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KaiserPro 12 hours ago [-]
2.4 gwhr is a monster of a battery.
For reference the UK has about 7gw output of battery (assuming all on at the same time. I don;t have the capacity though.) The UK is one of the more mature grid battery places in europe.
kieranmaine 10 hours ago [-]
The UK has some mammooth projects in the pipeline as part of the Long Duration Energy Storage Cap-and-Floor scheme [1].
There's a 200MW/3,600MWh project which has planning permission and also a 400MW/7,200MWh proposal [2].
There's so much domestic rooftop solar going to waste that it makes economic sense for these giant batteries to soak it up and sell it at night or during peak events. Love to see it.
gwlthr 9 hours ago [-]
Poland is an interesting market for BESS right now because it's still early days. The aFRR capacity market is mostly served by coal units, and only a few hundred MW of newly operational batteries are bidding against them. PSE buys roughly 400-500 MW of aFRR in each direction, so with several GW of batteries contracted in the capacity market for 2027-2030, reserve prices are likely to fall hard within a year or two. After that it becomes a market channel optimisation problem like in GB or Germany, which is a super interesting area to work in, IMO.
msalsas 13 hours ago [-]
Greenvolt Group has started construction of a 600 MW/2.4 GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Poland, with commercial operations targeted for the end of 2027.
toomuchtodo 13 hours ago [-]
Huge, this helps wean Poland off of coal.
varispeed 13 hours ago [-]
and industry
dalyons 9 hours ago [-]
batteries allow cheaper energy costs. How does that hurt industry
toomuchtodo 12 hours ago [-]
Industry can electrify or sunset. “Work is hard.” The energy potential is well above the demand curve, just have to build the orchestration infrastructure (low carbon generation, batteries, transmission, district heating, flexible load demand response, etc). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in thirty minutes to power humanity for a year, the inability to harness this potential energy is the problem being solved for. It's easy to go faster: simply direct fossil fuel capital and subsidies to the technologies I enumerate above. To not go faster is a choice. We could make different choices.
(Poland is expected to add 3-4GW of solar per year, and has hundreds of GWs of combined wind [onshore and offshore] and solar PV potential)
usrnm 11 hours ago [-]
> Industry can electrify or sunset
The much more realistic third option is just moving somewhere else
toomuchtodo 11 hours ago [-]
Tariffs to equalize if needed until electrification is complete. China is electrifying the fastest with low carbon generation. Other countries should try to keep up. Renewables and batteries are the cheapest form of firm generation in 90%+ of the world. That’s a competitive advantage. Why would you move industry to where power was not low carbon and therefore more expensive?
Clearly you have no real knowledge how economy works.
How the tariffs will make ordinary business build a steel plant that closed because it was not viable?
mypalmike 13 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile the US is doubling down on fossil fuels because… reasons.
kieranmaine 13 hours ago [-]
The BESS market is doing OK in the US. Politicians will come and go but the fundamentals of BESS are solid, so I don't see why the installed base won't keep increasing in the US.
> During the first six months of 2026, operators added another 8.3 GW of battery storage capacity, reaching nearly 52 GW of nameplate battery storage capacity
ElevenLathe 11 hours ago [-]
What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"? Do they mean gigawatt-hour? (sidenote: how scary that the DoE is the one making this error?)
kieranmaine 11 hours ago [-]
> What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"?
This is the maximum amount of power it can dispatch. I think they use it intentionally so they can compare it to other generation sources.
For example this spreadsheet [1], with data for 2023, contains figures for "power capacity megawatts" and "energy capacity megawatthours".
> In Q2 2026, battery energy stationary storage (BESS) installations reached 20.2 GWh
> total module manufacturing capacity to over 100 GWh.
> Storage Deployed in 2025: 57.6 GWh
thomastu 10 hours ago [-]
Depends on who you are talking to. Battery engineers tend to talk about capacity as storage potential (energy). The rest of the energy industry (resource planners, developers, manufacturers, etc.) talk about capacity in power terms (instantaneous discharge.)
When you see people talking about Lithium-based chemistries, you'll often only see power terms because they are almost always for 2-hr projects. Nowadays you'll see more differentiation between 2-hr/4-hr/6-hr storage (and a few interesting companies doing 100-hr+).
Unpacking the headline - A 600MW project of 4-hr lithium is 2.4GWh of storage capacity. The capacity rating of this project is 600MW, the storage capacity (2.4GWh) is an ESS specific attribute.
Another important dimension to capacity is how much accredited capacity your project has. Usually projects are only given credit based on some set of historic averages of how much system load the asset actually serves (e.g. if you for some reason had a battery could only discharge at high noon every day, 200GW of this resource would in a sane world have an accredited capacity of near 0 because it's completely coincident with existing solar.)
wffurr 12 hours ago [-]
How much faster would it go if the feds were helping things along instead of actively hindering?
pfdietz 11 hours ago [-]
The government likes to get in front of a parade and pretend they are leading it.
I dunno. I vacillated on that. It's something like 45–50 GWh nameplate currently installed, and ERCOT has 177 GW / 371 GWh of active planned battery projects in the interconnection queue. BESS are used for peaker-like capacity and load balancing, so GW is actually a pretty relevant number here.
Rebelgecko 12 hours ago [-]
YMMV depending on where in the US you are. California has like 10x'd it's battery storage in a couple years, to the point where it's the main source of electricity during some time slots where we used to be dependent on natty gas.
Edit: although it looks like in recent days, fossil fuels reign supreme once the sun goes down. I guess we don't have enough batteries for the current heat wave
NetMageSCW 12 hours ago [-]
Texas also has large amounts installed and growing.
iknowstuff 12 hours ago [-]
We have one of the world's largest BESS installations in California. Calm down.
burnte 12 hours ago [-]
Not really. The market is still moving quickly towards renewables. It's only some conservative politicians in the US that are making noise about fossil fuels, not the market.
smallerize 11 hours ago [-]
The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development.
The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals. That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
tzs 6 hours ago [-]
The market is doing its best to ignore the administration.
Most of the coal plants forced to delay retirement aren't producing energy. They sit idle with minimal staff.
The US manufactured 70 GWh of grid battery storage in 2025 and is expected to make 145 GWh in 2026. That still does use a lot of imported cells, but US cell production is expected to reach 96 GHw per year by the end of this year.
Recent polls found that 47% of Americans plan to buy an EV within the next 5 years, and 35% say they are seriously considering one for they next car.
By age 75% of 18-34 year olds expect to buy an EV in the next 5 years. 23% of those 65 and older expect to.
I don't think US car makers are going to ignore that.
They are currently beefing up their hybrids. Ford expects by 2030 for about half its cars to be a mix of hybrids, extended range vehicles, and EVs. GM says they plan to introduce PHEVs across the lineup by late 2027/early 2028.
Ford and GM also are using the time between now and when we get an administration that is sane to divert the engineering teams that worked on their first generation EVs to skunkworks projects to design small very cheap EVs that can compete on price with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cars by 2028.
They also believe that when sanity returns they will be able to scale up their new EVs fast enough to not lose out.
burnte 9 hours ago [-]
> The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals.
I was unaware car makers were part of the energy supply industry.
> That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
Most car makers are creating more and more electric cars, some makers are committing to 100% electric soon. Increasingly energy efficient ICE cars take engineering time and money to make, money they'd rather not spend. By not making them spend it, they won't. They'd do the same for safety features if we let them.
And none of that results my core statement which is the energy supply market (and you knew that's what I was talking about because that's literally the topic) is still moving to renewables. More renewables come online every month.
smallerize 8 hours ago [-]
The politicians are not "making noise", they have actual power and are making a real difference. (Except for the coal plants, so far, that hasn't held up in court.)
I know you were talking about energy industry, but I think mypalmike was being broader. That's why I called out that I was switching to talking about a different industry.
Efficiency goals are for the whole fleet of cars and don't just include making efficient ICE vehicles. They are moving the target average from 50 MPG to 35 MPG by 2031. That means fewer electric cars. “The standards finalized under the previous administration effectively required a switchover to electric vehicles that was out of step with market realities and customer demand. Today’s final rule is an appropriate course correction” --John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. https://abcnews.com/Business/trump-administration-rolls-back...
Schiendelman 11 hours ago [-]
Paying a wind company billions of dollars in damages is basically a wash, they spend that on another installation.
The US is switching to cleaner (coal -> gas) energy, renewables (solar and wind), and BESS almost entirely because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative.
thomastu 6 hours ago [-]
Not a response to this comment's author but, I'm always apprehensive that other people read comments like this without the context or history of how cleantech has actually developed and internalize these overly reductive views which make us think our political system is less flexible than it really is, or that past actions are somehow divorced from what progress we do have.
> ... because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative ...
The wind, solar and ess manufacturers got down the learning curve largely because of industrial energy + market transformation policy. You can literally see wind installations just go to near zero whenever the PTC doesn't renew in annual installations numbers. It's great that these technologies have matured and are now the least cost resource (in some models, new solar + storage even outcompetes existing natural gas which is very exciting), but market development is a public/private partnership. I can't see what good it does to talk in broad unfounded aspersions.
burnte 9 hours ago [-]
Thank you for understanding a broad view.
morninglight 13 hours ago [-]
Which battery technology and where are the sourcing it?
shortcrct 12 hours ago [-]
The article says the batteries are sourced from BYD, and it's likely lithium iron phosphate batteries.
jacekm 10 hours ago [-]
These ones are from BYD, however Poland is constructing another, smaller BESS in parallel where the batteries will be supplied by LG Energy Solution and manufactured near Wrocław, Poland.
onlyrealcuzzo 12 hours ago [-]
> BYD Energy Storage will supply the battery technology.
third sentence...
cassepipe 12 hours ago [-]
Article doesn't mention but says the company is BYD Energy Storage which apparenly uses
Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery technology (specifically, Lithium Iron Phosphate / LiFePO₄
For reference the UK has about 7gw output of battery (assuming all on at the same time. I don;t have the capacity though.) The UK is one of the more mature grid battery places in europe.
There's a 200MW/3,600MWh project which has planning permission and also a 400MW/7,200MWh proposal [2].
1. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-03/Long%20...
2. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/battery-storage/field-s-2...
https://www.nsw.gov.au/ministerial-releases/nsw-flicks-switc...
Australia has a few gigawatt hour batteries now and a 1GW/4GWh battery has been undergoing planning approval for a few months: https://reneweconomy.com.au/huge-4-gigawatt-hour-battery-aus...
There's so much domestic rooftop solar going to waste that it makes economic sense for these giant batteries to soak it up and sell it at night or during peak events. Love to see it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/08/30/poland-coal-capacity-tr...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/
https://pyrtkoanalytics.com/poland-in-the-energy-transition-...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/12/29/poland-projected-to-r...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/fifteen_minutes
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, >3TW of solar PV has been installed globally as of this year)
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
(Poland is expected to add 3-4GW of solar per year, and has hundreds of GWs of combined wind [onshore and offshore] and solar PV potential)
The much more realistic third option is just moving somewhere else
https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/exports-by-country (most Polish exports go to other EU countries or the US)
https://tradingeconomics.com/poland/imports-by-country
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
Brain dead. Corporations will simply drop the market or consumers will pay higher prices.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/eu-national-targets...
https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/07/how-europes-drought-expo...
Clearly you have no real knowledge how economy works.
How the tariffs will make ordinary business build a steel plant that closed because it was not viable?
Battery storage capacity averaged 70% growth over the last three years - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67925
> During the first six months of 2026, operators added another 8.3 GW of battery storage capacity, reaching nearly 52 GW of nameplate battery storage capacity
This is the maximum amount of power it can dispatch. I think they use it intentionally so they can compare it to other generation sources.
For example this spreadsheet [1], with data for 2023, contains figures for "power capacity megawatts" and "energy capacity megawatthours".
1. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor...
> In Q2 2026, battery energy stationary storage (BESS) installations reached 20.2 GWh
> total module manufacturing capacity to over 100 GWh.
> Storage Deployed in 2025: 57.6 GWh
When you see people talking about Lithium-based chemistries, you'll often only see power terms because they are almost always for 2-hr projects. Nowadays you'll see more differentiation between 2-hr/4-hr/6-hr storage (and a few interesting companies doing 100-hr+).
Unpacking the headline - A 600MW project of 4-hr lithium is 2.4GWh of storage capacity. The capacity rating of this project is 600MW, the storage capacity (2.4GWh) is an ESS specific attribute.
Another important dimension to capacity is how much accredited capacity your project has. Usually projects are only given credit based on some set of historic averages of how much system load the asset actually serves (e.g. if you for some reason had a battery could only discharge at high noon every day, 200GW of this resource would in a sane world have an accredited capacity of near 0 because it's completely coincident with existing solar.)
Edit: although it looks like in recent days, fossil fuels reign supreme once the sun goes down. I guess we don't have enough batteries for the current heat wave
The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals. That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
Most of the coal plants forced to delay retirement aren't producing energy. They sit idle with minimal staff.
The US manufactured 70 GWh of grid battery storage in 2025 and is expected to make 145 GWh in 2026. That still does use a lot of imported cells, but US cell production is expected to reach 96 GHw per year by the end of this year.
Recent polls found that 47% of Americans plan to buy an EV within the next 5 years, and 35% say they are seriously considering one for they next car.
By age 75% of 18-34 year olds expect to buy an EV in the next 5 years. 23% of those 65 and older expect to.
I don't think US car makers are going to ignore that.
They are currently beefing up their hybrids. Ford expects by 2030 for about half its cars to be a mix of hybrids, extended range vehicles, and EVs. GM says they plan to introduce PHEVs across the lineup by late 2027/early 2028.
Ford and GM also are using the time between now and when we get an administration that is sane to divert the engineering teams that worked on their first generation EVs to skunkworks projects to design small very cheap EVs that can compete on price with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cars by 2028.
They also believe that when sanity returns they will be able to scale up their new EVs fast enough to not lose out.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.
This would be the politicians I mentioned.
> And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals.
I was unaware car makers were part of the energy supply industry.
> That market is not moving quickly to renewables.
Most car makers are creating more and more electric cars, some makers are committing to 100% electric soon. Increasingly energy efficient ICE cars take engineering time and money to make, money they'd rather not spend. By not making them spend it, they won't. They'd do the same for safety features if we let them.
And none of that results my core statement which is the energy supply market (and you knew that's what I was talking about because that's literally the topic) is still moving to renewables. More renewables come online every month.
I know you were talking about energy industry, but I think mypalmike was being broader. That's why I called out that I was switching to talking about a different industry.
Efficiency goals are for the whole fleet of cars and don't just include making efficient ICE vehicles. They are moving the target average from 50 MPG to 35 MPG by 2031. That means fewer electric cars. “The standards finalized under the previous administration effectively required a switchover to electric vehicles that was out of step with market realities and customer demand. Today’s final rule is an appropriate course correction” --John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. https://abcnews.com/Business/trump-administration-rolls-back...
The US is switching to cleaner (coal -> gas) energy, renewables (solar and wind), and BESS almost entirely because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative.
> ... because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative ...
The wind, solar and ess manufacturers got down the learning curve largely because of industrial energy + market transformation policy. You can literally see wind installations just go to near zero whenever the PTC doesn't renew in annual installations numbers. It's great that these technologies have matured and are now the least cost resource (in some models, new solar + storage even outcompetes existing natural gas which is very exciting), but market development is a public/private partnership. I can't see what good it does to talk in broad unfounded aspersions.
third sentence...