Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Source: RWE connects its first utility-scale battery storage project to the California grid

Preface.  In 2024 if all of the BESS battery storage time were added up, they could store 8 of the 8,760 hours of annual electricity generated in the USA.  Only 5% of their energy is used to actually store energy, the rest is arbitrage to quickly balance fluctuations caused by wind and solar living and dying.  Yet we need from one (720 hours) or three or more months of energy storage (2160) of 4200 TWh annual electricity to cope for the seasonality of wind and solar in a 100% renewable grid.  But it isn’t simply a matter of building more energy storage batteries, because the technology they rest upon is shaky and unstable and complex.

Most states are too flat to develop pumped hydro storage, the only commercial option today.  PHS is also very expensive and can cost billions of dollars in the few places where one might even be put since the best spots were built decades ago.  One of the few ways to balance wind and solar without using natural gas are batteries.  Other posts explain why these won’t scale up, but that’s just the beginning of their problems as you’ll see in the two articles below.

This paragraph especially struck me: Cell imbalances can occur because battery energy storage systems comprise of hundreds of thousands of individual battery cells, and while these cells are part of the same system, they vary in quality and aging. The weakest cell among them dictates the performance. Thus, when the BESS is charged, not every cell will charge to the same targeted value (e.g., 100% SoC). At the same time, when discharged, not every cell will be discharged to the same planned value (e.g., 0% SoC).

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