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The World’s Largest Battery to Power the Permian (oilprice.com)
35 points by protomyth on Feb 21, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



One full screen popup ad: annoying

Two full screen popup ads: tab closed, never visiting that domain again, back to HN to warn the others.


Came here to share the same sentiment, saw your comment at the top.

This is the sort of website that reinforces my lazy habit of reading the comments first, instead of looking at the comment itself to form my own unbiased opinion about it.


n ads: use a script or ad blocking browser extension.


This article fails to make the distinction between battery capacity (in MWh) and battery power in MW.

That's very bad. It's a bit like mistaking miles for miles per hour.

Though in that case it's megawatt times hour.


The distinction between energy and power seems to mystify pretty much everyone apart from engineers and scientists. I consistently see it confused in articles in mainstream media.


It looks like all the articles on this new battery are based on a single table of existing and planned grid-tied power sources (including traditional power plants), published by the energy regulator. As a table of power sources it doesn't include capacity, just peak output, which is why there is no info on it. There doesn't appear to be a press release or anything.


It sounds like 495 MW will be the peak output of the battery, but I can't find anywhere information about the capacity, which is what I really want to know

edit: for comparison the Tesla Australian big battery has a 100 MW output and total 129 MWh capacity. The current largest grid battery in the world is in Japan at 50 MW output/300 MWh capacity


What are we defining as a battery?

If it's purely energy storage I think the hydro energy storage facilities (Like Dinorwig in the UK) definitely qualify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station which has a capacity of 1,800 MW

Tom Scott did a video on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI


Also of note: almost 25% of power generation capacity in Texas this year will be wind!


From the article it seems likely the power will go into making climate change even harder to stop though :/


The electrical infrastructure built will remain after oil demand and production declines.


Only the robot wrestling left and "Real Steel" (2011) is a reality. :)


Does anyone know if law mandates such largescale projects to co-operate with research? If one is going to make, install, use and monitor (within the same system, and thus using exactly the same metrics) huge amounts of batteries, it would seem useful to not make them all identical, but to arrange a hypercube of production parameters (concentrations of chemicals, purity levels, tolerances, ...) so that we can learn the most cost efficient utilization?

In the lab people experiment with sigma aldrich grade materials, but the cost efficiency is also a function of the cost of purification grade, manufacturing tolerances, ...


There is no such legal or regulatory mandate.


To power oil extraction, so that's probably a net increase for CO2 :(


Not one but two popup adds on this site!


Interesting how an oilfield in Texas is named after the city in Russia where I'm from.




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