In Australia, the real value of these big batteries is not necessarily to provide emergency power, but more to respond in milliseconds to variations in demand and to smooth out the 5 minute spot market.

Having a sink and a source for spikes aids grid stability and somewhat helps to reduce the need to build more infrastructure to handle transmitting power from the generators during those peaks.

It also helps avoid the viability of gas powered generators which are very expensive and carbon intensive.

I don't think it's a coincidence that China has developed batteries that neuter the advantage that gas had over coal, but I can't stop wondering if we'd already have solved long-term storage if China hated coal as much as oil and gas.

China can't hate coal (yet). In case of an armed conflict with the West, they will be cut off completely from oil and gas. Renewables don't cover all their energy needs. So they are building a lot of coal plants as backup.

> cut off completely from oil and gas

China is the world's 4th largest oil & gas producer. They're dependent on imports because they're the 2nd largest importer. However, they are simultaneously increasing production and decreasing consumption. Those two lines will cross some day. It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.

Can they procure their own uranium? Coal still has the advantage of being more local, much simpler, faster to get up and running. Smaller plants also means smaller distribution radius etc. so more infrastructure decentralization. I imagine that's part of the thought process too.

Producing batteries are not expensive and carbon intensive?

Genuine question - what is the thought process behind this comment?

Because we both know that gas generators also require a production step... arguably one that's quite a bit more complex than a battery, at ~$1,000,000/MW of installation costs. And that installation of that complex is going to be very carbon intensive (even the concrete foundation alone...).

And then on top the plant actively burns hydrocarbons for the entirety of its existence.

So fill me in here - what is the exact argument you are trying to make with this?

Over the lifetime of the battery it’s not that bad and gets better as the carbon intensity of the grid that runs the factories improves.

Compared to gas generators? Probably. And unlike gas there's no ongoing cost.

The extraction cost of minerals is only paid once. And a few big batteries will be much easier to recycle than a billion small ones in consumer electronics.

I am still a fan of centrifugal systems. The lifecycle costs of a spinning mass seem more manageable than the complexities of chemical batteries. The mass of a block of concrete and steal isn't going to degrade over time. And bearings/motors are such mature tech that they can last decades, even a century without replacement.

If you're going mechanical, why not pumped water storage instead? Nothing has to spin super fast and hydro has a lot of maturity.

(From a guy who got burned buying stock in a centrifugal system as my first "wicked smaht" investment as a 22yo).

That is ancillary services. And where all battery implementations started before saturating those marketss.

We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.

I'm glad they're reporting it as the energy storage capacity and not the power output capacity. Too many news sites like to report the power output capacity in stories like these, which is horribly misleading, and then often they also frame it as though this is equivalent to adding actual power generation to the grid, which is even more misleading.

One reason they report in MW instead of MWh, is that grid operators primarily spec systems by their continuous MW, and only secondarily mention their cumulative MWh. So that's the way they talk about them, and reporters just mimic that. Both are important, but the top-line number is MW, for sure.

One reason for this is that for a lot of grid-support functions, instantaneous or short-term power is vastly more important than long-term energy capacity. The other reason is that traditional generation is only sized by MW; you just keep pouring fuel into it forever, so the notion of MWh doesn't even enter the picture. They're not even thinking in those terms.

You and I, as battery natives, think about it the other way around. But we're not grid operators.

Yup! Some breaker trips, and a 500MW plant goes offline. How much battery storage do you need to compensate? 500MW. The fact that it stores 500MWh and therefore only lasts an hour comes afterwards, that is plenty of time to ask all the other fossil power plants to scale up a bit.

It's probably also a view that is shifting as batteries move from primarily providing short-term grid stability (where power available is probably the more important metric) to longer term storage.

Having worked in the industry for a bit, the reason people talk about "MW of batteries" is because they're usually designed to deliver the capacity for a fixed number of hours. Earlier batteries would do 1 hour (so a battery would typically be 1MW/1MWh) and newer sites coming online are usually 2 hours (so 1MW/2MWh). As battery deployment grows the money is increasingly just in energy arbitrage, so there's a lot of pressure for longer duration storage. If you see a headline MW figure it's a safe bet that it's between 1-2x that in MWh.

Isn’t the MWh more like 2-4x in the US for grid sized batteries?

I mean, both is important. Pumped hydro can have quite large amounts of storage, but supply comparatively little W of power.

Politically force datacenters to consume only solar and battery. Instead of total collapse, we now have tremendous amounts of cheap energy when the bubble implodes. That seems like the only way to hedge the bet on AI.

I am long on EVs, battery power and solar. One of the few silver linings in the otherwise dystopic hellscape timeline we're reading down now.

For comparison, US grid capacity is about 1250 GW, average usage 500 GW.

So, this adds over two minutes of average usage.

https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou... says total storage now is about 200 GWh, or about 25 minutes of average demand.

So if ALL power generation of the US would stop right now, EVERYTHING would still have power for 25 minutes. (ignoring all safeties tripping, and perfect load balancing)

That sounds so impressive.

No. Because neither storage nor generation is evenly spread. In some places you would have nothing, in some you could have potentially hours.

In practical terms, you would most probably get nothing, because situation like this would lead to complete grid breakdown and interruption of service.

Technical detail question: if all of those batteries were on connecting allowing feeding back to the grid, would they be able to synchronise the frequency/phase? What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?

It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.

> The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

This might or might not be true. I used to live near a large plant that took HVDC from a power plant several states away and transformed it into AC. They used electronics to provide the grid frequency, not spinning metal. All the other local peak power generation was run in grid following mode.

Considering the accelerating rate of installation and the ever decreasing costs of manufacturing, both problems should be alleviated in 10 years. Instead of 25 minutes, most likely 4-6 hours. Instead of extremely uneven distribution, likely all the major population centers will have at least some non zero coverage.

It's not public.

Only if that battery was connected to 500GW of inverter capacity (and the grid was a spherical chicken -- enough intertia-replacement devices to keep timing working, enough capacity to link supply with demand etc)

inertia-replacement is what batteries do best, so in this kind scenario that's probably the least of the problems.

That means a huge ability to absorb production or consumption peaks!

Compared to what is this a good measure?

"How much is needed during a no sun and no wind period" could be reasonable comparison.

Makes sense. With battery technology improving and being the cheapest it's ever been, why not? This is probably the direction most countries will go in the future.

I wonder how much medium- to long-term storage has been installed this year. Batteries are fantastic, but we need better ways to store excess wind and solar for dark winter days when there's no sun or wind.

It's nice to see more storage being added, but we have keep thr order of magnitude in mind: the peak electricity demand for the US is 750GW, so the added storage for the past 3 month corresponds to just 96 seconds of peak consumption.

There's still a very long way to go !

But we generally don't need to satisfy the peak with battery - peak US demand occurs while the sun is still up, in July, so you can satisfy a large chunk of that with solar still. The hard part is those ~4 hours after solar stops producing enough and it's still hot and people are still up. So what we need is several hours of about half the gap between {nuclear, wind, hydro} and peak. Remembering that we also use even non-pumped hydro as a form of storage, by drawing on it more in the periods just before and just after sunrise/sunset.

For example, if you look at the energy production across PJM from two days ago: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:hiovtnl...

(Using that b/c I run the bot and it's data I'm very familiar with. You can see similar patterns in CAISO but they've already got so much solar it's a little more messy/duck-curved by all of the behind-the-meter solar.)

You can see hydro coming online from roughly 16:00 - 23:00. There's still a big gas peak that we'd need a lot of storage to shave, and you're right that it's a long way to go before we do that, but it's not quite as bad as "we need enough battery to satisfy 100% peak demand".

As others have stated, neither storage nor generation is evenly spread.

But, like with UPS, 96 seconds is ample time to let delicate systems glide to a standstill or to start the diesel generator.

Obviously there are a variety of sizes and configurations, but if you assumed 3.5MWh per 20ft container, that's 5771 containers, and if you assumed a PCS container per two battery container, that's 8656 containers, just for an idea of the scale.

and then it's roughly just a rectangle of 100 by 100 containers, still big, but maybe not sooo big :-)

or a cube of 20x20x20 containers, seems small enough. (funny how we interpret numbers and sizes

I've always wondered why they don't stack them in deployment -- the containers are obviously fine with it! -- but I guess land is cheap enough not to bother.

Horizontally they need plenty of room for airflow, as each container has some HVAC-or-whatever module on the side. But vertically...

Foundations, maintenance, fire risk.

Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.

I always thought they were spread apart so much to further reduce the chance of catastrophic spread of fire from one container to another.

That would be a lot harder if you stack them since heat likes to rise.

But no clue if that is the actual reason.

Yeah, that's probably part of it. Some do have explosion vents in the top of the container.

It'd just be impressive to see a giant wall of battery. A bunch of little batteries camping in a field doesn't play the same visually. Ah well.

I would assume it has something to do with fire hazard ?

Am I correct to assume all these grid batteries are all made in China as well?

No firstly there are several Korean companies making both batteries and battery manufacturing machine tools.

There are big factories in both Michigan and Kentucky Ford operates it just took over from Blueoval SK.

They retooled Ford plants are now making grid batteries instead of car batteries is my understanding.

Tesla also has battery factories in the USA as well as a lithium refinery.

Batteries are complex but less complex than semiconductors. They are rapidly dropping in cost too.

Grid batteries was one of the few areas that escaped Trump's gutting of the IRA and was included in other Infrastructure bills.

And a side effect of the EV market getting hobbled also redirected battery factory capacity from that market.

I'm not sure what's online yet but there is a pipeline.

edit an estimate from earlier this year:

> By the end of 2025, 20 gigawatt-hours of dedicated storage cell lines had opened, and the industry is on pace to hit 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year.

China, the electrostate

Presumably this is only capacity connected to the grid, and doesn't include isolated data centre builds?

I was snobby and looked up the numbers because I didn't think this is relevant. But it is.

Space-Tesla installed 3 GWh in 2026 alone.

> I was snobby and looked up the numbers because I didn't think this is relevant. But it is.

Kudos to you for bein' "that guy". So many folks sit and comment while having the world's biggest library of information on just about every topic right there at their fingertips and still can't be bothered to take the 30 seconds to look up something they don't know about on their favorite search engine. I appreciate you for havin' done "the right thing" here. :)

Rude and cowardly. If you've got a problem, talk to me directly, not about me to other people.

https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou...:

- The utility-scale market continued underpin growth, with 18 GWh installed, largely supported by seven gigawatt scale projects. Arizona installed over 6.2 GWh of utility scale projects, the largest quarterly deployment for any state in history.

- In the BTM space, residential storage added 657 MWh and commercial and industrial (C&I) added 1.8 GWh, largely on the back of demand from data centers.

⇒ it includes data centers

That's one third of what China added in December, 2025:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/16/chinas-batteries-move-b...

Batteries are great but every country still needs generation to charge them up. Some of the big gentailers build very little new generation capacity.

There's likely some spare solar capacity that will help. Currently the peak of solar is almost counterproductive, but converting that to storage is good for both the consumers and the power plants. (Less feed in during the day, lower evening peak)

How many batteries in parallel would you need to capture the power of a lightning strike?

As far as I know, we have yet to figure out how to capture power from a lightning strike. There is a lot of energy there, but it's static electricity which is completely different from what any grid runs on.

You'd probably use some kind of capacitor

To capture it? Quite a few I'd imagine. The energy you could collect though from one hit is quite low.

It's around 1MWh within a fraction of a second.

That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.

Which is why nobody even attempts this.

yea, i think the low efficiency (plus how to predict where lightning would hit!). Might as well just put up a wind turbine, since wind is much more predictable, not to mention easier to harvest.

For comparison, 20.2 GWh is what the Grand Coulee Dam can produce in 4 hours of operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

How many minutes does your average AI data center last on that amount?