.

Having worked in the industry for a bit, the reason people talk about "MW of batteries" is because they're usually designed to deliver the capacity for a fixed number of hours. Earlier batteries would do 1 hour (so a battery would typically be 1MW/1MWh) and newer sites coming online are usually 2 hours (so 1MW/2MWh). As battery deployment grows the money is increasingly just in energy arbitrage, so there's a lot of pressure for longer duration storage. If you see a headline MW figure it's a safe bet that it's between 1-2x that in MWh.

I can see why one might intuitively think this, but actually this is just a bad take. For most practical purposes, the main value added by these batteries is not really the size of their storage capacity (afterall, their capacity is tiny relative to the grid's needs), but their ability to quickly sink or supply massive amounts of power.

If these batteries had 10x the storage capacity, but 1/10th the power output, they'd miss out on their biggest advantage, which is capturing mid-day solar oversupply, and providing virtual grid inertia.

Long duration, lower-power batteries will have an important role to play once grids get further along in renewable adoption, but for now, short duration power-supply is the main value they add, and it makes perfect sense to quote battery numbers in terms of power. (not that I'd complain about providing capacity numbers too)

As others have stated, neither storage nor generation is evenly spread.

But, like with UPS, 96 seconds is ample time to let delicate systems glide to a standstill or to start the diesel generator.

There's likely some spare solar capacity that will help. Currently the peak of solar is almost counterproductive, but converting that to storage is good for both the consumers and the power plants. (Less feed in during the day, lower evening peak)

and then it's roughly just a rectangle of 100 by 100 containers, still big, but maybe not sooo big :-)

To capture it? Quite a few I'd imagine. The energy you could collect though from one hit is quite low.

You'd probably use some kind of capacitor

As far as I know, we have yet to figure out how to capture power from a lightning strike. There is a lot of energy there, but it's static electricity which is completely different from what any grid runs on.

China, the electrostate

Grid batteries was one of the few areas that escaped Trump's gutting of the IRA and was included in other Infrastructure bills.

And a side effect of the EV market getting hobbled also redirected battery factory capacity from that market.

I'm not sure what's online yet but there is a pipeline.

edit an estimate from earlier this year:

> By the end of 2025, 20 gigawatt-hours of dedicated storage cell lines had opened, and the industry is on pace to hit 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year.

AI energy needs, will contribute to faster battery improvements than anything else.

Everything using batteries will benefit from it.