vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
As far as I am aware, these are short term batteries to deal with intra day volatility (intra hour to switch between different sources in fact I believe). It's not capacity to deal with a week without wind. You would need to quote the capacity not in GW but in GWh for that (or GW-days).
Batteries are short duration storage (4-12 hours); overbuilding renewables, generation diversity, and transmission solves for your problem statement around longer duration lulls in certain generation types.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/how-texa... ("How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the country")
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-bat... ("As brutal heat tests Texas’ power grid, batteries play a small but growing role in keeping the lights on")
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240707022007/https://www.eia.g... (EIA 12 month forward looking generator deployment; scope to Texas and gray icons, which indicate battery storage)
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("HN: Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")