I don't think that's true for steam engines - they produce only what is demanded and scale their steam (and hence fuel) consumption accordingly. This is what makes steam an effective backup & load smoothing source, you can load up a bunch of coal in the boilers for when your laser turrets start going, but it won't get consumed as long as your nuclear/solar power is running. One of my strategies when I run out of coal is to cut the power to everything but the coal mining patch (by deleting power poles), and then let it mine enough to fill up the boiler belt.

It's nuclear that continues to burn regardless of demand. The extra energy will heat your heat pipes up to 1000C but any heat beyond that is wasted.

Also, if you play Space Age you're well accustomed to using batteries (accumulators) to smooth out power spikes. Fulgora power generation through lightning rods is incredibly bursty, and if you don't drop about 20-30 accumulators per lightning rod you will waste power and not make it through the day.

100% efficiency is impossible.

Or S-R latched heat tower with accumulator, though it's more of a hassle than it's worth.

I've read that globally almost all the places that can do pumped hydro "storage" already exist. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then while this is a really cool technology, we won't be getting much further with it.

you would be way way better off just buying some actual batteries

I get service from San Diego Gas & Electric, have solar and powerwalls, and am part of Community Power's VPP. I am prohibited from charging my powerwall from the grid.

Evaporation can be solved by covering the reservoirs, so the water can't evaporate. Geography is the real issue. Costs to build possibly too.

I think geographic dispersion of batteries is going to be a big plus. If the "battery" is a giant lake or a big plant with a spinning mass, the power has to be transmitted from that facility to the end user over the grid

Putting a ton of smaller chemical batteries at distribution substations means when the grid is at the peak, you can cover that peak without transmitting that power over the transmission system. Putting the battery near the consumer will take a big load off of the transmission system which as much of a bottleneck as the lack of generating facilities

Batteries (and their associated HV switching gear) are slow to react and have very limited lifespans, on the order of a few years. That's why your washing machine uses a capacitor to start its motor rather than a battery. Even capacitors are not as reactive as an already spinning mass.

And while they claim to be peaceful, the underlying argument is that human life is the problem to be solved, and if you believe in increasing living standards or having children you're the enemy.

Hard to see how that stops at halting powerplant construction. Theses people would accidentally cause a famine with their agricultural policies and look upon the starving children as "progress", even if they're socialized enough to never say it out loud. Scary shit.

Or the amount of energy required to produce a large gas turbine. Which, between the refining and advanced metallurgy and the casting and machining of such a large piece of metal, is a lot.

Coal by it’s nature is much less amenable (from a physics/chemistry) perspective to automation and high resolution control. Less pure/refined, granular instead of a gas, harder to start and burns longer once started, etc.

Contaminants in the coal (due to it being a solid mineral) also means it burns with a lot often toxic ash that is hard to deal with.

On the plus side, you can often literally use an excavator to dig it up and put it in the back of a train and then burn it with minimal other capital equipment.

It all makes sense.

> I agree with you on your point that I don't see the connection between batteries and gas vs coal either. If anything, batteries are to stabilize energy demands when the Sun is down.

Because spinning a coal plant up or down is slower, the batteries let you make the gradient more gentle.

Suppose Alice's gas plant can go from 100MW output to zero in ten minutes. So if Sam's solar farm goes from zero to 100MW over ten minutes in early morning Alice's plant can mirror, between them Alice and Sam produce 100MW of power smoothly. Obviously real life is more complicated but this gets the point across

Now, Charlie owns a coal power plant, it can ramp from 100MW to zero, but it takes about an hour. This doesn't directly mirror the solar farm, Charlie and Sam can't really just work together to smoothly produce the same power

Bill's 100MWh BESS fixes this. An hour before the sun comes up, Charlie's coal plant begins shutting down, Bill's BESS puts out 100MW while consuming the gradually reducing coal power output and some of the gradually increasing additional power from the solar farm as that increases.

> The big story is that fossil fuels are relatively stable or in decline and solar is exploding.

This is true only in the sense that fossil fuels, as a percentage of total energy consumption, are stable or in slight decline. That is because total energy consumption is rapidly increasing, specifically as new forms of energy are added to the mix.

Fossil fuels in absolute terms are, however, increasing.

China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up. Coal use as a percentage of total energy is going down.

China is burning more oil and natgas than ever before. It is increasing. But as a percentage of total energy, it is decreasing.

This also matches China's CO2 targets. China's plan is not to decrease CO2 emissions, those emissions will keep increasing. The targets are to decrease the emissions required to generate a dollar of GDP. By 2060, they want the ratio of emissions to GDP to be 60% lower than it was in 2020. If you look at historical trendlines, that is an easy target to meet, just with improvements in technology and energy efficiency, particularly when you are starting from such a high base. But people look at that goal and think that China wants to cut emissions by 60%. GDP in 2060 will be 10x what the GDP was in 2020, so a 60% cut in that ratio is still a 400% increase in total emissions. Everything is measured in terms of ratios, not absolute numbers. Ratios where the base is always rapidly growing.

This confuses a lot of people who see that the ratio of fossil fuel in the entire energy mix is decreasing, and think this means that actual fossil fuel use is decreasing. The charts, report, graphs that people cite, if you look carefully, are always ratios. Ratios with the denominator growing as the denominator is something tied to GDP, whether total output or total energy output.

It's more accurate to say that there are limits to how much additional fossil fuel capacity China can bring online, as these are mature industries, whereas nuclear, solar, etc, are young industries and there is a lot of capacity to bring online since you are starting from a low base. China's approach to energy is always "we want more of it, of any kind." The only reason that China's oil production is not increasing by 10% per year is because it's not possible for China to increase oil production that quickly. Same for coal. China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.

> It might be a dangerous day for the rest of the world when China stops becoming dependent on imported oil.

Why? Would China just try to start a global war? If it's about Taiwan, I'm not sure that USA would care like 5 years ago. USA will probably do the same with South America

China’s Batteries Move Beyond Capacity Scale-up: Utility-Scale Storage Could Have Shifted 23 TWh More Clean Power in 2025 - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/16/chinas-batteries-move-b... - July 16th, 2026

> Can they procure their own uranium?

Nuclear power in China peaked around 2021 at ~5% of the total electricity mix. I don’t think it’s a factor.

China likes renewable and batteries because it’s the cheapest way to generate power. It’s cheaper to build solar plus battery storage, than building new coal plants.

Leadtime for nuclear power, unless you wanna buy a sketchy Russian submarine reactor that's been rusting in an arctic bay, is decades longer than even the supply constrained gas turbines.

I don't know why you think solar needs two forms of back up. Batteries are very reliable.

At least in my personal use - which is admittedly far smaller - I just see the battery as the main source. Solar exists to charge it.

It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.

But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.

> What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?

The RoCoF (rate of change of frequency) must be low enough that the inverters can form the grid without letting out the magical smoke. Having inertia is what slows this rate down.

I always thought they were spread apart so much to further reduce the chance of catastrophic spread of fire from one container to another.

That would be a lot harder if you stack them since heat likes to rise.

But no clue if that is the actual reason.

Foundations, maintenance, fire risk.

Land is cheap relative to a container full of cells.

They are pretty heavy and batteries already need to do adequate foundation work before installation.

I would assume it has something to do with fire hazard ?