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by throwaway2037 38 days ago
Hat tip. This is a perfect follow-up. This confirms to me: Yes, it is a major achievement. Batteries with capacity of 24-48 MW-hours is HUGE! Probably none of this infra existed 25 years ago. I wonder: What is/was the total cost (in 2026 dollars) to build this battery infra?
2 comments

This rollout occured in the last 10 years.

Some legislation in 2010 set small targets for 2020 and it grew rapidly from there.

Joke follow-up: According to a few sources a standard D battery holds about 24 watt-hours of energy. Thus, a single battery can supply the energy of 12 nuclear power plants for about 2 nanoseconds. Awesome! (I hope that my math is correct here.)
It's not, one battery won't output 12GW no matter for how brief a period you want it. This is the achievement here, that the battery can supply that much current for a time.
Battery array, not battery. The achievement is not that it came from “a battery”, it’s that amount of power — 40% of their state power — came “from batteries” for a period of time. An array is a collection of batteries just like putting three D batteries in a flashlight forms a battery array.

The facetious remarks that the same could be said of a D battery are absolutely on the mark…for the point of being a joke about the headline…