Blog post: swansont: That's a Big Twinkie

Generating capacity is, however, only one side of the story. Storage systems are rated not only by their power, or how fast they can crank out energy (measured in gigawatts), but also by the total amount of energy they store (measured in gigawatt-hours). A facility with an energy capacity of one-gigawatt that can only supply electricity for 10 minutes would not be very helpful; in an ideal world it could do so for, say, 100 hours, thus storing 100 gigawatt-hours. Building up new pumped hydro-facilities similar to existing ones would probably help in all but the most disastrously long of wind lulls. For those worst-case scenarios, we might still have to brace for rolling blackouts.

 

Of course, this simple calculation also assumes current consumption levels. How would we power all those electric cars that we're supposed to be driving in the future?