The Way We Get Power Is About to Change Forever
The age of batteries is just getting started. In the latest episode of our animated series, Sooner Than You Think, Bloomberg's Tom Randall does the math on when solar plus batteries might...
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There’s a cloud looming over the future of clean energy.It’s called curtailment, and it’s the biggest obstacle to weaning the world off fossil fuels.Curtailment actually happens when we produce too much wind or solar powerat certain times of the day and we have to just — shut it down.But what if we sent that extra electricity into giant batteries,to use when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing?That day just might be coming sooner than you think.The easiest way to curtail curtailment would be a massive explosion of energy storage. Ideally: batteries.There’s just one problem. Batteries are still way too expensive.Take a place like Texas. A quarter of the electricity from the Lone Star state comes from wind.When the wind dies down, Texans just fire up a nat...
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There’s a cloud looming over the future of clean energy.It’s called curtailment, and it’s the biggest obstacle to weaning the world off fossil fuels.Curtailment actually happens when we produce too much wind or solar powerat certain times of the day and we have to just — shut it down.But what if we sent that extra electricity into giant batteries,to use when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing?That day just might be coming sooner than you think.The easiest way to curtail curtailment would be a massive explosion of energy storage. Ideally: batteries.There’s just one problem. Batteries are still way too expensive.Take a place like Texas. A quarter of the electricity from the Lone Star state comes from wind.When the wind dies down, Texans just fire up a nat...
