Energy storage is a common topic that comes up in discussing energy.
A lot of people think it would be easy to just charge some batteries during the day with a solar plant and then use them through the night.
Critics of this idea frequently tell proponents to "do the math."
This page does the math and tries to help you understand the energy storage issue in concrete, visualizable numbers.
We attempted this with pumped storage using aircraft carriers before, but this time we're using
batteries.
Robert Stone, the filmmaker who brought us the documentary Pandora's Promise,
suggested at a screening in Seattle in October 2013 that he views climate change denial
in the same light that he views scale of energy problem deniers.
This page is an attempt to better educate the scale-deniers.
The case of interest is the replacement of a single large baseload power plant (1 gigawatt electric) with a large solar array and a bunch of batteries.
This is a typical size for a nuclear power plant, and can produce electricity for a city of about 700,000 average US citizens, or 1/440th of the USA.
If you want to scale up the battery requirements to the entire USA, just multiply by 440.
While we know that energy demand decreases at night a large baseload remains,
and we assume here that the plant continuously operates at 1GWe.
This is not uncommon for baseload plants to do.