Comment by otherme123
1 year ago
Energy without batteries must be produced when it's consumed. Imagine your cellphone without a battery: it would be connected to a power plant that must be started on demand, and stopped when your phone is not in use.
Now imagine your phone gets a battery, that can be charged with a small solar panel when you're not using the phone. This way, you can use the phone even when the sun isn't shinning or at dark hours, as long as the solar panel and the sunny hours at least match you consumption.
The additional generation you call for comes from the windy/sunny times when people are not consuming 100% of production, so they charge the batteries instead.
In fact, coal can be thought as a storage of energy, not a source: it was stored from sun energy some million years ago when nobody was consuming it, so we can recover some of that energy today by pluging "the coal batteries" in a furnace.
I’m aware the battery in Hawaii uses additional generation, it’s mentioned in the article. That point was the obviously-misleading headline, which is not the first I’ve seen for this type of installation.
But my point is that you don't need additional generation. At night, a lot of wind energy is currently being lost, because 1) it doesn't get consumed and there's no means to store it and 2) the more eolic you install without batteries, the less ROI you get. Thus, you have to install extra-capacity for the day in the form of gas or coal. Now imagine you install batteries to store night wind energy: the show changes! You can actually replace a coal plant with a battery that can store enough wind energy at night that offset the coal plant, without extra generation installed.
This currently isn't true, because grids are not dumb. They are not over installing eolic or PV if they can't store the over production. But if batteries are price competitive, they might go that route. An eolic turbine that was previously stopped 50% of the nights, could be producing 24/7.