Forced energy storage is bad news

Are electric vehicles causing a 'battery energy storage fire'?

With the growing number of electric vehicles and batteries for energy storage on the grid, more high-profile fires have hit the news, like last year’s truck fire in LA, the spate of e-bike battery fires in New York City, or one at a French recycling plant last year. “Battery energy storage systems are complex machines,” Mulvaney says.

Is excessive energy storage a problem?

Spyros Foteinis highlights the acknowledged problem that an insufficient capacity to store energy can result in generated renewable energy being wasted (Nature 632, 29; 2024). But the risks for power-system security of the converse problem — excessive energy storage — have been mostly overlooked.

Is excessive energy storage a threat to China's power system?

But the risks for power-system security of the converse problem — excessive energy storage — have been mostly overlooked. China plans to install up to 180 million kilowatts of pumped-storage hydropower capacity by 2030. This is around 3.5 times the current capacity, and equivalent to 8 power plants the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam.

Did New York's grid battery storage facilities catch fire?

And yet, between May and July 2023, New York had had three large fires at the grid battery storage facilities built up to that time: On May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire.

Why is energy storage oversupply a problem?

The expansion is driven mainly by local governments and lacks coordination with new energy stations and the power grid. In some regions, a considerable storage oversupply could lead to conflicts in power-dispatch strategies across timescales and jurisdictions, increasing the risk of system instability and large-scale blackouts.

How much energy storage has been built so far?

The amount of energy storage built so far is stated as 13,391 MW. Of course, they use the wrong units. These people are completely innumerate. However, we know that they are talking about 4-hour lithium-ion batteries, so multiply by 4 and divide by 1000 to get 53.564 GWh of storage built so far.