The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year (wired.com) 47
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill.
The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects.
In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects.
In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
Slashdot had a big duplicate story boom too (Score:1)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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Big Badda Boom
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Big Beautiful Battery Badda Boom.
The Beautiful Big Battery Boom (Score:3)
as someone would have called it if he thought he could have taken credit for it.
Re:The Beautiful Big Battery Boom (Score:5, Insightful)
Well Trump's all in on coal. so of course he needs to downplay how well solar wind and batteries are doing. plus it's Obama and sleepy Joes fault anyway.
So, when the nuclear people are all telling us how wind is more expensive because of the need for batteries, I'm always reminding them that actually it's Nuclear which can't cope with the variation in power needs and benefits very much from power storage. I'll avoid being a hypocrite and point out here also that batteries aren't just for renewables.
However, this is totally great news. Once power creation goes below a certain cost level it will be impossible to pay for transporting fossil fuels like oil and coal and make a profit from generating it. It will be impossible to pay for building huge, dangerous underground mines or shafts and digging out the fuels. Economies which have committed heavily to doing that and haven't found free alternatives which come to them instead, like the sun and the wind, possibly water and geothermal, will become stop being competitive for many things such as AI and creating steel.
Trump has given Europe a chance to come level with America which we can only hope Europe begins to underatand and take, but Trump is also giving China it's best chance to get ahead strategically and that's a really dangerous game as long as they remain hard aligned with Russia and authoritarianism. I really hope the US wakes up and realizes that AI is not the only game being played right now and you need to get ahead on distributed, fuel free (and free fuel) energy sources. The batteries will definitely help because they will always take from the cheapest sources available to them at any given time.
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Actually both are in the same group - non-dispatchable. That is, neither nuclear nor wind/solar can adapt to changing loads. But both do it in the opposite way.
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"Nuclear takes hours to ramp up and down, so you're always running it at less than current demand because demand has to be higher than what nuclear can provide ..."
As if that distinguishes nuclear over fossil fuel generation. All generators have to "ramp up and down" and nuclear COULD include capabilities that mitigate their relative slowness to respond. The difference here is response time, not any fundamental difference in generation. Nuclear reactors are steam generators, they only differ in how the s
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Nice bunch of lies you have there. Just to address the first: A regular steam generator (coal, gas, oil, solar) can idle with no warning. A nuke needs to SCRAM (and then needs week or months to come up again) because it cannot idle fast from higher power levels. It would blow up if you tried that.
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The correct term is virtual power plant [wikipedia.org].
Whether coal is dispatchable depends on your definition [visionofearth.org]. But it is not cost-effective to run nuclear below 100% power output, so in practice, nuclear reactors are always either running at full output or shut off for service. This is why France is forced t
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But it is not cost-effective to run nuclear below 100% power output, so in practice, nuclear reactors are always either running at full output or shut off for service. / But this will hopefully change with future reactor designs.
The biggest cost of nuclear is the capital expenditure in building the plant. The fuel cost is in fact a small part of the cost even of refueling. Furthermore, the hope of nuclear becoming cheaper looks unrealistic to me. Russia's willingness to attack nuclear plants in Ukraine and the failure of the IAEA to achieve anything in trying to stop them tells me that nuclear plants need to be built safer, possibly even resistant to nuclear attack, in future.
I wonder if dispatchable / load following nuclear power
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I know that the fossil fuel addicted power industry doesn't like to admit this, but I think you can see both wind and solar as more dispatchable than most fossil fuels.
so you want to run them above demand so if their output drops, they can still meet demand (you can curtail solar and wind output, but demand should never exceed what solar and wind can provide).
Exactly. The problem with the way you are putting this is that it sounds like a problem. If this was a fossil fuel plant and you had to keep it running above demand then you would be burning fuel that was wasted. However, there's nothing wrong with "burning" wind that won't be needed. Spin up your turbine blades to a nice cruising speed and t
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I think you can see both wind and solar as more dispatchable than most fossil fuels.
That's the dumbest thing I have read in a while. Do you really think solar works at night? Or wind works without wind?
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I think you can see both wind and solar as more dispatchable than most fossil fuels.
That's the dumbest thing I have read in a while. Do you really think solar works at night? Or wind works without wind?
Solar works on the other side of the planet at night. More importantly, whilst wind runs 24/7, Solar fills in the important times during the day when power demand is high. There is never no wind, it just moves elsewhere. The prevailing winds coming into the UK move up and down but, now that we have wind power coverage from Norway, through Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, Portugal and Marocco, all connected to one single grid, the wind is always blowing somewhere. What is especially impressive is that now
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That's even dumber. You really think we can run HVDC cables from one side of the planet to the other? That's insane. It's also a crazy waste of resources.
Hydro isn't solar or wind. You said solar and wind are more dispatchable.
Delusional
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That's even dumber
No, you just aren't bright enough to understand it.
Hydro isn't solar or wind. You said solar and wind are more dispatchable.
Delusional
More dispatchable than coal or especially nuclear? Sure.
Every power source has an envelope. A limit to what it can provide at a given time. When a nuclear plant undergoes refueling that limit is literally zero. In the night, a solar plant also has a limit of zero. During the day a nuclear plant can change it's output level perhaps 4 times by about 50% assuming that we have recently refueled it. If it's got old fuel, if it's already changed too often today,
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No, you just aren't bright enough to understand it.
Keep telling yourself that!
More dispatchable than coal or especially nuclear? Sure.
Delusional
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Funny how YOU do not know how a nuke works. Yes, you can follow the load. If you have a good prediction and only relatively small deviations from that. You cannot follow the load without those predictions or when they are to far off. What you then end up is needing to dump power in emergency mode. One reason France often gets negative payments for their power: They need to get rid of the power or they would have to do really bad things to their nukes. Look it up.
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France is full with load following bukes.
Germanies ran basically at 90% all the time.
Perhaps you are mixing up: following the load as in the big picture.
With: balancing the little fluctuations.
Both are not the same. The former nukes can do just fine, especially if they are build for it, and run accordingly, see France.
One reason France often gets negative payments for their power: They need to get rid of the power or they would have to do really bad things to their nukes. Look it up.
No, the reason is simply
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France is full with load following bukes. / Germanies ran basically at 90% all the time.
True but it has limits. To avoid accusations of bias or misinformation let me quote the actual nuclear propaganda [world-nuclear.org].
Le
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Nuclear generation isn't ready to deal with that.
That never was the point of discussion. For that you have balancing power plants.
I think you are really having a bit of a "violent agreement" here. Economics mean that nobody would sell electricity for a negative price if they could avoid it without losing other sales. EDF chooses to do that, though, because (using economics) they see an opportunity to more than make up for their loss by selling extra energy later when prices are back to positive. Their negat
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LOL, how nicely brainwashed you are. In actual, you know, real reality, having to "sell" off their energy at negative prices is something that happens much more frequently to renewables-rich places like Germany or (suprisingly) Texas.. (my emphasis)
Nice bit of sleight of hand there. Sure it happens in "renewables-rich" but only in so far as it is caused by their non-renewable energy sources. The only relation to renewables being when there's a specific purchase deal which gives a longer term stable supply price to small generators, typically in a transition phase when fossil fuel power plants have still not been removed from a grid.
The simple fact is that a renewable generator never accepts a negative price. All renewable generation systems are able t
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It needs to be added that supplying too much power is utterly disastrous. The only tech that has this problem is nuclear though. Hence nukes may need to SCRAM if there is too much power in a grid and nothing else that can reduce its power output fast enough. That is really bad as a SCRAM typically damages the nuke and that means weeks to months until it is available again. Not a resilient tech at all. The safe limit is apparently close to 70%. If you have more nuclear in a grid, it become unstable and the r
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Trump has given Europe a chance to come level with America which we can only hope Europe begins to underatand and take,
I am sorry, but we do not plan to go down on that level any time soon.
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Hahaha, yes. Levelling with the US would be a really bad idea, given how far behind they are. The one thing the US does much better than all of Europe is lying to their people about the reality of things
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Oh oh, the mods ran mad again :P
Re:The Beautiful Big Battery Boom (Score:4, Interesting)
What's missed here is that China installed more than that just in December, 65 gigawatt hours. They also installed more solar last year than the rest of the world combined, and opened more nuclear plants than the rest of the world has opened in all the years since the 1970s combined.
Expectations (Score:2)
With the discovery if gold, local residents are expecting a boom [youtube.com]...
Only makes sense... (Score:5, Informative)
I remember power stations were about the price of $2/watt for a while, and heavy, then stayed at $1/watt for maybe 5-7 years. Now, I'm seeing that drop to 50 cents per watt for name brands like Jackery.
This is a very good thing overall. Not just for powering small items when power is out, or on a trip, but there are a lot of cities that tack a fee on the time of day of power use, so if one charges a battery bank when those fees are not applied, and just used power from the battery from there, it can pay for the battery bank after a while. Done right, it means we don't need as much base load, with solar and wind handling everything in the daytime.
My next RV build, I'm definitely going to stick a few thousand watt-hours of batteries, with the ability to feed the battery bank via shore power, a generator, or maybe via a second alternator. This way, I can run the A/C regardless of state, being on the road, dry camping, or camping at a campground. If power sags, or is really dirty at a campground (perhaps low voltage when the class "A" big rigs come in with 5+ air conditioners up top), the lower voltage isn't going to burn out compressors, and is still usable for battery charging.
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"...it can pay for the battery bank after a while."
That "while" needs to be short, otherwise there is no financial benefit. When you are at a breakeven point, all you've done is paid someone else those same fees, then assumed the storage, maintenance and liability of additional equipment.
" Done right, it means we don't need as much base load, with solar and wind handling everything in the daytime."
Where "done right" means done FOR us, not BY us. That's the point of public utilities.
"My next RV build, I'm
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"A few thousand watt-hours" should definitely "run the A/C", hell that like several e-bikes worth! Hopefully no one else will suffer when your batteries explode.
Oh look, some bullshit from a know-nothing who has no experience.
Everyone is using LFPs in their RVs now, because they are cheap AF. The question is, why do you imagine the consumption of an e-bike is relevant to that of an air conditioner? Most of them run over 1000 watts, most e-bikes are around 250-400. If you knew anything about any of this you wouldn't have written your post at all.
Having centralized battery storage is cool, but you know what else is cool? Having power during an outage.
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I recommend brushing up on battery chemistry. LiFePO4 doesn't explode, and it can handle a lot of cycles.
This isn't a new setup. I have a co-worker who has exactly this, with a Victron 4000 watt inverter with two power inputs. His class "B" van kept his house powered up during a power outaged due to a fallen power line. I highly recommend looking at lithium battery chemistries. Not all of them go boom when you look at them funny.
In fact, people are saving money immediately. [theguardian.com]
As for public utilities, if l
Big Battery Boom ? (Score:2)
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That happens as well, but less and less often. And these installations are designed to deal with that with minimal damage. Since these batteries are stationary, other tech is also in use.
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You fell for a hallucination. Batteries can be charged and discharged several times per year! I guess "copilot" does not know that or you gave it a really stupid question.
Oh, and wind also blows in the night. Occasionally. And, here is the kicker: You can plan for nighttime! Shocking, I know.
Re: Clarity (Score:3)
Also, (58/1,300,000)*100 is 0.004%
Big batta-boom (Score:3)
Big Boom? (Score:2)
Some Math (Score:2)