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From the December 2, 2024 article "Batteries are a missing piece in Illinois’ clean energy transition. Engineers and lawmakers are racing to add them to the power grid." in the Chicago Tribune:

All the lithium-ion batteries in the world collectively hold 1 terawatt of power, or 1 million megawatts. That’s just enough electricity to power the U.S. at peak energy consumption for one hour.

The quote has some discrepancies in use of units for power versus energy, but let's assume (as many utilities and power agencies do in their reporting) that peak demand is the average power for the hour of highest demand, so if the peak demand for the year is 1 kW then the grid uses 1 kWh for that hour of peak demand.

Thus, the question in the title: Do all the Li-ion batteries in the world have just enough power to meet peak demand in the U.S.?

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    As you say, there's a problem with dimensions. Power (Watts) is energy/time. Batteries don't "hold" power, they hold energy (Joules, Watt-hours, or other units with the same dimensions). A Watt-hour is the amount of energy delivered by a 1 Watt heater for an hour, or a 60 Watt heater for a minute, etc. A battery's power rating is how fast it can deliver energy. So it's unclear whether the claim here is discharge rate and power delivery, or storage capacity. Or a journalist is equating incompatible units that happen to have the same number, and whose names both include Watts.
    – Peter Cordes
    Commented Dec 6 at 11:17
  • There's a conceptual issue with this question: Outside of accounting for emergencies, you'd only really want to have backup energy for peak load, not for base load. Battery backups are also good for very quickly providing power (for FCR, aFRR etc), but there's better backup power options out there than batteries that take longer to spin up to meet demand (and later: spin down).
    – ave
    Commented Dec 8 at 18:48
  • @PeterCordes I realize the confusion may stem from the fact that they're referring to both, and that the claim is that there are enough batteries to provide both 1 TW of power and 1 TWh of energy to meet the U.S. peak demand for one hour, covering both the power and energy requirements. In this case we might blame an overzealous editor who was trying to trim the word count.
    – LShaver
    Commented 2 days ago
  • @ave I don't think they're claiming this should or could happen -- it's just a conceptual way to understand the scale of battery deployment.
    – LShaver
    Commented yesterday

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According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the peak hourly consumption of power in the US occurred on July 15th 2024 with ~745 GigaWatt-hours (GWh).

That number is indeed lower than the total amount of battery capacity in the world.

However, not all Li-ion batteries can discharge all of their energy in a single hour.

The C-rate is the ratio of how fast the battery can be discharged (or charged) relative to its capacity.

A C-Rate of 1.0 means that it can dump all its Amp-hours in a single hour, while 0.5 means it would take 2 hours, etc.

The higher the output current, the more heat you have to dissipate, and the more the cycling stress on the battery.

Smaller, hand held things that people want charging (and discharging) fast tend to be designed to have higher C-Rates. They can also dissipate their heat faster (thanks to a higher surface area to volume ratio) and can be designed to only last a few years max, when compared to a grid scale facility.

Grid scale batteries aren't usually designed for a high C-Rate, as their job is mostly to charge during the day, drain all night, and smooth out the fluctuations from renewables, and last for years to decades.

According to Thunder Said Energy, a target for long term battery storage installations is a C-Rate of 0.25

According to Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions (IEA), the total global supply of batteries was 2,400 GWh and that an average of ~400 GWh were added annually over the last 5 years.

If the total battery storage today is ~3,000 GWh and the average C-Rate is 0.25, then yes, the entire worlds supply of batteries could handle the peak US power consumption in 2024.

If the total supply is ~3,000 GWh and the average C-Rate is closer to 0.33, then the total available power would match the 1,000 TW figure quoted from your original link.

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abestrange is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
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    For context, it may be relevant to mention that in a country as large as the US, a nationwide Dunkelflaute is essentially impossible meteorologically speaking, and other forms of renewable on-demand electricity production exist (hydro, biomass), so it will never be necessary to power the entire country with batteries.
    – gerrit
    Commented Dec 6 at 8:12
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    I think it's probably also worth pointing out that Li-ion batteries are not a particularly likely technology to use for large scale grid storage so extrapolating from their properties is not enlightening anyway.
    – Jack Aidley
    Commented Dec 6 at 10:05
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    A couple of things to note: The C-rate for charging isn't necessarily that for discharging, and with the C-rate (partially) thermally limited the picture can be rather more complicated when you take into account demands with very short peaks. That doesn't change the conclusion as such short peaks are shorter than the hourly average peak demand used in the calculations
    – Chris H
    Commented Dec 6 at 14:08
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    @JackAidley To your point, I was just reading about new Sodium-ion batteries (Na-ion?) being brought to market. The whole time the article focused on their potential use in EVs but it seems to me that, given the lower power density, they would be a better choice for less weight/space-sensitive applications such as grid storage e.g. residential solar complements.
    – JimmyJames
    Commented Dec 6 at 21:04
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    @njuffa Now look up Pumped Hydro Storage.
    – Jack Aidley
    Commented Dec 7 at 6:46
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I'll be using the same 745GWh peak hourly energy consumption abestrange did.

According to Bloomberg, yearly Li-Ion production capacity is around 2600GWh:

BloombergNEF estimates that lithium-ion battery demand across EVs and stationary storage came in at around 950 gigawatt hours last year. Global battery manufacturing capacity was more than twice that, at close to 2,600 GWh.

The International Energy Agency paints a similar picture, with a 4000GWh production forecast for 2025. Note that this is just for Li-Ion batteries, it does not include other chemistries such as lead-acid or nickel–metal hydride.

The Li-Ion batteries produced the last year alone can sustain US peak consumption for 3.5 hours.
Total existing battery capacity will be significantly larger than that. So the article's claim is clearly false.

As a fun aside, Tesla EVs have batteries in the 50-100kWh range, and 6.75 million Tesla's have been sold to date. Assuming 65KWh average per Tesla, and 60% of capacity still remaining, then just the world's Tesla's could hold about 263GHw, about a third of the required energy for the question.

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marcelm is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
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    Production capacity is a relevant policy consideration, but the claim at issue here seems to be about the capacity of the batteries currently in the field, not about what capacity could be in the field in the future.
    – John Bollinger
    Commented Dec 6 at 15:18
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    @JohnBollinger If 2600GWh of capacity was produced the last year, it stands to reason more than that is currently in the field.
    – marcelm
    Commented Dec 6 at 17:13
  • Does either source (or another) break down capacity between stationary storage batteries and EVs? That's the only way I think the claim could be correct, if they are only talking about grid storage batteries (which of course isn't specified, but could be considered logical).
    – LShaver
    Commented 2 days ago
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    @LShaver From what I remember encountering in my search, grid-connected battery capacity is way smaller, in the order of maybe 50GWh. So that seems unlikely as the source of the article's claims.
    – marcelm
    Commented 2 days ago

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