Re:SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private ...
by toomuchtodo on Thursday September 27, 2018 @08:23PM
(#18090027)
Yeah, we argue this all the time :) you can’t stick hydro storage just anywhere, yet you can ship cargo containers full of powerpacks to anywhere in the world in a week or two. The Hornsdale Power Reserve was built in 90 days. Tesla is building a 700MW-1.1GW facility with PG&E to replace 3 natural gas generators (in the Southwest US, solar and batteries are cheaper than natural gas).
Utility scale battery storage will lead the day. Raw materials go into your factory, out come battteries good for at least a decade, that can perform energy arbitrage and frequency response for grid services. And every year it keeps getting cheaper to build. Hydro storage construction is always going to be geoconstrained, time consuming to construct, and expensive.
Just my two cents.
I know we've talked about this before. But +100MW-hrs here and there is nothing. Yeah, 300MW in Australia is impressive for Lithium Ion. But...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/ener...
This singular $3 Billion project will give 2GW of power. If the lake holds 8-hours of water, that'd be 16-GW-hrs of energy in a single project.
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If energy storage is to be figured out in the USA, we need to be calculating GW-hr scale projects, not MW-hr scale projects like Mr. Musk.
Lithium Ion's main benefit was to Tesla, as Tesla would have a 2nd place to sell their Lithium Ion batteries. Its great for Tesla, but its way too small of a scale for me to consider it as a major solution to the USA's energy problem.