00:00This is a problem for the country's electricity grid. Batteries are the best defense.
00:05Five years ago, a giant winter storm took down Texas's electricity grid.
00:09It caused...
00:10Natalities and tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. A big problem back then...
00:15was that a lot of gas-fired power plants froze up or couldn't get the gas they needed.
00:20This caused instability on the grid.
00:23Batteries would have been really good at...
00:25addressing that instability because they can deliver a lot of power instantaneously to the grid.
00:30To stabilize it.
00:31However, back then, Texas didn't have so many batteries on the grid.
00:35Fast forward to today and there's more than 12 gigawatts of batteries on the Texas grid.
00:40Equivalent to 15% of peak demand. That is a lot. So if there are any...
00:45reason, the winter storm causes a bunch of power plants to go offline, those batteries could injure...
00:50inject power into the grid instantaneously and stabilize it. The reason this is important...
00:55is that there are other big grids around the US that could also use batteries. One that's in the...
01:00news a lot today is the one that we call PJM. The biggest grid in the country stretching from...
01:05Chicago to the Chesapeake. It's also the center of the AI power debate.
01:10With people worried about data centers sucking up all the power and raising bills and...
01:15causing reliability issues for all the millions of households who live in that region.
01:19There aren't a lot of...
01:20batteries on that grid. But if this weekend shows the value of batteries...
01:25defending Texas's grid... that could send a signal to other grids around...
01:30the country, PJM included, to get more of these things built...
01:35to help provide resilience to the entire US electricity system.
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