The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

Posted by ljf 7 hours ago

Comments

Comment by nicois 5 hours ago

In Australia, the real value of these big batteries is not necessarily to provide emergency power, but more to respond in milliseconds to variations in demand and to smooth out the 5 minute spot market.

Having a sink and a source for spikes aids grid stability and somewhat helps to reduce the need to build more infrastructure to handle transmitting power from the generators during those peaks.

It also helps avoid the viability of gas powered generators which are very expensive and carbon intensive.

Comment by DanielHB 3 hours ago

When I worked with medium-sized scale batteries one of the most surprising use-cases was to use them _together_ with diesel generators. Diesel generators are incredibly wasteful because they don't vary the power output / fuel-consumption very well based on demand.

When you couple a large battery with a diesel generator the generator turns off when the battery is full so the generator always run at optimal efficiency.

Comment by cortesoft 2 hours ago

I feel like this is one of those things that isn’t surprising to Factorio players

Comment by DanielHB 1 hour ago

Factorio power generators always run at 100% efficiency, so it is not really the same thing, you still consume the same amount of coal if you have batteries or not.

I guess it applies for nuclear power if you do that jank thing to not put fuel cells unless you need power. But then it is a thermal battery...

Comment by fendy3002 43 minutes ago

Or S-R latched heat tower with accumulator, though it's more of a hassle than it's worth.

Comment by pixl97 2 hours ago

Yep, this is the fully hybrid electric path. Generators work much more efficiently when ran at a fixed RPM.

Comment by itsamario 1 hour ago

Not just fixed but most engineers design with UL standards so while they advertise maximum output they're all most efficient somewhere around 80% their maximum.

The batteries help the grid because they can maintain a minimum demand the power plants need and compensate for any excess demand that would tax the grid infrastructure.

I've never tested a generator, are they all producing pure sine waves?

Comment by _heimdall 2 hours ago

Unless its a Chevy Volt. That was a really interesting car in many ways, but they kneecapped fuel efficiency by eating transformer losses twice instead of licensing Toyota patents.

Comment by _heimdall 2 hours ago

The biggest challenge is keeping the energy almost perfectly in phase. US power runs at 60Hz and most grid equipment fails quickly if that changes even a little bit.

If I'm not mistaken, that was what hit Spain when much of their grid went down for hours. The analysis I heard was that they were running entirely on renewables and it fell out of phase causing large scale safety shutdowns.

Comment by qlte 1 hour ago

That's the usual failure mode of any grid, aggressive load shedding will be used as a last resort to keep the frequency within tolerances.

The renewable aspect is because historically they were installed with "grid following" inverter systems instead of "grid forming" which can maintain frequency even if temporarily islanded in a partition without spinning mass generators to set frequency.

There's nothing intractable about a 100% renewable grid, the technology exists and has already been deployed in new installations.

Comment by ttul 2 hours ago

Fortunately, interconnects cannot go out of phase easily. If one region is out of phase with another, massive currents flow down the transmission lines within milliseconds, causing generators at one side or the other to slow down or speed up. I have seen this effect live at a hydroelectric dam. We were watching the turbine shaft spin at the moment they switched on some giant interconnect. There was a phase-alignment dial and it just instantly pinged up to 0 while the spinning shaft shuddered, slightly altering its rate of rotation in the blink of an eye.

Comment by ViewTrick1002 5 hours ago

That is ancillary services. And where all battery implementations started before saturating those marketss.

We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.

Comment by bluefirebrand 3 hours ago

I worked at a company for a while trying to make a battery control device that predicts the peak daily demand and discharges the battery to offset it.

It's kind of crazy how much money you can save by shrinking your peak demand during the time of day it's most expensive.

Comment by LeFantome 2 hours ago

Where I live, hydro is the dominant power producer.

My electricity costs 40% less from 11 pm to 7 am and 30% more from 4 pm to 9 pm.

A hydro dam can also be thought of as a battery. When you are not using it, the dam fills up (charges).

My utility buys inexpensive excess power from the NA grid when electricity is cheap and drains the dams when third-party electricity is expensive. Adding other renewables to the mix plays a similar role. The pricing incentives shrink peak demand as you suggest.

One of the reasons residential solar is a tough sell for me is that electricity is relatively inexpensive and likely to stay that way.

Comment by _heimdall 2 hours ago

There are interesting large scale projects that use hydro directly as power storage for renewables.

When the sun is out or wind is blowing, use excess energy to pump water up hill. When you're low on energy supply, open up the dam to run the water back down hill and through a hydro plant.

I've toyed with the idea of doing the same thing at a small scale on our farm but would need to build a second decent sized pond up hill of our main one.

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 27 minutes ago

I've read that globally almost all the places that can do pumped hydro "storage" already exist. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then while this is a really cool technology, we won't be getting much further with it.

Comment by toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

Have you priced residential batteries and time of use to charge at night? That's Base Power's value prop, they partner with ComEd, install batteries at your home and become your power provider charging a lower rate than ComEd. Batteries charge at night when nuclear generators are still humming and demand is low, and then serve daytime load.

Solar may not pencil out, but energy arb over system lifetime might, especially if you have any battery subsidies available. Just keep in mind flexibility to add solar in the future so its as trivial as installing racking and panels and running power to the storage and load center (optimize for optionality).

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/07/28/base-power-battery...

Comment by sandworm101 5 hours ago

I am still a fan of centrifugal systems. The lifecycle costs of a spinning mass seem more manageable than the complexities of chemical batteries. The mass of a block of concrete and steal isn't going to degrade over time. And bearings/motors are such mature tech that they can last decades, even a century without replacement.

Comment by nixon_why69 4 hours ago

If you're going mechanical, why not pumped water storage instead? Nothing has to spin super fast and hydro has a lot of maturity.

(From a guy who got burned buying stock in a centrifugal system as my first "wicked smaht" investment as a 22yo).

Comment by stefs 3 hours ago

there are areas where almost all options for pumped hydro are already developed and there's little room for expansion. additionally, the heat waves from the climate catastrophe affects pumped hydro negatively (evaporation and higher water temperature).

Comment by tpm 2 hours ago

Evaporation can be solved by covering the reservoirs, so the water can't evaporate. Geography is the real issue. Costs to build possibly too.

Comment by grumbelbart2 4 hours ago

Mostly because we already used all suitable places. It also has a huge environmental impact, large upfront costs that you can only spend in bulk, permissions, lawsuits, protests from the local population and so forth.

Comment by sandworm101 4 hours ago

Hydro is limited by geography. It cannot scale in the same way. Rather than giant spinning masses at central locations, current thinking is more about smaller masses scattered throughout a grid. There are even a few studies on whether existing air conditioner/heat pump compressors could contribute.

Comment by rgarrett88 4 hours ago

Maintenance on high energy movement hasn't exactly had a great track record either.

Comment by detourdog 1 hour ago

There was a giant flywheel company near me about 20 years ago. Maybe it's still there. They had one incident where a flywheel broke.

https://beaconpower.com/stephentown-new-york/

Comment by angry_octet 4 hours ago

There's a very long waiting list for new synchronous condensers, almost 5 years from order to delivery.

Comment by toomuchtodo 4 hours ago

Batteries can serve the same function, while also providing energy arb and additional grid services, so I'm somewhat curious how log the market for syncons continues to exist.

Comment by sandworm101 3 hours ago

Batteries (and their associated HV switching gear) are slow to react and have very limited lifespans, on the order of a few years. That's why your washing machine uses a capacitor to start its motor rather than a battery. Even capacitors are not as reactive as an already spinning mass.

Comment by jabart 29 minutes ago

If the washing machine is using an induction moter, the capacitor is for creating the conditions for it to self-start on a single phase system. Three-phase induction motors don't need this.

Comment by sanderjd 3 hours ago

How are you defining "slow" in this comment?

My understanding is that batteries are demonstrating longer useful lifetimes than was anticipated.

Ultimately I think diversity in technologies is the best policy, but difficult to set up the incentives to achieve it.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 hours ago

Both assertions are false. Batteries react within milliseconds [1], and last 10-20 years (depending on chemistry and cycling, lithium at the shorter end, sodium and flow at the longer end) [2] [3] [4]. Australia had to reconfigure its ancillary services market due to how fast battery storage reacts, for example (proven out with the Hornsdale Power Reserve).

Please update priors to current state of the art.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50176

- The most common cited use case for batteries is frequency response. Frequency response is a service that maintains grid frequency as close to 60 hertz (Hz) as reasonably possible. Deviations below 60 Hz can lead to protective generator trips that result in a subsequent decline in system stability. Batteries are particularly well suited for frequency regulation because their output does not require any startup time and batteries can quickly absorb surges. At the end of 2020, 885 MW of battery storage capacity (59% of total utility-scale battery capacity) cited frequency response as a use case.

[2] Smith, J. et al. "Lithium - ion battery degradation mechanisms and mitigation strategies for utility - scale energy storage". Journal of Energy Storage, 2020.

[3] Brown, A. "Lead - acid battery performance and lifespan in utility - scale applications". Power Systems Research, 2018.

[4] Green, C. et al. "Flow batteries for long - term utility - scale energy storage: A review". Energy and Environmental Science, 2019.

Comment by adrianN 2 hours ago

Siemens is making a lot of money selling inertial stabilizers. There is ongoing research on how to stabilize grids in the face of decreasing inertial frequency stabilization.

Comment by toomuchtodo 1 hour ago

Do you have any resources you can share on how this compares to synthetic inertia battery storage and renewables inverters can provide? I am interested!

Comment by _blk 4 hours ago

Yup. Esp. when space is available. But thet benefit heavily from low pressure environments though so it's not just an arm and a mass in a fence.

Comment by dev_l1x_be 4 hours ago

Producing batteries are not expensive and carbon intensive?

Comment by horsawlarway 4 hours ago

Genuine question - what is the thought process behind this comment?

Because we both know that gas generators also require a production step... arguably one that's quite a bit more complex than a battery, at ~$1,000,000/MW of installation costs. And that installation of that complex is going to be very carbon intensive (even the concrete foundation alone...).

And then on top the plant actively burns hydrocarbons for the entirety of its existence.

So fill me in here - what is the exact argument you are trying to make with this?

Comment by bijowo1676 3 hours ago

their only argument is dont do anything, dont build anything, dont change anything, the Earth is too populated, so we need degrowth degrowth degrowth at all costs and fall of living standards across the board, so that we can achieve true Net Zero Carbon life.

thats the only argument these people make

Comment by scottLobster 2 hours ago

And while they claim to be peaceful, the underlying argument is that human life is the problem to be solved, and if you believe in increasing living standards or having children you're the enemy.

Hard to see how that stops at halting powerplant construction. Theses people would accidentally cause a famine with their agricultural policies and look upon the starving children as "progress", even if they're socialized enough to never say it out loud. Scary shit.

Comment by ethagnawl 48 minutes ago

> having children you're the enemy.

With these people, this greatly depends on _who_ is having the children.

Comment by JMKH42 3 hours ago

People who make these comments are either disingenuous people, or people who aren't thinking carefully repeating the arguments of their tribe.

Comment by WarmWash 4 hours ago

The good 'ole "Lets start with the premise that all energy in our calculation comes from coal transported by truck, and then work out how "green" these technologies are"

Comment by adrianN 4 hours ago

Over the lifetime of the battery it’s not that bad and gets better as the carbon intensity of the grid that runs the factories improves.

Comment by stefs 4 hours ago

that's a one time cost over many years that's quickly amortized. lets assume an upfront cost of ~100kg CO2 per kWh of battery storage and 250g of CO2 per kWh generated by a gas turbine. this means the carbon ROI is there after 400 kWh.

Comment by dralley 4 hours ago

Compared to gas generators? Probably. And unlike gas there's no ongoing cost.

Comment by pixl97 2 hours ago

That type of person never thinks about the crazy amount of energy it takes to get fuel out of the ground. I guess they think gas falls out of the sky like rain and the only cost is in collecting it.

Comment by dralley 1 hour ago

Or the amount of energy required to produce a large gas turbine. Which, between the refining and advanced metallurgy and the casting and machining of such a large piece of metal, is a lot.

Comment by sanderjd 3 hours ago

Not particularly, relative to producing anything, including turbines and the fuel to run them. (And then you have to burn that fuel...)

Comment by thatfrenchguy 2 hours ago

you have to look at CO2/kwh produced over the lifetime, that's the useful metric here

Comment by speed_spread 4 hours ago

The extraction cost of minerals is only paid once. And a few big batteries will be much easier to recycle than a billion small ones in consumer electronics.

Comment by throwaway473825 5 hours ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that China has developed batteries that neuter the advantage that gas had over coal, but I can't stop wondering if we'd already have solved long-term storage if China hated coal as much as oil and gas.

Comment by carefree-bob 4 hours ago

China does not hate oil and gas.

To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.

China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.

And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.

The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.

Comment by tialaramex 4 hours ago

> The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand.

In thermal electricity plants it takes a lot longer to go from cold & dark to generating electricity with coal than with either Combined-Cycle gas or especially the Open-Cycle "peaker" gas plants. Both types of gas plant also AIUI have a lot better ability to "throttle" their power output.

This means if you have a bunch of CCGT like Britain, you can use those directly to "top-up" the power from your fleet of solar PV and wind turbines, whether that's 1GW of top-up or 20GW of top-up. The change from weather (sun goes down, wind picks up, clouds appear, etc.) is relatively slow compared to what a gas plant can do, whereas it's too fast for coal to keep up as I understand it.

Comment by lazide 4 hours ago

Coal by it’s nature is much less amenable (from a physics/chemistry) perspective to automation and high resolution control. Less pure/refined, granular instead of a gas, harder to start and burns longer once started, etc.

Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.

On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.

It all makes sense.

Comment by pixl97 2 hours ago

>literally use an excavator to

That might be understating the issue. The excavators we use to dig coal have been, and are monstrous. Thousand ton beasts requiring a fleet of support vehicles around them and the ever increasing depth of overburden.

Also the fly ash leftovers tend to get piled up and occasionally break lose in human and ecological disasters at massive scales.

Comment by tialaramex 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288

This is the same kind of scale as those fictional "Spice Harvesters" in Dune. Look around for a photo where there's a person or a familiar object you know the size of in the same frame as the Bagger 288

Comment by jmyeet 4 hours ago

Here's a detailed breakdown of China's energy picture since 2020 [1]. The big story is that fossil fuels are relatively stable or in decline and solar is exploding. Hydro is down because of drought and they're building an even bigger dam than the Three Gorges Dam (ie Medog) but it'll be ~7 years before it comes online.

There has been an uptick in coal this year to replace oil imports, which have fallen off a cliff because of the Iran war [2]. The real story of 2026 is how China essentially saved the world economy by doing this [3].

China is dependent on oil and gas imports but clearly sees the writing on the wall. All of these projects are an effort to wean themselves off of oil. So is a lot of domestic policy like the electrification of vehicles. This has had a global impact, reducing global oil demand by almost 2% in the last 5 years [4].

I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.

[1]: https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-imports

[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/china-crude-oil-iran-hormuz-...

[4]: https://www.intellinews.com/china-led-ev-boom-cuts-global-oi...

Comment by tialaramex 3 hours ago

> I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.

Because spinning a coal plant up or down is slower, the batteries let you make the gradient more gentle.

Suppose Alice's gas plant can go from 100MW output to zero in ten minutes. So if Sam's solar farm goes from zero to 100MW over ten minutes in early morning Alice's plant can mirror, between them Alice and Sam produce 100MW of power smoothly. Obviously real life is more complicated but this gets the point across

Now, Charlie owns a coal power plant, it can ramp from 100MW to zero, but it takes about an hour. This doesn't directly mirror the solar farm, Charlie and Sam can't really just work together to smoothly produce the same power

Bill's 100MWh BESS fixes this. An hour before the sun comes up, Charlie's coal plant begins shutting down, Bill's BESS puts out 100MW while consuming the gradually reducing coal power output and some of the gradually increasing additional power from the solar farm as that increases.

Comment by carefree-bob 2 hours ago

> The big story is that fossil fuels are relatively stable or in decline and solar is exploding.

This is true only in the sense that fossil fuels, as a percentage of total energy consumption, are stable or in slight decline. That is because total energy consumption is rapidly increasing, specifically as new forms of energy are added to the mix.

Fossil fuels in absolute terms are, however, increasing.

China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up. Coal use as a percentage of total energy is going down.

China is burning more oil and natgas than ever before. It is increasing. But as a percentage of total energy, it is decreasing.

This also matches China's CO2 targets. China's plan is not to decrease CO2 emissions, those emissions will keep increasing. The targets are to decrease the emissions required to generate a dollar of GDP. By 2060, they want the ratio of emissions to GDP to be 60% lower than it was in 2020. If you look at historical trendlines, that is an easy target to meet, just with improvements in technology and energy efficiency, particularly when you are starting from such a high base. But people look at that goal and think that China wants to cut emissions by 60%. GDP in 2060 will be 10x what the GDP was in 2020, so a 60% cut in that ratio is still a 400% increase in total emissions. Everything is measured in terms of ratios, not absolute numbers. Ratios where the base is always rapidly growing.

This confuses a lot of people who see that the ratio of fossil fuel in the entire energy mix is decreasing, and think this means that actual fossil fuel use is decreasing. The charts, report, graphs that people cite, if you look carefully, are always ratios. Ratios with the denominator growing as the denominator is something tied to GDP, whether total output or total energy output.

It's more accurate to say that there are limits to how much additional fossil fuel capacity China can bring online, as these are mature industries, whereas nuclear, solar, etc, are young industries and there is a lot of capacity to bring online since you are starting from a low base. China's approach to energy is always "we want more of it, of any kind." The only reason that China's oil production is not increasing by 10% per year is because it's not possible for China to increase oil production that quickly. Same for coal. China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.

Comment by tialaramex 1 hour ago

> China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up.

In terms of electricity production, that does not seem to be the case

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

It's possible that China's metallurgical coal burning increased so much that it offsets power generation decline, but I wouldn't expect so.

> China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.

This does not match the observed reality.

Comment by rini17 1 hour ago

> This does not match the observed reality.

Observed by whom? For example this shows no change in overall trend.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china/emissions

Comment by tialaramex 50 minutes ago

Two problems. First, you were talking about China growing all forms of energy, but this chart isn't somehow depicting that, instead it's about CO2 emissions, but more importantly Second that's a chart ending in 2024. The chart I linked shows a dip for Coal in 2025 and further reducing year-on-year through to September 2026.

Comment by jefurii 4 hours ago

Username doesn't quite fit here

Comment by oblio 5 hours ago

China can't hate coal (yet). In case of an armed conflict with the West, they will be cut off completely from oil and gas. Renewables don't cover all their energy needs. So they are building a lot of coal plants as backup.

Comment by bryanlarsen 4 hours ago

> cut off completely from oil and gas

China is the world's 4th largest oil & gas producer. They're dependent on imports because they're the 2nd largest importer. However, they are simultaneously increasing production and decreasing consumption. Those two lines will cross some day. It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.

Comment by tuesdaynight 4 hours ago

> It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.

Why? Would China just try to start a global war? If it's about Taiwan, I'm not sure that USA would care like 5 years ago. USA will probably do the same with South America

Comment by toomuchtodo 4 hours ago

China built strategic petroleum reserves that can operate for over a year so that if the US attempted to blockade oil supplies from the middle east during a conflict, China could press on when they decide to obtain Taiwan (or so the geopolitical strategy thesis goes). Does it make sense to take Taiwan once China has their own semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and Taiwan is mostly a retirement home [1]? Hard to say. Old people in power take illogical and unconventional actions out of nostalgia, historically speaking.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50260274

Comment by toomuchtodo 4 hours ago

China coal use has dropped below 50% [1], and they currently curtail renewable generation roughly total annual generation of Spain and the Philippines combined every six months [2] (~401 terawatt-hours of power). They are rapidly deploying battery storage to accelerate electrification and making use of energy that would otherwise be curtailed, which should continue to drive down coal use (their electricity markets are currently reconfiguring to use market signals and incentives to encourage this outcome).

They will, in the next five years (at current renewables and battery storage deployment rates [60% of their energy currently comes from renewables, and this increases 10% YoY]), become a low carbon (hard to say net zero yet) electrostate [3] that will continue to scale manufacturing clean tech for the world [4] with minimal carbon footprint.

It cannot be overstated how fast they are going.

[1] China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343 (citations)

- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=china+electrostate

[4] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

Comment by _blk 4 hours ago

Can they procure their own uranium? Coal still has the advantage of being more local, much simpler, faster to get up and running. Smaller plants also means smaller distribution radius etc. so more infrastructure decentralization. I imagine that's part of the thought process too.

Comment by throw-qqqqq 3 hours ago

> Can they procure their own uranium?

Nuclear power in China peaked around 2021 at ~5% of the total electricity mix. I don’t think it’s a factor.

China likes renewable and batteries because it’s the cheapest way to generate power. It’s cheaper to build solar plus battery storage, than building new coal plants.

Comment by lnsru 5 hours ago

In the case of armed conflict with the West all Chinese inverters will be weaponized to burn homes in the West. The shops will be empty in the West and West will be in very ugly situation outsourcing all the manufacturing. Better it doesn’t happen.

Comment by bradfa 6 hours ago

I'm glad they're reporting it as the energy storage capacity and not the power output capacity. Too many news sites like to report the power output capacity in stories like these, which is horribly misleading, and then often they also frame it as though this is equivalent to adding actual power generation to the grid, which is even more misleading.

Comment by myself248 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by crote 5 hours ago

Yup! Some breaker trips, and a 500MW plant goes offline. How much battery storage do you need to compensate? 500MW. The fact that it stores 500MWh and therefore only lasts an hour comes afterwards, that is plenty of time to ask all the other fossil power plants to scale up a bit.

Comment by rcxdude 5 hours ago

It's probably also a view that is shifting as batteries move from primarily providing short-term grid stability (where power available is probably the more important metric) to longer term storage.

Comment by leoedin 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by kitten_mittens_ 5 hours ago

Isn’t the MWh more like 2-4x in the US for grid sized batteries?

Comment by eigenspace 5 hours ago

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)

Comment by jcattle 6 hours ago

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

Comment by goldenarm 3 hours ago

It's impressive to see the battery capacity growing on ElectricityMaps over the years : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/yearly

But why is the utilization rate so low? It was barely 0.8% of electricity in California last year.

Edit: Got the answer, the batteries fire up around 6pm during the evening peak at around 9GW for ~25% of the total consumption. We would need approximately 5x more batteries and renewable power to move out of carbon-intensive production entirely.

Comment by contravariant 3 hours ago

I think that graph is saying that 0.8% of the total electricity was lost on batteries. You don't want that number to be higher.

If you want to see the batteries at work look at an hourly graph and you can see it charging and discharging during the day.

Comment by sanderjd 3 hours ago

I don't know how that utilization rate and electricity share is being calculated, but my guess is that this is because nearly all current batteries are 2-hour or less, so even if they fully discharge each day, there is a pretty low upper bound on their utilization.

But they don't shine in that sustained discharge use case. They are most useful for helping manage small fluctuations, and for time shifting energy to the daily peaks.

So I just think utilization is a less useful way to think about battery storage. Unless you're comparing them to gas peakers specifically. (That is, separating out the peakers from base load gas.)

Comment by auspiv 3 hours ago

0.8% of electricity can be very critical MWs or MWhs.. rounding to 1% is 87.6 hours of electricity. could be the top 1% of prices, or grid stability, or some other grid event where having batteries able to instantly supply tens to hundreds to thousands of MW is worth a ton of $$$ and also huge increases in grid stability.

recall batteries do not generate electricity, they store it for when it is needed most.

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by 1970-01-01 5 hours ago

Politically force datacenters to consume only solar and battery. Instead of total collapse, we now have tremendous amounts of cheap energy when the bubble implodes. That seems like the only way to hedge the bet on AI.

Comment by Ringz 3 hours ago

I like this idea, but they’re already doing this. Just not all data centres.

I think Google's first offshore purchase was 92 MW from the Norther wind farm in Belgium. TSMC will buy all the power from Ørsted's 920 MW Greater Changhua 2b & 4 offshore wind farm for the next 20 years.

There are examples in Germany but mainly for chemical and steel factories.

The best way to “force them” is a global emissions trading system + carbon levy. But his might be very unlikely in the next 10–15 years and maybe as complex as Peace in the Middle East.

Comment by Geonode 1 hour ago

"Politically force X" is practically always a failure.

Comment by boringg 4 hours ago

Reliability issues. You cannot get 4 9s with solar and battery.

Comment by Zigurd 3 hours ago

Compared with gas turbines? The main reason power is supply constrained is that gas turbines are a precision high-tech product that fails catastrophically if you don't build it right and maintain it.

Bloom fuel cells are a plausible alternative, but they are in the process of building out their manufacturing capacity, and operating experience at data center scale hasn't been tested. Bloom's process also involves extremely high temperatures, which could result in uptime and maintenance issues.

Comment by boringg 2 hours ago

Im not a gas booster -- but turbine technology is pretty impressive. Id go with nuclear before gas for sure - especially for these larger long lived sites.

I would say you end up with battery+solar and gas turbine/gensets providing power when solar+batteries cant fill the gap. Its a bit expensive to be adding so many different sources on site to shore up power supply.

FWIW obvious maintenance work required to keep turbines going.

Comment by Y-bar 3 hours ago

Which is why just about everyone is saying that a mix of energy sources, such as combing solar with wind, is a good thing.

Comment by boringg 1 hour ago

What are you talking about -- almost no one goes with a mix of energy. It should be renewables + nuclear + storage and were golden. Everyone just goes solar+battery saying thats all we need, it isn't.

And gas/fuel has high functional use as a differentiated energy product - we just don't need to use so much of it -- keep it on the smaller end of the use case spectrum.

Comment by lenerdenator 3 hours ago

Is the point of the battery not to add 9s with solar?

Comment by boringg 2 hours ago

Yes the point of batteries is to add backup power when solar goes down - and it does. However the two of them do not get to 4 9's of uptime which is needed for these large data facilities.

Comment by lenerdenator 1 hour ago

At least in my personal use - which is admittedly far smaller - I just see the battery as the main source. Solar exists to charge it.

Comment by Ringz 2 hours ago

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Comment by Synaesthesia 6 hours ago

Makes sense. With battery technology improving and being the cheapest it's ever been, why not? This is probably the direction most countries will go in the future.

Comment by estearum 5 hours ago

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Comment by daedrdev 4 hours ago

One thing that would really help batteries is permitting reform. The BAAJA reform bill would really help not just the batteries themselves but the transmission lines which are far more difficult to construct thank to an insane system and lots of lawsuits.

Comment by cucumber3732842 3 hours ago

In my jurisdiction a battery development is just about the only kind of development that can tell the evil rule and restriction people masquerading as do-gooders to GFY (though of course it still gets kicked in the dick at the state level since we've got a lot of rules others don't).

Grid capacity both locally and at the transmission level is still the biggest factor when it comes to site viability though. You can't back feed a municipal water system by connecting a fire hose to a random house's hose spigot.

Regardless, battery sites are becoming a big thing in long term RE investing because being able to have this site plan developed under favorable rules while all the other rules only ever get worse makes these sites potentially hugely valuable when the batteries are gone in decades.

Comment by Someone 6 hours ago

For comparison, US grid capacity is about 1250 GW, average usage 500 GW.

So, this adds over two minutes of average usage.

https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou... says total storage now is about 200 GWh, or about 25 minutes of average demand.

Comment by nomercy400 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by clarionbell 6 hours ago

No. Because neither storage nor generation is evenly spread. In some places you would have nothing, in some you could have potentially hours.

In practical terms, you would most probably get nothing, because situation like this would lead to complete grid breakdown and interruption of service.

Comment by viraptor 5 hours ago

Technical detail question: if all of those batteries were on connecting allowing feeding back to the grid, would they be able to synchronise the frequency/phase? What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?

Comment by crote 5 hours ago

It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.

Comment by bluGill 5 hours ago

> The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

This might or might not be true. I used to live near a large plant that took HVDC from a power plant several states away and transformed it into AC. They used electronics to provide the grid frequency, not spinning metal. All the other local peak power generation was run in grid following mode.

Comment by tialaramex 1 hour ago

Grid Forming Batteries are a thing - but since it's not free to implement of course such a provider would like to get paid, not give it away, whereas both a conventional thermal plant or a hydro plant unavoidably has spinning metal, their stability comes free with the electrical supply.

The risk vs reward isn't great. If you made your country's 10GW grid work with only batteries for 15 minutes to show it's possible, maybe you get one half page in a "Electricity Weekly" industry newspaper. But if anything goes wrong and ordinary people notice - now you're on TV News for a week.

Comment by bluGill 1 hour ago

I'm under the impression that most grid scale batteries are owned by the utility which in turn cares about this. And the rest are only going to be bought if a utility \ grid gives them a contract where again those who care will give better terms of they need it.

My home battery might participate without the above but in to small to matter.

Comment by bob1029 4 hours ago

> What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?

The RoCoF (rate of change of frequency) must be low enough that the inverters can form the grid without letting out the magical smoke. Having inertia is what slows this rate down.

Comment by oblio 5 hours ago

Considering the accelerating rate of installation and the ever decreasing costs of manufacturing, both problems should be alleviated in 10 years. Instead of 25 minutes, most likely 4-6 hours. Instead of extremely uneven distribution, likely all the major population centers will have at least some non zero coverage.

Comment by DJBunnies 5 hours ago

It's not public.

Comment by wtch98 5 hours ago

Only if that battery was connected to 500GW of inverter capacity (and the grid was a spherical chicken -- enough intertia-replacement devices to keep timing working, enough capacity to link supply with demand etc)

Comment by rcxdude 5 hours ago

inertia-replacement is what batteries do best, so in this kind scenario that's probably the least of the problems.

Comment by pletnes 6 hours ago

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

Comment by baxtr 6 hours ago

Compared to what is this a good measure?

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

Comment by teamonkey 53 minutes ago

Any amount is good if it reduces costs to the consumer and reduces the usage of fossil fuels.

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Comment by ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago

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Comment by jonatron 6 hours ago

Obviously there are a variety of sizes and configurations, but if you assumed 3.5MWh per 20ft container, that's 5771 containers, and if you assumed a PCS container per two battery container, that's 8656 containers, just for an idea of the scale.

Comment by universa1 6 hours ago

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

Comment by blahgeek 6 hours ago

or a cube of 20x20x20 containers, seems small enough. (funny how we interpret numbers and sizes

Comment by myself248 6 hours ago

I've always wondered why they don't stack them in deployment -- the containers are obviously fine with it! -- but I guess land is cheap enough not to bother.

Horizontally they need plenty of room for airflow, as each container has some HVAC-or-whatever module on the side. But vertically...

Comment by jcattle 6 hours ago

I always thought they were spread apart so much to further reduce the chance of catastrophic spread of fire from one container to another.

That would be a lot harder if you stack them since heat likes to rise.

But no clue if that is the actual reason.

Comment by myself248 5 hours ago

Yeah, that's probably part of it. Some do have explosion vents in the top of the container.

It'd just be impressive to see a giant wall of battery. A bunch of little batteries camping in a field doesn't play the same visually. Ah well.

Comment by chickenbig 5 hours ago

Foundations, maintenance, fire risk.

Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 48 minutes ago

They are pretty heavy and batteries already need to do adequate foundation work before installation.

Comment by ksec 5 hours ago

I would assume it has something to do with fire hazard ?

Comment by walthamstow 6 hours ago

Presumably this is only capacity connected to the grid, and doesn't include isolated data centre builds?

Comment by origini 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by blooalien 6 hours ago

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

Kudos to you for bein' "that guy". So many folks sit and comment while having the world's biggest library of information on just about every topic right there at their fingertips and still can't be bothered to take the 30 seconds to look up something they don't know about on their favorite search engine. I appreciate you for havin' done "the right thing" here. :)

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by walthamstow 5 hours ago

Rude and cowardly. If you've got a problem, talk to me directly, not about me to other people.

Comment by Someone 6 hours ago

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

Comment by ksec 5 hours ago

Am I correct to assume all these grid batteries are all made in China as well?

Comment by ardme 5 hours ago

No firstly there are several Korean companies making both batteries and battery manufacturing machine tools.

There are big factories in both Michigan and Kentucky Ford operates it just took over from Blueoval SK.

They retooled Ford plants are now making grid batteries instead of car batteries is my understanding.

Tesla also has battery factories in the USA as well as a lithium refinery.

Batteries are complex but less complex than semiconductors. They are rapidly dropping in cost too.

Comment by slfnflctd 2 hours ago

My understanding is that a large portion of Tesla's batteries are still manufactured by Panasonic, and most of the rest by other third parties. Some of this is in the US, but the production does not belong to Tesla.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by Gravityloss 5 hours ago

China, the electrostate

Comment by slfnflctd 2 hours ago

"All along the Eastern shore

Put your circuits in the sea

This is what the world is for

Making electricity"

Comment by tomsellin23 3 hours ago

Lots of folks are going with lithium, including myself. I'm adding two more 16 kWh batteries to my home system. It just makes sense.

Comment by kilroy123 5 hours ago

I wonder how much medium- to long-term storage has been installed this year. Batteries are fantastic, but we need better ways to store excess wind and solar for dark winter days when there's no sun or wind.

Comment by origini 3 hours ago

Its Wind. When sun is less, wind gets more.

Geothermal and water.

If than there is still some oil/gas we need to burn and haven't build long DC lines between sunny area and non sunny, its perhaps fine or we start that much that we just generate methan

Comment by maipen 5 hours ago

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

Everything using batteries will benefit from it.

Comment by stymaar 6 hours ago

It's nice to see more storage being added, but we have keep thr order of magnitude in mind: the peak electricity demand for the US is 750GW, so the added storage for the past 3 month corresponds to just 96 seconds of peak consumption.

There's still a very long way to go !

Comment by dgacmu 4 hours ago

But we generally don't need to satisfy the peak with battery - peak US demand occurs while the sun is still up, in July, so you can satisfy a large chunk of that with solar still. The hard part is those ~4 hours after solar stops producing enough and it's still hot and people are still up. So what we need is several hours of about half the gap between {nuclear, wind, hydro} and peak. Remembering that we also use even non-pumped hydro as a form of storage, by drawing on it more in the periods just before and just after sunrise/sunset.

For example, if you look at the energy production across PJM from two days ago: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:hiovtnl...

(Using that b/c I run the bot and it's data I'm very familiar with. You can see similar patterns in CAISO but they've already got so much solar it's a little more messy/duck-curved by all of the behind-the-meter solar.)

You can see hydro coming online from roughly 16:00 - 23:00. There's still a big gas peak that we'd need a lot of storage to shave, and you're right that it's a long way to go before we do that, but it's not quite as bad as "we need enough battery to satisfy 100% peak demand".

Comment by chicken-stew 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by cisc 5 hours ago

That's one third of what China added in December, 2025:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/16/chinas-batteries-move-b...

Comment by seb1204 6 hours ago

Batteries are great but every country still needs generation to charge them up. Some of the big gentailers build very little new generation capacity.

Comment by viraptor 5 hours ago

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)

Comment by criddell 4 hours ago

Don't grid operators typically have excess capacity most of the time?

Comment by nomercy400 6 hours ago

How many batteries in parallel would you need to capture the power of a lightning strike?

Comment by onraglanroad 1 hour ago

As mentioned, you can't do it with batteries.

To capture the 1.21 GW from a lightening strike requires a flux capacitor.

Comment by bluGill 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by HPsquared 6 hours ago

You'd probably use some kind of capacitor

Comment by Maxion 6 hours ago

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

Comment by myrmidon 4 hours ago

It's around 1MWh within a fraction of a second.

That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.

Which is why nobody even attempts this.

Comment by neutronicus 2 hours ago

An actual generation scheme would probably do something with the potential difference prior to dielectric breakdown actually occurring, at any rate.

Comment by chii 5 hours ago

yea, i think the low efficiency (plus how to predict where lightning would hit!). Might as well just put up a wind turbine, since wind is much more predictable, not to mention easier to harvest.

Comment by EricFrost 4 hours ago

That's 60 Wh per person in the U.S.

Comment by syngrog66 4 hours ago

I am long on EVs, battery power and solar. Among the few silver linings in the otherwise dystopic hellscape timeline we're heading down now.

Comment by antiquark 5 hours ago

For comparison, 20.2 GWh is what the Grand Coulee Dam can produce in 4 hours of operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

Comment by ZeroGravitas 4 hours ago

The dam only runs about 33% of the time so 8 hours a day and the batteries run nearly every day so just 3 months of additions is nearing half a grand coulee dam of electricity output. Or two Coulee dams a year in grid battery production.

The existing batteries in Texas and California have already delivered a coulee-dam-year (21TWh) so far in 2026.

Comment by pixl97 2 hours ago

I live in Texas and I've recently seen a number of wide load hauls of grid scale batteries. Not sure where they are coming from, but they were all heading out west. I assume to wind/solar to capture them when costs are low and balance the grid later. For Texas being the gas state, it is crazy how much renewable stuff I see moving around.

Comment by zombot 5 hours ago

How many minutes does your average AI data center last on that amount?

Comment by myrmidon 4 hours ago

Largest operational/planned AI datacenters are in the 2GW+ range, so ~600min for one of those.

But a more typical size would be around 200MW, which could run over a week on 20GWh.

Comment by BOOSTERHIDROGEN 1 hour ago

Where is that data center ?

Comment by myrmidon 10 minutes ago

AWS New Carlisle in Indiana is probably at ~1GW right now and scheduled to hit ~2.2GW when finished (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/29/amazon-opens-11-billion-ai-d...).

Microsoft Fairwater Wisconsin is currently at 400ish MW and projected to scale beyond 2GW of electrical power by mid 2028, as buildings currently still under construction come online (according to: https://epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers/directory/microsoft-fa...).

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Comment by sandworm101 4 hours ago

Building out batteries and solar farms. Balancing the need for peak load demands against the steady state of steam generators. Racing to get nuclear going before running out of space for solar panels.