alt Hacker Newsnaw, we'll just build enough battery to cover the nights and then use gas as emergency backup for any rare wonky weather events. that could easily get us to 90+% clean, which would be absolutely amazing. Constant base load only supply like nukes are economically obsolete. On a modern grid you need a rapid response backup. Which is gas for now, and hopefully we'll come up with something to replace that later.
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Manuel_D • yesterday at 11:35 PM
Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh. Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage.
Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
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As you have been reminded of in other comments, there is no "enough battery backup". These weather events aren't exactly rare either. Germany for example has on average multiple episodes of both subnormal wind and sun energy production in high-pressure systems.