"Unfortunately, battery tech is not there yet to help with the supply-demand mismatches."
Isn't this the situation that Elon's battery in South Australia was built to handle? From what I understand, it's been profitable and successful.
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Without something to handle soaring peaks, a friend of mine who works in energy described the power landscape as like needing a 100-lane wide bridge to deal with peak-hour crossing a city river.
The South Australia battery is profitable because it solves the problem of changes in demand over a period of seconds or minutes, filling the gaps while a larger fossil fuel plant manually ramps up to take over the load.
Itβs critically important and far more costly to do in other ways.
From the article, it seems they're dealing with demand fluctuations of 1000-3000 MW within a given hour (2PM was the example), so I think it's really working on a totally different scale. Even 10x as many batteries wouldn't be able to smooth that load fluctuation.
Isn't this the situation that Elon's battery in South Australia was built to handle? From what I understand, it's been profitable and successful.
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Without something to handle soaring peaks, a friend of mine who works in energy described the power landscape as like needing a 100-lane wide bridge to deal with peak-hour crossing a city river.