Batteries now make renewable energy a realistic option, so let’s start using them
There’s a growing consensus that batteries are going to play a central role in creating secure electricity supplies around the world.
Pioneers like Australia and Canada are already enjoying the advantages of large battery installations to stabilize the fluctuation of energy demand, leading to major savings, and are now being joined by the United States, which is building facilities such as the Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Solar Project, a huge plant with more than 1.9 million solar panels in the Mojave Desert linked to some 120,000 batteries capable of storing more than 3,280 MW of energy.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, the state had a storage capacity of 770 MW. At the end of April 2024, it announced that the figure had now passed 10,000 MW, enough to cover 20% of total demand. To reach the established goal of being powered entirely by renewable electricity by 2045, it has to reach 52,000 MW, a very reasonable goal considering that 5,660 MW were added to the electricity grid in 2023 alone.
Where is the challenge that makes this investment in storage necessary? Renewables can easily meet almost all of the grid’s energy demand during the day, but the problem, as we all know, is that the situation is very different at noon and…
