thomastu

Not a response to this comment's author but, I'm always apprehensive that other people read comments like this without the context or history of how cleantech has actually developed and internalize these overly reductive views which make us think our political system is less flexible than it really is, or that past actions are somehow divorced from what progress we do have.

> ... because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative ...

The wind, solar and ess manufacturers got down the learning curve largely because of industrial energy + market transformation policy. You can literally see wind installations just go to near zero whenever the PTC doesn't renew in annual installations numbers. It's great that these technologies have matured and are now the least cost resource (in some models, new solar + storage even outcompetes existing natural gas which is very exciting), but market development is a public/private partnership. I can't see what good it does to talk in broad unfounded aspersions.

Depends on who you are talking to. Battery engineers tend to talk about capacity as storage potential (energy). The rest of the energy industry (resource planners, developers, manufacturers, etc.) talk about capacity in power terms (instantaneous discharge.)

When you see people talking about Lithium-based chemistries, you'll often only see power terms because they are almost always for 2-hr projects. Nowadays you'll see more differentiation between 2-hr/4-hr/6-hr storage (and a few interesting companies doing 100-hr+).

Unpacking the headline - A 600MW project of 4-hr lithium is 2.4GWh of storage capacity. The capacity rating of this project is 600MW, the storage capacity (2.4GWh) is an ESS specific attribute.

Another important dimension to capacity is how much accredited capacity your project has. Usually projects are only given credit based on some set of historic averages of how much system load the asset actually serves (e.g. if you for some reason had a battery could only discharge at high noon every day, 200GW of this resource would in a sane world have an accredited capacity of near 0 because it's completely coincident with existing solar.)

There's a very expensive process for resource planning the electrical grid that is highly modeling dependent. Most electricity grids are planned with a least cost expansion modeling approach. A small number of incumbent vendors provide expensive closed source tools to do this. There are quite a few open tools in this space, but open energy transition is building consensus around pypsa and pypsa-eur as equivalent top of class models (better in a lot of ways) to use for various IRPs.

those are average rates, not actual retail rate schedules - useful for talking about something like an annual consumption number but not so much for something like net metering where the time of use is a big deal.