I mean, CATL seem pretty confident, and they make more batteries than you by quite a large margin, including LFP. They don't have a habit of making bold public claims that then fall flat on their arse, so it seems unlikely that they will have done here, either. And they claim a bunch of advantages for Naxtra over LFP, including lifecycle, temperature tolerance, deep discharge tolerance, and safety. Of course, we will all wait for the first units to appear in production cars before reaching a firm conclusion, but I think you're giving them too little credit.

There's a good explanation of what CATL's claiming for its Na batteries here.

https://www.batterytechonline....

I find it interesting that one key use case may be replacing lead acid starter batteries for trucks. The power requirements for truck starter batteries have eased slightly over the years with things like assisted-start sequences, to the point where sodium can meet the need (although lithium would struggle). And sodium will outperform lead for cold start, deep discharge and lifetime.

We can certainly hope so. I am skeptical not least because the founder appears to be a bit of an oddball prone to grandiose claims, but they did make an actual hub motor, and I watched an interesting video that did a great job of unearthing a lot of information to see whether the claims might possibly be plausible and found that it was indeed possible they've done it.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Having seen some of the comments, I'm now truly firmly of the belief that the only valid method of doing this calculation is to calculate power generated per year and divide that by average annual household consumption. That takes account of capacity factor on the one hand, and peaks and troughs in demand on the other.

The peak figure is important for peaker plants, where the question is one of capacity adequacy, but this is not that project, and the question is one of scale of net new generation.

Your scenario makes sense for an isolated system, where there were a bunch of homes whose electricity was exclusively supplied by this single wind farm. But obviously, that's not the case: it's part of a system of heterogenous supply, so this is just a theoretical and indicative calculation the operator or media have used to give people a sense of the scale of this project compared to others / the scale of the US as a whole. And that's where I'm puzzled, I can't see how they got to their indicative figure.

Personally, as I mentioned above, I think the best thing to do is to talk about expected annual power generation vs annual power demand per average US household, to communicate the scale of this. That accounts for peaks and troughs in both supply and demand.

But actually my main takeaway from this is that the US uses a gargantuan amount of electricity compared to the rest of the world, even other developed countries. The UK, for example, has an average of 2,700 kWh, just *one quarter* of what the average US household consumes. Crazy stuff.

That is very true

You can drive any Canadian car into the US for up to a year without permanent importation requirements kicking in. Same for Mexico, where Chinese cars have been on sale for ages and make up 20% of the new car market.

I’m curious about how this 660,000 figure was calculated. 2.6GW would be just about 4kW of capacity per home for 660,000 homes. But these calculations are normally done on the basis of sustained annual average draw. For the US, that is more like 1.2 to 1.5kW, a truly insane number (the UK average is 0.4, ie 400W, and in China it’s more like 2 to 300W). But even at 1.5kW, that wind farm could deliver enough capacity for 1.7m homes, not 660k.

I think, for some dumb reasons the calculation is being done off the average peak load. But that is more like 5kW than 4kW, so that figure is wrong.

It would really make more sense to do the calculation on the basis of expected annual generation divided by annual average US household consumption, which heads off all the nonsense about nameplate capacity. That would be 9.5bn kWh divided by 10,800kWh, so about 880,000 homes.

London buses are much better than US buses. But that's because London invests in buses and bus infrastructure, so they're well used by people from all walks of life. And the US, by and large, does not. So it's a matter of policy choice.

It’s pretty cool!

It’s quite a big issue, yes.

This article is a couple of years old, but captures the main issues accurately.
https://www.politico.eu/articl...

You may think buses suck, but lots of people disagree with you. Including me. I think buses are great! The 13 and the 113 and the SuperLoop near me are all fantastic. Quiet, comfortable, easy to use. I have a car, but living in London, it’s easiest to be multi-modal.

Done right, storage lets you defer some of your grid upgrades for transport, though. And storage is cheaper and generally less politicised.

Yes, there’s a price signal. But the UK grid operator is a regulated natural monopoly, so it is under no existential threat from passing on rising costs of operation like curtailment to its customers. There’s regulatory and other pressure, but that’s not a full substitute for market discipline, and indeed the UK grid operator has not exactly been pulling its finger out to dramatically increase storage and connectivity. We have a congested grid and the plan for relief is insipid. And people end up picking up the bill, and it’s causing blowback because propagandists are saying it’s all because of renewables.

There are some real advantages to colocation, and I shouldn’t have put my question so rhetorically. But there are downsides too. A few mentioned below by stripes. Generally, the challenges of grids are felt most keenly near where there’s high demand / load, so if you put batteries there rather than at the seaside, you get to defer expensive grid upgrades, and you get voltage stabilisation etc where it’s needed. Seaside sites are typically quite constrained, too — there are more degrees of freedom inland. You avoid asset clustering which creates system risk, and you get to distribute your storage more evenly around the country, creating resilience.