Anybody up for rate increases?
The amount of batteries is somewhat unclear. The Bill specifies that 5,000 Megawatts (MW) of batteries be bought but this is the discharge capacity, that is how fast the batteries can be emptied. The storage capacity is what counts and that is measured in Megawatt-hours (MWh). Specifying MW is like buying juice based on how fast it pours not how much the bottle holds…
Almost all grid scale battery systems these days are four hour duration so for simplicity we will start by assuming the whole 5,000 MW buy is four hour batteries.
This gives 20,000 MWh of storage. Battery systems today run around $500,000 per MWh. That gives a total cost of $10,000,000,000 or ten billion dollars which equals roughly 17% of the current state budget. If 10 hour batteries are purchased the cost jumps to $25,000,000,000 or twenty-five billion dollars. The Bill actually calls for a good bit of longer duration batteries as well which makes the cost even higher.
DB2
