Utility scale batteries are not yet a proven and deployed technology. Not to say there aren’t successes - Aliso Canyon and the AEMO installation in Australia have both been very well received by their respective system operators. But there’s a very long way to go before batteries will exist as a viable, general alternative to natural gas peaker plants.
I did not say that they are an alternative to natural gas peaker plants. I said that in markets where the spot price can spike to $8,000 per MWh, grid scale batteries are being deployed in order to serve those load spikes more economically.
There is about ~1GWh of grid scale battery storage already deployed in the US alone. 150MW was deployed in 2019 Q1 - which represents 232% growth YoY . ~5 GWh is projected to be installed annually by 2024. [1] I think that this qualifies as proven and deployed.
I agree, proven and delayed, when and where it makes sense to do so.
It remains to be seen if this will become a common deployment generally speaking, though with more grid scale wind and solar being built it does seem likely, in my opinion.
Minimum US national load is ~400GWh and peak is ~675GWh, [1] so there’s a tremendous amount of storage which could be used to smooth out the curve.
Perfectly smoothing the curve would require something like 2TWh (charging at 150GW for 12 hours and then discharging at 150GW for 12 hours), which would be total overkill, but every little bit can help stabilize the grid—and spot prices—that much more.
The fact that 10 years from now we could have 100GWh of storage, and adding maybe 50GWh per year is pretty awesome. Global Li-Ion battery production is forecast to be ~1TWh by then.
Between electric cars, home storage, and grid storage, chemical battery production seems like it’s turning into a trillion dollar market. Eventually we’ll add airplanes to that list!
