How often do you think it would need to supply a whole state? Australian states are massive.
I’m in NSW, and from memory, I can think of a few power outages that took down a few tens of thousands of homes for a few days. Most are much smaller. That’s in a state with a couple of million homes. So at most a few percent of the state. So even in a worst case scenario maybe you still get a day at full power. If you ration it out to essential services, then a lot longer.
This is all ignoring the fact that most outages are grid related, not generation related, which means that nuclear would be of no help, but a somewhat distributed battery backup system could be massively useful.
This was built entirely in 16 months, from groundbreaking to connection to the grid. For the cost of a single nuclear reactor you can build 30 of these. And opposed to nuclear technology batteries are still making remarkable progress in their affordability.
Edit: Btw the battery also uses below 0,5% of the area of a usual nuclear plant.
This one?
If so it would supply just New South Wales for only 20 minutes. Hardly seems to be on the verge of solving grid scale storage.
How often do you think it would need to supply a whole state? Australian states are massive.
I’m in NSW, and from memory, I can think of a few power outages that took down a few tens of thousands of homes for a few days. Most are much smaller. That’s in a state with a couple of million homes. So at most a few percent of the state. So even in a worst case scenario maybe you still get a day at full power. If you ration it out to essential services, then a lot longer.
This is all ignoring the fact that most outages are grid related, not generation related, which means that nuclear would be of no help, but a somewhat distributed battery backup system could be massively useful.
Now to the word “emerging”
This was built entirely in 16 months, from groundbreaking to connection to the grid. For the cost of a single nuclear reactor you can build 30 of these. And opposed to nuclear technology batteries are still making remarkable progress in their affordability.
Edit: Btw the battery also uses below 0,5% of the area of a usual nuclear plant.