-1 for using the wrong physical units. It’s Watt-seconds, if you’re wondering. 
But you also didn’t put it in perspective. It’s 2.5 (2.8 actually) seconds to power the entire state, but again assuming that power generation and draw is constant, which it isn’t. It might be enough to power some small nearby community for the whole night.
The physical unit of energy is the joule J. The watt is a derived unit of power equivalent to 1 J per second.
We can simplify the calculation by looking at the CALISO website. It says the CA power grid is now delivering about 39 GW.
The California population is 39 million people so the grid is delivering 1 kiloWatt per person.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day so the grid delivers about 10^8 J per day per person.
The battery of the article stores 25 Megawatt hours. With 3600 seconds in an hour that is about 10^11 J.
The bottom line is that the battery in the article can store the energy required by 10^11/10^8=1000 people for one day.
I suppose you can call that a small town.
Energy requirements are lower at night than during the day, also a lot of the energy is used for industrial purposes. My house uses < 0.3kW at night (< 2.4kWh over 8 hours), so I was guesstimating a small town of 10000 homes like mine.
Also may be important to note that it’s every day, not just “one day”.
Dude, that’s a city.
It’s just one day, unless they’re recharged. Those batteries cannot keep providing that amount of electricity day after day indefinitely.
According to the photos they were placed next to a huge solar panel installation, presumably to be recharged while the sun shines. 25 MWh is not the annual output, it’s the storage capacity.
That’d require also presuming the power being produced by solar panels is excess and isnt already being used during the day. Is there any indication that solar panel installation was built to recharge batteries, and wasnt already there before the batteries, powering the grid?
The point is that a fully charged battery can only provide it’s max output once. Beyond that, it’s only redistributing the existing power supply.
It would be pretty stupid to install all these batteries if they couldn’t be regularly recharged. I’m just giving this company the benefit of the doubt.
Well…yeah? This is about the batteries having enough juice to power a town every day. That simply cannot happen for more than one day, without those batteries first drawing one day’s worth of power away from that town to recharge. You arent giving the benefit of the doubt, you are assuming there is a day’s worth of excess power kicking around on the grid every day.
To follow that logic, it can power the entire moon for a millennium.
It makes no difference to me. I stand by my moon projection.
I always said 'er thought 'er might have thought you were very generous. 
Vanguard is no longer drinking the Climate Koolaid.
“We cannot state that [environmental, social and governance] investing is better performance wise than broad index-based investing,” said Buckley. “Ourresearch indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.”
Every night. That could certainly happen if there’s excess generation during the day.
No, I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to this business. There’d be little point in installing all these batteries next to the solar plant if that plant wasn’t generating enough excess power to recharge the batteries.
Now you are qualifying things with ifs and buts. The comment was that those batteries could provide enought electricity to power a small town for one day. You claimed it was every day.
I’m not qualifying anything with any ifs and buts. Here’s my actual comment in its entirety. The words “every day” mean every calendar day or 24 hours, since it should be clear I was talking about using the batteries at night.
What part of “every day” means “only at night”?
And you literally added an “if”:
You’re just picking at words without paying attention to the context.
The context is that this battery installation has enough electricity to power a small town for one day. You then tried to claim it can do so every day, which is impossible since after one day it needs to draw as much power off the grid as it can provide to the grid.
The context is that it can store enough energy to power a small town through the night. It is located next to a solar array, presumably because (giving the benefit of the doubt to the business that created the battery storage) the solar array can produce enough energy to charge the batteries every day.
It doesn’t matter that it takes just as much energy to charge the batteries. What matters is what has been brought up in this thread multiple times – solar panels only work when the sun shines. So we need extra panels and batteries to make the solar+battery provide energy when the sun does not shine.
That does not reconcile with
It reconciles with:
Which was a response to
And by the your own choice of words, it might not.
