Comment on Why is coal and fossil fuels still used?
exasperation@lemm.ee 4 days agoYeah, people are working on it.
The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.
That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.
It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.