[dragontamer]

Weird units.

Batteries are normally talked about in terms of energy storage, not power.

IE: Batteries overall have 0 power. Everything they make had to come from somewhere else. Actually, because of losses in the 20%ish range, it's probably more accurate to say that California's Battery Array is __COSTING__ 2 nuclear power plants worth of power in electrical waste.

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Talk about GW-hrs of storage. You know, the value people actually cares about?

[asplake]

In practice, it can be very relevant. With my own household solar/battery system, I am sometimes frustrated more by limits on how much current I can draw, not by capacity. I could add more batteries, but it seems that the inverter is the limiting factor. And 12MW of inverter is impressive, no?

[dragontamer]

No?

Natural Gas would crush these numbers at far less $$ invested.

All of this crap is apples vs bananas. It's all fake made up metrics

Strangely enough: natural gas is probably the better comparison because at least natural gas is a peaker / grid stabilization technology.

Batteries are energy storage while nuclear I base load. It's the most nonsensical comparison I can possibly think of.

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Energy storage should be compared vs energy storage. How is a battery vs compressed air? How is Li-ion vs Lead Acid? How is Pumped Hydro vs Li Ion?

[adrian_b]

Batteries must always be talked about while mentioning both the stored energy and the maximum power.

These 2 battery parameters depend on different constructive details of the batteries. The stored energy depends on the volume of the electrodes (or of electrolyte in flow batteries), while the maximum power depends on the area of the electrodes.

All combinations are possible, e.g. batteries with high maximum power and low stored energy or with low maximum power and high stored energy or with both high maximum power and high stored energy.

For specific kinds of batteries, it may be easier to build them for high stored energy than for high power, or vice-versa.

Because for any kind of energy storage device both these parameters matter, the animals, like humans, have not much less than a dozen of combinations of energy storage and energy conversion methods, each of them providing different capabilities for the maximum power and for the total stored energy, so that they are chosen for use based on the duration and the intensity of the required effort.

[pibaker]

If all you have is a lawnmower engine, it doesn't matter how much gas you have. You won't be going very fast.

Same deal with energy storage. Yes energy capacity matters. But if you can’t put stored energy into the grid fast enough you get a brown or black out right away.

[dragontamer]

Except we have flywheels to solve the power problem (single digit minutes of storage, extremely high power).

The reason why batteries are being talked at all is because we are missing the energy storage problem (hours, or even days. Some people want seasonal storage but that's impossible with our current levels of tech).

The so called lawnmower engine that stores energy slowly in the summer but delivers it slowly in Winter would be more useful than you might think. Especially because we have solutions for every other tier (capacitors/supercaps for seconds of storage, flywheels for small minutes of storage, batteries for large minutes of storage, pumped hydro / compressed air energy storage for hours of storage).

[internet_points]

They use power units to make it comparable with the non-storage sources, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157824

[dragontamer]

Yes. People misuse units to compare apples with bananas.

Bad comparisons are bad.