Electricity grid of the future: California bets on batteries
On April 16, 2024, "data geek" Joe Deely first discovered on the portal, which used to be called Twitter, that most of the electricity in the evening hours came from batteries.
Not the electricity in his house. The data related to the electricity grid of the entire US state of California, one of the largest in the world, with around 38 million residents and a lot of industry.
Over a period of just under 3 hours, almost the entire currently installed battery capacity of around 6 gigawatts could be fed into the grid. The evening peak in private electricity consumption and the loss of solar energy were thus compensated.
That evening, the installed batteries fed roughly as much electricity into the Californian grid as the state's only nuclear power plant over 24 hours. And batteries can react much more flexibly to electricity demand.
Just over 20 gigawatt hours can currently be drawn from the installed battery capacity alone. This could keep the entire power grid running for at least an hour.
Given the size of California, this is a fairly manageable amount. Overproduction of renewable energy during the day only can charge those batteries. A comparison with EVs gives a good idea of the scale.
The large batteries in electric cars hold around 100 kilowatt hours. 200 such batteries would be enough for 20 megawatt hours and 200,000 of these would correspond to the entire Californian battery capacity in the power grid.
200,000 EVs is just the number that were registered in California in the second half of 2023. There should therefore be no shortage of potential additional capacity that could be fed into the grid at critical times. After all, a total of almost 14 million cars drive through the Golden State.
The larger this proportion becomes, which of course would also have to be charged throughout the day, the smaller the required proportion per electric car would be. The Californian electricity grid provides some interesting insights into how electricity buffers in the form of batteries can be used sensibly. Especially as the car is probably safely parked in the garage after getting up in the morning and in front of the TV in the evening.
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