Having a sink and a source for spikes aids grid stability and somewhat helps to reduce the need to build more infrastructure to handle transmitting power from the generators during those peaks.
It also helps avoid the viability of gas powered generators which are very expensive and carbon intensive.
When you couple a large battery with a diesel generator the generator turns off when the battery is full so the generator always run at optimal efficiency.
We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.
It's kind of crazy how much money you can save by shrinking your peak demand during the time of day it's most expensive.
(From a guy who got burned buying stock in a centrifugal system as my first "wicked smaht" investment as a 22yo).
My understanding is that batteries are demonstrating longer useful lifetimes than was anticipated.
Ultimately I think diversity in technologies is the best policy, but difficult to set up the incentives to achieve it.
Please update priors to current state of the art.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50176
- The most common cited use case for batteries is frequency response. Frequency response is a service that maintains grid frequency as close to 60 hertz (Hz) as reasonably possible. Deviations below 60 Hz can lead to protective generator trips that result in a subsequent decline in system stability. Batteries are particularly well suited for frequency regulation because their output does not require any startup time and batteries can quickly absorb surges. At the end of 2020, 885 MW of battery storage capacity (59% of total utility-scale battery capacity) cited frequency response as a use case.
[2] Smith, J. et al. "Lithium - ion battery degradation mechanisms and mitigation strategies for utility - scale energy storage". Journal of Energy Storage, 2020.
[3] Brown, A. "Lead - acid battery performance and lifespan in utility - scale applications". Power Systems Research, 2018.
[4] Green, C. et al. "Flow batteries for long - term utility - scale energy storage: A review". Energy and Environmental Science, 2019.
Because we both know that gas generators also require a production step... arguably one that's quite a bit more complex than a battery, at ~$1,000,000/MW of installation costs. And that installation of that complex is going to be very carbon intensive (even the concrete foundation alone...).
And then on top the plant actively burns hydrocarbons for the entirety of its existence.
So fill me in here - what is the exact argument you are trying to make with this?
thats the only argument these people make
To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.
China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.
And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.
The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.
In thermal electricity plants it takes a lot longer to go from cold & dark to generating electricity with coal than with either Combined-Cycle gas or especially the Open-Cycle "peaker" gas plants. Both types of gas plant also AIUI have a lot better ability to "throttle" their power output.
This means if you have a bunch of CCGT like Britain, you can use those directly to "top-up" the power from your fleet of solar PV and wind turbines, whether that's 1GW of top-up or 20GW of top-up. The change from weather (sun goes down, wind picks up, clouds appear, etc.) is relatively slow compared to what a gas plant can do, whereas it's too fast for coal to keep up as I understand it.
Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.
On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.
It all makes sense.
That might be understating the issue. The excavators we use to dig coal have been, and are monstrous. Thousand ton beasts requiring a fleet of support vehicles around them and the ever increasing depth of overburden.
Also the fly ash leftovers tend to get piled up and occasionally break lose in human and ecological disasters at massive scales.
There has been an uptick in coal this year to replace oil imports, which have fallen off a cliff because of the Iran war [2]. The real story of 2026 is how China essentially saved the world economy by doing this [3].
China is dependent on oil and gas imports but clearly sees the writing on the wall. All of these projects are an effort to wean themselves off of oil. So is a lot of domestic policy like the electrification of vehicles. This has had a global impact, reducing global oil demand by almost 2% in the last 5 years [4].
I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.
[1]: https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-tre...
[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/crude-oil-imports
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/china-crude-oil-iran-hormuz-...
[4]: https://www.intellinews.com/china-led-ev-boom-cuts-global-oi...
Because spinning a coal plant up or down is slower, the batteries let you make the gradient more gentle.
Suppose Alice's gas plant can go from 100MW output to zero in ten minutes. So if Sam's solar farm goes from zero to 100MW over ten minutes in early morning Alice's plant can mirror, between them Alice and Sam produce 100MW of power smoothly. Obviously real life is more complicated but this gets the point across
Now, Charlie owns a coal power plant, it can ramp from 100MW to zero, but it takes about an hour. This doesn't directly mirror the solar farm, Charlie and Sam can't really just work together to smoothly produce the same power
Bill's 100MWh BESS fixes this. An hour before the sun comes up, Charlie's coal plant begins shutting down, Bill's BESS puts out 100MW while consuming the gradually reducing coal power output and some of the gradually increasing additional power from the solar farm as that increases.
China is the world's 4th largest oil & gas producer. They're dependent on imports because they're the 2nd largest importer. However, they are simultaneously increasing production and decreasing consumption. Those two lines will cross some day. It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.
Why? Would China just try to start a global war? If it's about Taiwan, I'm not sure that USA would care like 5 years ago. USA will probably do the same with South America
They will, in the next five years (at current renewables and battery storage deployment rates [60% of their energy currently comes from renewables, and this increases 10% YoY]), become a low carbon (hard to say net zero yet) electrostate [3] that will continue to scale manufacturing clean tech for the world [4] with minimal carbon footprint.
It cannot be overstated how fast they are going.
[1] China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343 (citations)
- "As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable," Yang said. China added a record amount of new battery storage facilities in 2025, ending the year with more than half of global capacity. Growth has continued this year, with installed lithium-ion battery storage reaching almost 150 gigawatts by the end of the first quarter, according to Ember. The country is targeting 300 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2030, up from 136 at the end of 2025, in addition to expanding its fleet of longer-duration pumped hydro storage to around 160 gigawatts from 66.
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=china+electrostate
[4] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
Nuclear power in China peaked around 2021 at ~5% of the total electricity mix. I don’t think it’s a factor.
China likes renewable and batteries because it’s the cheapest way to generate power. It’s cheaper to build solar plus battery storage, than building new coal plants.
One reason for this is that for a lot of grid-support functions, instantaneous or short-term power is vastly more important than long-term energy capacity. The other reason is that traditional generation is only sized by MW; you just keep pouring fuel into it forever, so the notion of MWh doesn't even enter the picture. They're not even thinking in those terms.
You and I, as battery natives, think about it the other way around. But we're not grid operators.
If these batteries had 10x the storage capacity, but 1/10th the power output, they'd miss out on their biggest advantage, which is capturing mid-day solar oversupply, and providing virtual grid inertia.
Long duration, lower-power batteries will have an important role to play once grids get further along in renewable adoption, but for now, short duration power-supply is the main value they add, and it makes perfect sense to quote battery numbers in terms of power. (not that I'd complain about providing capacity numbers too)
Grid capacity both locally and at the transmission level is still the biggest factor when it comes to site viability though. You can't back feed a municipal water system by connecting a fire hose to a random house's hose spigot.
Regardless, battery sites are becoming a big thing in long term RE investing because being able to have this site plan developed under favorable rules while all the other rules only ever get worse makes these sites potentially hugely valuable when the batteries are gone in decades.
I think Google's first offshore purchase was 92 MW from the Norther wind farm in Belgium. TSMC will buy all the power from Ørsted's 920 MW Greater Changhua 2b & 4 offshore wind farm for the next 20 years.
There are examples in Germany but mainly for chemical and steel factories.
The best way to “force them” is a global emissions trading system + carbon levy. But his might be very unlikely in the next 10–15 years and maybe as complex as Peace in the Middle East.
Bloom fuel cells are a plausible alternative, but they are in the process of building out their manufacturing capacity, and operating experience at data center scale hasn't been tested. Bloom's process also involves extremely high temperatures, which could result in uptime and maintenance issues.
I would say you end up with battery+solar and gas turbine/gensets providing power when solar+batteries cant fill the gap. Its a bit expensive to be adding so many different sources on site to shore up power supply.
FWIW obvious maintenance work required to keep turbines going.
But why is the utilization rate so low? It was barely 0.8% of electricity in California last year.
Edit: Got the answer, the batteries fire up around 6pm during the evening peak at around 9GW for ~25% of the total consumption. We would need approximately 5x more batteries and renewable power to move out of carbon-intensive production entirely.
But they don't shine in that sustained discharge use case. They are most useful for helping manage small fluctuations, and for time shifting energy to the daily peaks.
So I just think utilization is a less useful way to think about battery storage. Unless you're comparing them to gas peakers specifically. (That is, separating out the peakers from base load gas.)
If you want to see the batteries at work look at an hourly graph and you can see it charging and discharging during the day.
recall batteries do not generate electricity, they store it for when it is needed most.
California has reached 45% of its 2045 battery storage target.
- California has built one of the largest battery storage fleets in the world. Battery storage capacity has grown from less than 700 megawatts (MW) at the beginning of 2019 to more than 23,000 MW by mid-2026. This rapid growth is helping transform how the grid operates by reducing reliance on fossil fuel generation, increasing grid flexibility and reliability, and supporting the integration of renewable energy resources.
To note, they added ~22GW of storage in ~6 years. Will it take until 2045 to reach their 52GW target and surpass it? or will they surpass their target ~10-15 years early?
https://www.interconnection.fyi/?market=CAISO&status=All&typ...
As of this comment, there are ~1,100 requests to add battery storage to the CAISO grid, totalling ~287.75 GW of capacity. Most of this will not get built, but enough of it will. The above link and constraint does not include solar/battery hybrid projects in the CAISO queue.
Horizontally they need plenty of room for airflow, as each container has some HVAC-or-whatever module on the side. But vertically...
That would be a lot harder if you stack them since heat likes to rise.
But no clue if that is the actual reason.
It'd just be impressive to see a giant wall of battery. A bunch of little batteries camping in a field doesn't play the same visually. Ah well.
Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.
So, this adds over two minutes of average usage.
https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou... says total storage now is about 200 GWh, or about 25 minutes of average demand.
That sounds so impressive.
In practical terms, you would most probably get nothing, because situation like this would lead to complete grid breakdown and interruption of service.
But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.
This might or might not be true. I used to live near a large plant that took HVDC from a power plant several states away and transformed it into AC. They used electronics to provide the grid frequency, not spinning metal. All the other local peak power generation was run in grid following mode.
The RoCoF (rate of change of frequency) must be low enough that the inverters can form the grid without letting out the magical smoke. Having inertia is what slows this rate down.
"How much is needed during a no sun and no wind period" could be reasonable comparison.
There are big factories in both Michigan and Kentucky Ford operates it just took over from Blueoval SK.
They retooled Ford plants are now making grid batteries instead of car batteries is my understanding.
Tesla also has battery factories in the USA as well as a lithium refinery.
Batteries are complex but less complex than semiconductors. They are rapidly dropping in cost too.
And a side effect of the EV market getting hobbled also redirected battery factory capacity from that market.
I'm not sure what's online yet but there is a pipeline.
edit an estimate from earlier this year:
> By the end of 2025, 20 gigawatt-hours of dedicated storage cell lines had opened, and the industry is on pace to hit 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year.
Put your circuits in the sea
This is what the world is for
Making electricity"
Space-Tesla installed 3 GWh in 2026 alone.
Kudos to you for bein' "that guy". So many folks sit and comment while having the world's biggest library of information on just about every topic right there at their fingertips and still can't be bothered to take the 30 seconds to look up something they don't know about on their favorite search engine. I appreciate you for havin' done "the right thing" here. :)
- The utility-scale market continued underpin growth, with 18 GWh installed, largely supported by seven gigawatt scale projects. Arizona installed over 6.2 GWh of utility scale projects, the largest quarterly deployment for any state in history.
- In the BTM space, residential storage added 657 MWh and commercial and industrial (C&I) added 1.8 GWh, largely on the back of demand from data centers.
⇒ it includes data centers
Geothermal and water.
If than there is still some oil/gas we need to burn and haven't build long DC lines between sunny area and non sunny, its perhaps fine or we start that much that we just generate methan
Everything using batteries will benefit from it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/16/chinas-batteries-move-b...
There's still a very long way to go !
For example, if you look at the energy production across PJM from two days ago: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:hiovtnl...
(Using that b/c I run the bot and it's data I'm very familiar with. You can see similar patterns in CAISO but they've already got so much solar it's a little more messy/duck-curved by all of the behind-the-meter solar.)
You can see hydro coming online from roughly 16:00 - 23:00. There's still a big gas peak that we'd need a lot of storage to shave, and you're right that it's a long way to go before we do that, but it's not quite as bad as "we need enough battery to satisfy 100% peak demand".
But, like with UPS, 96 seconds is ample time to let delicate systems glide to a standstill or to start the diesel generator.
That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.
Which is why nobody even attempts this.
The existing batteries in Texas and California have already delivered a coulee-dam-year (21TWh) so far in 2026.
Is this real or are we living in a Factorio livestream?