alt Hacker NewsWe started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
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I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much?
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
Thanks for the [1] link, I hadn't seen that before.