[AnotherGoodName]

Agreed. The relatively small battery substation linked above can output 2GW of equivalent inertia generation (a measure to align batteries to inertial power systems) when needed. That's an entire power station they can match for short periods of time. Link: https://www.energymagazine.com.au/sa-approves-world-first-ba...

Australia's largest power plant has 2.9GW of inertial generation assuming all generators are running at 100%. As in the small battery substation alone comes close to the countries largest power station. I'm not sure where the idea that lithium ion can't dump power quickly comes from. They are absolutely phenomenal at it. Australia's building dozens of these substations too since they are so cheap and reduce overall power costs. It's a win from all points of view.

[bob1029]

The article does not describe an inertia constant. Without the time component, any comparison to traditional systems is meaningless. Inertia is a measure of energy, not power.

Large spinning masses can provide several seconds of inertia. For 2GW of traditional turbine, you would have between 10-20 gigawatt-seconds of energy that is instantly available at any moment to resist RoCoF.

[ajross]

The switching rate of a good power MOSFET has a bandwidth in megahertz. It's... all solid state electronics. Again, this is just wrong, absent someone showing a cite. It's very weird seeing this kind of seeming ignorance of basic electrical engineering on a hacker site of all places.

[tacticus]

> assuming all generators are running at 100%.

which they won't ever be given the habits of coal plants to suffer outages whenever it's convenient to pump the price up.