Saturday, November 23, 2024

How much battery power is there in 2030?

 This post here estimated there would be about 16.5GWh of Grid scale batteries power in ireland in 2030.   an actual expert said 13.5GWh. Eirgrid estimate 3.4GWh and SEAI 1.7GWh.

But apart from Grid scale batteries what other ones will we have?

Grid scale solar and domestic solar are about equal. There might be a similar relationship between Domestic and grid scale batteries. In 2019 in the UK 10,000 homes had domestic storage batteries. And those batteries seemed to be about 5KWh on average. They have gone up since. that would be 50MWh. This is tiny compared to the amount of grid scale energy at the timeI do not think currently domestic batteries make up a big proportion of total batteries. I could be wrong on this but that is what the data I see at the moment says. 

One place we do have a lot of batteries is in Electric cars. 73000 Electric cars registered in Ireland each with an average 40 kWh battery. Which is a total of just under 3GWh of batteries. That is over 3 times the amount in grid storage systems.


'Under the Climate Action Plan, the Government initially set a target of having 175,000 electric passenger cars on the road by the end of 2025 which would increase to 845,000 by the end of 2030.' That would be 34GWh of batteries in cars. And given that EV battery capacity keep going up, Range doubles every 7 years  that could be nearly doubled by then. Even if they do not go from 40KWh to 80KWh, 60KWh is pretty standard and probably will be average by then.







70GWh of electric batteries driving around involves us meeting our agreements and increased capacity trends continuing. It would be a huge amount of power 16.5GWh grid + 70GWh EV is a big chunk of a days worth of current electricity usage.

There is a problems getting that much energy into cars in 5 years time. If you could get the electricity out for the owner when it was needed it that would really help but that is not currently practical. I can imagine houses filling up EV batteries in cheap renewables and running their house off the EV batteries. Though this is not practical yet renewable and EV trends mean it would be cheap so there is incentive to make it work. Cars are used slightly under an hour a day on average. Which means 23 hours a day the battery could be used to help the grid.

The average house uses about 12KWh a day. Say 20KWh to include heating with electricity not gas. If you have a battery of 80KWh that could hold 3 days of that power and do the usual short Irish commute (17km) a few days a week. There is a big incentive to charge the battery on windy or sunny times and then use the car battery for the house at peak expensive electricity times.

In a few years based on current trends and agreements Ireland could have a huge amount of its daily energy needs storable in battery form. 

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