Re:California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rol...
by Manuel_D on Monday October 27, 2025 @11:16PM
(#45728896)
Output is just one factor, capacity is another. If you're building a solar plant with the assumption that storage will make it provide consistent energy output throughout the day, then the difference between 12 hours of storage and 2 hours of storage is enormous.
Some storage project list power output figures that can only be sustained for 90 minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Big_Battery
This is because grid operators are most concerned with immediate power output. They need to keep the grid balanced, and if they need a gigawatt to do it, it doesn't matter if the batteries have 100 GWh if they can only discharge at 1 MW.
Since the batteries described here are used primarily to handle the peak of the duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve) it seems like 4 hours of capacity (the article mentions that the lithium-ion batteries have 4-6 hours of capacity) is sufficient to get over that difficult hump.
Anyway, to get back to your question of how many GWh, if we assume that the batteries have 4 hours of storage, then we're looking at around 4h * 15.7 GW = 63 GWh of battery capacity. (4 hours is what I've seen as standard for lithium-ion, conservative if the article's claim of "four to six hours" is true.)
Hope this helps ease the peeve!