The Guardian tells us that utility scale batteries are just great:

From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America’s electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.

This is not wholly so. There’s a substantial difference here between what GW means for a battery and what a GW means for a nuclear power plant.

That 20 GW (gigawatts) of power. We use 20 GW of power in an hour and so we’ve used 20 GWh.

OK.

If it’s at night and the wind isn’t blowing so we get those 20 GWh from our batteries. After 61 minutes we have no power at all and civilisation collapses. If we get that 20 GWh from nuclear then at minute 61 the atomkraft hums merrily along and we start gaining our second hour of 20 GW, another 20 GWh. Civilisation does not collapse.

That is, nuclear capacity of 20 GW gives us 20 GW each and every hour. 20 GW of battery power gives us 20 GW once and once only in any on particular use. We’ve got to await wind or morning to get some more.

Battery power simply is not equivalent to nuclear output in any useful manner. They’re different concepts.

We therefore think that we need to have new and better propaganda about renewable power here.

Of course, it’s possible to be cynical - we prefer “realist” - and note that propaganda is the process of misinforming people so that they believe untruths. So, what we’re actually arguing is that we need worse propaganda about unreliables so that people are not fooled into believing those untruths.

Just to remind about dunkelflautes:

Dunkelflauten can occur simultaneously over a very large region, but are less correlated between geographically distant regions, so multi-national power grid schemes can be helpful. Events that last more than two days over most of Europe happen about every five years.

We need 48 times as much battery storage as nuclear output to cover something as foreseeable as the twice a decade opportunity for European civilization to collapse.

Better, worse, you choose, but more realistic propaganda please.

Tim Worstall