Switzerland dug a hole the size of two soccer fields to install the world’s most powerful underground battery, able to output 1.2 GW within milliseconds.
2026-06-03 22:00 UTC
Replies (9)
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@unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-06-03 22:40
Fuck these incompetent headline writers who cant use units correctly. At this point they are doing this shit on purpose to ragebait people into reading the article. And they dont even explain what that headline is supposed to mean in the article. Does the output power ramp up that fast or do they mean that it can actually just output a lot of energy really fast?
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@solrize@lemmy.ml 2026-06-03 22:35
$1 per WH or almost that is pretty terrible. You can get battery systems for 1/4 of that $/WH at Home Depot.
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@DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2026-06-03 22:02
1.21 Jiggowatts?! Is there a GIF?
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@Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-06-04 05:34
They just had the first stone laying ceremony so that explains the new wave of publications on the project. They are using a Vanadium flow battery by the company Invinity Energy Systems which is British-Canadian. I’m a little unsure whether it’s a good idea to combine this with a datacenter, I hope the datacenter bubble popping won’t jeopardize the whole project.
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@ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2026-06-04 05:43
able to output 1.2 GW within milliseconds So explode?
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@darkmogool@feddit.org 2026-06-04 10:25
How big is a soccer field?
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@gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2026-06-05 00:50
this will be by far the largest vanadium flow battery in the world, especially outside china
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@outerspace@lemmy.zip 2026-06-05 06:27
What is a size of a soccer field
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@squaresinger@lemmy.world 2026-06-04 13:36
The headline looks wrong, but it actually isn’t. The article specifies: Total capacity: 2.1GWh Peak output: 1.2GW Ramp up time: a few milliseconds 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.