HackiNews

• nicois
  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.

  • bluefirebrand
    I worked at a company for a while trying to make a battery control device that predicts the peak daily demand and discharges the battery to offset it.

    It's kind of crazy how much money you can save by shrinking your peak demand during the time of day it's most expensive.

  • ViewTrick1002
    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.

  • sandworm101
    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.

    • nixon_why69
      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).

      • stefs
        there are areas where almost all options for pumped hydro are already developed and there's little room for expansion. additionally, the heat waves from the climate catastrophe affects pumped hydro negatively (evaporation and higher water temperature).
      • grumbelbart2
        Mostly because we already used all suitable places. It also has a huge environmental impact, large upfront costs that you can only spend in bulk, permissions, lawsuits, protests from the local population and so forth.
      • sandworm101
        Hydro is limited by geography. It cannot scale in the same way. Rather than giant spinning masses at central locations, current thinking is more about smaller masses scattered throughout a grid. There are even a few studies on whether existing air conditioner/heat pump compressors could contribute.
    • angry_octet
      There's a very long waiting list for new synchronous condensers, almost 5 years from order to delivery.
    • rgarrett88
      Maintenance on high energy movement hasn't exactly had a great track record either.
    • _blk
      Yup. Esp. when space is available. But thet benefit heavily from low pressure environments though so it's not just an arm and a mass in a fence.
  • dev_l1x_be
    Producing batteries are not expensive and carbon intensive?

    • horsawlarway
      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?

      • JMKH42
        People who make these comments are either disingenuous people, or people who aren't thinking carefully repeating the arguments of their tribe.
    • WarmWash
      The good 'ole "Lets start with the premise that all energy in our calculation comes from coal transported by truck, and then work out how "green" these technologies are"
    • adrianN
      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.
    • stefs
      that's a one time cost over many years that's quickly amortized. lets assume an upfront cost of ~100kg CO2 per kWh of battery storage and 250g of CO2 per kWh generated by a gas turbine. this means the carbon ROI is there after 400 kWh.
    • dralley
      Compared to gas generators? Probably. And unlike gas there's no ongoing cost.
    • speed_spread
      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.
  • throwaway473825
    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.

    • carefree-bob
      China does not hate oil and gas.

      To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.

      China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.

      And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.

      The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.

      • tialaramex
        > The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand.

        In thermal electricity plants it takes a lot longer to go from cold & dark to generating electricity with coal than with either Combined-Cycle gas or especially the Open-Cycle "peaker" gas plants. Both types of gas plant also AIUI have a lot better ability to "throttle" their power output.

        This means if you have a bunch of CCGT like Britain, you can use those directly to "top-up" the power from your fleet of solar PV and wind turbines, whether that's 1GW of top-up or 20GW of top-up. The change from weather (sun goes down, wind picks up, clouds appear, etc.) is relatively slow compared to what a gas plant can do, whereas it's too fast for coal to keep up as I understand it.

        • lazide
          Coal by it’s nature is much less amenable (from a physics/chemistry) perspective to automation and high resolution control. Less pure/refined, granular instead of a gas, harder to start and burns longer once started, etc.

          Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.

          On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.

          It all makes sense.

      • jmyeet
        Here's a detailed breakdown of China's energy picture since 2020 [1]. The big story is that fossil fuels are relatively stable or in decline and solar is exploding. Hydro is down because of drought and they're building an even bigger dam than the Three Gorges Dam (ie Medog) but it'll be ~7 years before it comes online.

        There has been an uptick in coal this year to replace oil imports, which have fallen off a cliff because of the Iran war [2]. The real story of 2026 is how China essentially saved the world economy by doing this [3].

        China is dependent on oil and gas imports but clearly sees the writing on the wall. All of these projects are an effort to wean themselves off of oil. So is a lot of domestic policy like the electrification of vehicles. This has had a global impact, reducing global oil demand by almost 2% in the last 5 years [4].

        I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.

        [1]: https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...

        [2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-imports

        [3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/china-crude-oil-iran-hormuz-...

        [4]: https://www.intellinews.com/china-led-ev-boom-cuts-global-oi...

      • jefurii
        Username doesn't quite fit here
    • oblio
      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.

      • bryanlarsen
        > 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.

        • tuesdaynight
          > It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.

          Why? Would China just try to start a global war? If it's about Taiwan, I'm not sure that USA would care like 5 years ago. USA will probably do the same with South America

          • toomuchtodo
            China built strategic petroleum reserves that can operate for over a year so that if the US attempted to blockade oil supplies from the middle east during a conflict, China could press on when they decide to obtain Taiwan (or so the geopolitical strategy thesis goes). Does it make sense to take Taiwan once China has their own semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and Taiwan is mostly a retirement home [1]? Hard to say. Old people in power take illogical and unconventional actions out of nostalgia, historically speaking.

            [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50260274

      • toomuchtodo
        China coal use has dropped below 50% [1], and they currently curtail renewable generation roughly total annual generation of Spain and the Philippines combined every six months [2] (~401 terawatt-hours of power). They are rapidly deploying battery storage to accelerate electrification and making use of energy that would otherwise be curtailed, which should continue to drive down coal use (their electricity markets are currently reconfiguring to use market signals and incentives to encourage this outcome).

        They will, in the next five years (at current renewables and battery storage deployment rates [60% of their energy currently comes from renewables, and this increases 10% YoY]), become a low carbon (hard to say net zero yet) electrostate [3] that will continue to scale manufacturing clean tech for the world [4] with minimal carbon footprint.

        [1] China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026

        [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343 (citations)

        [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=china+electrostate

        [4] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

      • _blk
        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.
      • lnsru
        In the case of armed conflict with the West all Chinese inverters will be weaponized to burn homes in the West. The shops will be empty in the West and West will be in very ugly situation outsourcing all the manufacturing. Better it doesn’t happen.
• goldenarm
  It's impressive to see the battery capacity growing on ElectricityMaps over the years : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/yearly

  But why is the utilization rate so low? It was barely 0.8% of electricity in California last year.

• bradfa
  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.

  • myself248
    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.

    • crote
      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.
    • rcxdude
      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.
  • leoedin
    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.

    • kitten_mittens_
      Isn’t the MWh more like 2-4x in the US for grid sized batteries?
  • eigenspace
    I can see why one might intuitively think this, but actually this is just a bad take. For most practical purposes, the main value added by these batteries is not really the size of their storage capacity (afterall, their capacity is tiny relative to the grid's needs), but their ability to quickly sink or supply massive amounts of power.

    If these batteries had 10x the storage capacity, but 1/10th the power output, they'd miss out on their biggest advantage, which is capturing mid-day solar oversupply, and providing virtual grid inertia.

    Long duration, lower-power batteries will have an important role to play once grids get further along in renewable adoption, but for now, short duration power-supply is the main value they add, and it makes perfect sense to quote battery numbers in terms of power. (not that I'd complain about providing capacity numbers too)

  • jcattle
    I mean, both is important. Pumped hydro can have quite large amounts of storage, but supply comparatively little W of power.
• 1970-01-01
  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.

  • boringg
    Reliability issues. You cannot get 4 9s with solar and battery.

    • lenerdenator
      Is the point of the battery not to add 9s with solar?
• Synaesthesia
  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.

  • estearum
    Electricity is woke, that's why.

    Diesel is the future.

• daedrdev
  One thing that would really help batteries is permitting reform. The BAAJA reform bill would really help not just the batteries themselves but the transmission lines which are far more difficult to construct thank to an insane system and lots of lawsuits.

  • cucumber3732842
    In my jurisdiction a battery development is just about the only kind of development that can tell the evil rule and restriction people masquerading as do-gooders to GFY (though of course it still gets kicked in the dick at the state level since we've got a lot of rules others don't).

    Grid capacity both locally and at the transmission level is still the biggest factor when it comes to site viability though. You can't back feed a municipal water system by connecting a fire hose to a random house's hose spigot.

    Battery sites are becoming a big thing in long term RE investing because being able to have this site plan developed under favorable rules while all the other rules only ever get worse makes these sites potentially hugely valuable when the batteries are gone in decades.

• jonatron
  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.

  • universa1
    and then it's roughly just a rectangle of 100 by 100 containers, still big, but maybe not sooo big :-)

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

      • myself248
        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...

        • jcattle
          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.

          • myself248
            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.

        • ksec
          I would assume it has something to do with fire hazard ?
• tomsellin23
  Lots of folks are going with lithium, including myself. I'm adding two more 16 kWh batteries to my home system. It just makes sense.
• Someone
  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.

  • nomercy400
    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.

    • clarionbell
      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.

      • viraptor
        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?

        • crote
          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.

          • bluGill
            > 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.

        • bob1029
          [delayed]
      • oblio
        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.
    • DJBunnies
      It's not public.
    • wtch98
      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)
  • pletnes
    That means a huge ability to absorb production or consumption peaks!
  • baxtr
    Compared to what is this a good measure?

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

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

  • ardme
    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.

  • ZeroGravitas
    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.

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

  • origini
    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.

    • blooalien
      > 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. :)

      • walthamstow
        Rude and cowardly. If you've got a problem, talk to me directly, not about me to other people.
      • walthamstow
        Hey, fuck you mate. If you've got a problem, talk to me, not about me.
  • Someone
    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

• kilroy123
  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.

  • maipen
    AI energy needs, will contribute to faster battery improvements than anything else.

    Everything using batteries will benefit from it.

• EricFrost
  That's 60 Wh per person in the U.S.
• cisc
  That's one third of what China added in December, 2025:

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

• stymaar
  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 !

  • chicken-stew
    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.

• seb1204
  Batteries are great but every country still needs generation to charge them up. Some of the big gentailers build very little new generation capacity.

  • viraptor
    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)
  • criddell
    Don't grid operators typically have excess capacity most of the time?
• nomercy400
  How many batteries in parallel would you need to capture the power of a lightning strike?

  • bluGill
    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.
  • HPsquared
    You'd probably use some kind of capacitor
  • Maxion
    To capture it? Quite a few I'd imagine. The energy you could collect though from one hit is quite low.

    • chii
      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.
• syngrog66
  I am long on EVs, battery power and solar. Among the few silver linings in the otherwise dystopic hellscape timeline we're heading down now.
• antiquark
  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

  • ZeroGravitas
    The dam only runs about 33% of the time so 8 hours a day and the batteries run nearly every day so just 3 months of additions is nearing half a grand coulee dam of electricity output. Or two Coulee dams a year in grid battery production.

    The existing batteries in Texas and California have already delivered a coulee-dam-year (21TWh) so far in 2026.

• zombot
  How many minutes does your average AI data center last on that amount?
• sandworm101
  Building out batteries and solar farms. Balancing the need for peak load demands against the steady state of steam generators. Racing to get nuclear going before running out of space for solar panels.

  Is this real or are we living in a Factorio livestream?