I love how they can't help but to make this a Texas vs. CA thing in the first few sentences. So here we're go: based on Texas' track record, these batteries are going to fail disastrously the first hard winter they get.
Batteries are good. But we must definitely find a way to do load shifting of high energy demand industries and processes to peak of solar. Wonder what can be shifted to 4 hour window without impacting the overall economics ?
There is a good chance solar per Kwh may reach 1-2 US cents LCOE by 2030. Off course this does not include storage, transmission. But this is an order of magnitude difference from many energy sources only a decade back.
One would expect that a site dedicated to clean energy would know the difference between watts and watthours (i.e. power and capacity), on several occasions it claims that the capacity is X gigawatts instead of gigawatthours (GWh). It's hard to figure out what exactly is getting installed as the relation between the two is often different depending on the spec of the system.
The capacity of the connection they can saturate is in GW. The capacity they can store is in GWh.
Power generation is generally in GW, and if you're trying to work out how much demand you can satisfy, then that's what you want to know. If you're trying to work out how long you can satisfy it for then you want GWh.
It's even more confusing when those two numbers are the same which does sometimes happen. However, for grid storage it's more common for the GWh number to be 2-4x as large as the GW number.
If you follow the link on their site, the eia.gov site also reports the batteries in GW. They are consistent about this across their sites, so it isn’t an accidental error… but I can’t for the life of me recall why they do it this way.
