My take it is an attack tactic to convince the public that alternatives are not necessary, or the challenges don't exist. It serves to get commitment and action from people, and when/if they figure out they have been duped, they have no choice but to double down.

The source for this stuff is the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). I guess politics so it looks like they are doing something?

wikipedia:

>The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating energy information to promote sound policymaking

I think they could be doing a better job in the above.

(source article https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025&utm_so...)

> The ISOs managing grids cares about the GWs and expects batteries to optimize their utilization to create the largest value for the grid enabling them to balance supply and demand. Like how they expect coal plants to manage the size of their coal pile without having to be told how to do it.

What you're saying is that the ISOs care about how they can much peaker capacity these batteries can replace. That makes "Nuclear plants" an interesting metric for comparison doesn't it?

Ultimately, the important measure is how many tons of CO2 these batteries can prevent from being put into the atmosphere by gas peaker plants, which are their direct competitors. Something that is actually perfectly illustrated by the graph you've posted. You can see the usage of gas and imports reducing as renewables rise while the nuclear line does what it does, stay constant. The purpose of the batteries is to reduce the gas and imports lines to what they are while the renewable lines are at their peaks.

No, it's not. The point of batteries is, typically, as a storage mechanism for renewables that doesn't have 100% uptime so, battery storage in itself doesn't have a defined GW used per day. The reason why I say it should be scaled to actual long term usage (preferably a calendar year) is that the capability of batteries to replace power plants is dependent on how much excess energy exists to charge them.

For example, a TW of battery capability isn't going to do you any good in a Canadian winter if it's paired with solar that gets a few hours of generation a day.

The comparison required to know how much fossil/nuclear generation these batteries are capable to replace is comparing the worst case scenario for the whole system, batteries and generation included. If the worst day for these batteries they discharge 2Gwh of power, they can only replace 2GW/24 of traditional power generation.

The nuclear comparison is a bit ironic to me as well because one of the things that the batteries are actually very capable of is replacing the "peaker" generation that's required by nuclear/hydro/geothermal generation since it's difficult to scale those responsively. A Solar/Wind/(Nuclear|Hydro|Geo) generation backed by significant battery capacity could completely replace the need for fossil fuels in the generation side and, as renewable production and battery capacity increase, you can drop the rods a bit lower and scale back your nuclear production until it's zero.

I see this article as clearly meant to refute the nuclear energy argument when, in practice, building battery capacity makes nuclear make more sense, not less.

Correct, that would be intuitive. However, it is not what is being done here. When reported in press releases, battery capacity is not divided by day. Peak possible GW is reported independent of duration. This obfuscates the fact that this can only be provided for 1 or two hours

> Nuclear power and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands.

Nuclear and renewables are very comparable in their (in)flexibility, that's a piece of info that's not really acknowledged by the Nuclear crowd, imo. However, that's not the only issue with renewables, they are also inconsistent.

Historically, the grid needed two things, a consistent power supply and a responsive power supply. Solar and wind are pretty bad options for both. The increase in usefulness of solar and wind aren't because they got better, it's because we added a third demand, carbon neutrality. We can also put price in there but I don't view price as an inflexible attribute as we can see with the cost of solar/wind plummeting as demand gave it the benefit of increased R&D and demand/production.

Our grid now needs to be consistent, responsive _and_ carbon neutral. Ignoring initial production costs (which is a can of worms I don't want to get into at the moment), Nuclear is consistent and carbon neutral and solar/wind are inconsistent and carbon neutral. Batteries are responsive and, given enough capacity of an inconsistent supply, are capable of being a consistent supply as well.

So if you want to satisfy the three requirements in a hypothetical scenario with modern technology, I think there's a fairly clear idea design which is a baseline capacity in geothermal and hydro where available supplemented by nuclear or, where those aren't available, nuclear alone, backed by batteries for flexibility with an ever increasing capacity of inflexible renewables and batteries. However, the grid we have today was built without the carbon neutral parameter so we went with the cheaper and "safer" (arguable by data but public perception matters here) options of fossil fuels over nuclear. Nuclear plants are now in the position of the adage of planting trees. The best time to build a nuclear plant was a 30 years ago, the second best time is now.

Given that the cost of nuclear (the reason it wasn't built 30 years ago) isn't associated with it's use as much as it is with it's safety, to me, the best investment would be in implementing safer Nuclear (which does exist) both in R&D and in existing technologies.

As a semi-side note, I find it incredibly frustrating how little investment in fusion research is talked about in this conversation. Nobody can give you a real answer on how far away it is so it's typically too risky for private investment which makes it a great candidate for government investment which is currently at a pitiful level despite a near universal recognition that it will be, at some point in the future, the obvious eventual outcome.