this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn't.
The article specifies:
That's what the "within milliseconds" in the title refers to.
Every power generator has a ramp up time. Think the time it takes to start the engine in a diesel generator, until it spins up and is able to output peak power.
Nuclear reactors can hare ramp-up times of hours, in some conditions even days.
This thing here can go from zero to peak output within almost no time, which makes it perfect to balance the sometimes erratic and unpredictable generation fluctuations of renewable energy production.
For comparison, coal or gas power generators usually have large flywheels that, once spinning, react almost instantly to power fluctuations in the network by converting their motion to electricity or the other way round. If these coal or gas generators aren't running, they can't be used to balance the fluctuations in the network, so battery solutions like the one in OP are required to actively manage the network stability.
Perfect power source for a Death Star! The planet goes from zero to smithereens in milliseconds!
That's like a huge capacitor on my hobby electronics brain.
That's pretty much the job, except a billion times as large.
FYI. Hydro power has similar capacity and start up times
Yeah, the downside of hydro though is that you need to have a fitting space to build it. You can't just excavate a random field somewhere and plonk a hydro dam right there.
In most places all easy spots for hydro are already taken.
Not quite - only the biggest hydro stations can generate a gigawatt or more, and their startup time is like 10 minutes.
This project is only 500 MW here
https://www.pv-magazine.de/2024/09/20/flexbase-plant-500-megawatt-redox-flow-speicher-in-der-schweiz/
And other places say 800 MW
Both of which are comparable to large hydro.
Modern pumped hydro has a ramp up in the 10s of seconds range.
Anyway. Same ballpark in terms of power.
I must have got the 1.2GW from some comment.
Thanks, I edited the headline to make it clearer, but this community is overrun with confidently incorrect folks.
...this community - oh, you mean social media! Yes, quite true.
Peak output needs to be 1.2 GW not GWh.
Correct, the typo is mine, not from the article.
I thought that issue was considered solved by smart inverters now?