Bottled In Bond?

California is full of old steam natural gas plants that can not cycle well with renewables. The California PUC seems to be blocking replacement of these with ccgt (that likely cost $1.3B/GW more than this article states) and California instead wants to build batteries. I am not against building batteries, but prevent potential black outs with more power plants in the next few years, then build the batteries, or fuel cell, or compressed air storage as the price goes down. 4 GW of new ccgt would be about $5.2B and if the grid ran those in place of less efficient gas would save 1/3 of the fuel. It likely will cost at least $3B for these batteries. The bay bridge construction is about 5x over budget. It doesn't make much sense when you look at the payback of these batteries.
Green Car Congress: Stanford study quantifies energetic costs of grid-scale energy storage over time; current batteries the worst performers; the need to improve cycle life by 3-10x

If they build 1.3 GW of batteries instead of 4GW of fast cycling natural gas, they likely will use more fossil fuel and spend more money. They could do both, and wait for battery improvements before committing to put in so big of a buffer.

 

Jeez . . . Is it me? ... or is this article as poorly written as humanly possible:

1.3 gig's ??? What does that mean ... 1.3gig's ... a second? ... per hour? it'd be nice if it's not a guess. Power for a million homes? for how long!! 100 years? Oh ... I'll just guess. It'd be nice if the numbers were more specific.
.

 

Just instantaneous power, we can only guess at energy from other battery grid systems. Many of these are sized around 1:1 MW:MWH, so my best guess is around 1.3GWh for the 1.3GW battery, but it may be bigger.

Duke Energy just went live last December with a 36 MW (24MWH) battery at one of its wind farms in west texas. We should know in about a year how well it does. It cost about $44M, half from the DOE to test the concept. I would guess that it runs on average of less than 1 hour per day.