NewcastleFalcon wrote: 22 Sep 2021, 09:37As was starting from zero, building a petrol and diesel infrastructure with exploration/drilling/production/transport/refining/distribution not to mention building a road network
As was starting from zero building the gas infrastructure
As is building nuclear power plants
As continues to be in 2021 the cumulative years of grid inefficiency and management by firing up large gas power stations.
Yes lots will be required, and at least its started. No one pretends 68mWh currently makes any difference apart from being a decent cash generator for the investors, and that's why they will happen.
It is never will be the intention of battery storage or any other storage medium, to provide power to provide every house in the country with their total annual electricity demand at any point in time. That's what the windfarms, the solar developments , solar panels on every south facing roof and yes the Nuke's are for.
Regards Neil
I totally understand that it's not the intention that we'll have to run wholly from grid scale battery storage at any one point, but we will have to lean heavily on grid scale battery storage in certain occasions, and it won't be acceptable - both politically and commercially - to say: "Sorry the lights went out, we didn't have enough batteries this evening when the wind wasn't blowing and the sun wasn't shining". If I read it correctly, Tony Seba reckoned you needed about 4x solar, wind and battery capacity/demand to be able to reliably supply via solar, wind and battery - and that's for the states of California, Texas, and New England, and as the song goes "It never rains in Southern California" so they've got a fairly predictable weather pattern there. The same cannot be said for us here. One of the reported problems rolled up in the current gas pricing issue is that the winds haven't blown much across Europe this summer, leading to drastically reduced power production from them, and gas generating needing to be used to fill the gaps. Indeed, I had a quick look at the output from my local offshore windfarm (Rampion) and one of the London arrays - over the last month they've varied from 50% of maximum design output, to 0%. That's not a great statistic to build a wind generating policy on - you either need to massively over spec their generating capacity to cover all bases, or have a hefty backup solution - either alternate power generation or grid scale battery, or both.
As an aside, we're currently - as in now this evening - relying on gas to supply 43% of our generating capacity (about 14.2GW), whilst wind is giving us 26% (8.6GW), so you could extrapolate an incredibly crude statistic from that and say - going on tonight's power generation - you'd need nearly 3 times the wind turbine capacity we've already got in order to do away with the 'peaker plants', and that's assuming the wind generation never drops below what it's at right now. Yes - you can shoot holes in those figures, but I use them to show the kind of figures needed to do away with the reliable gas generating capacity.
I take issue with your points that the fossil fuel industry and generation started from zero in that they had - very roughly - 100 years to evolve to supply the country and its needs. Grid scale battery storage isn't going to have that luxury - it needs to be deployed at speed and size if we're going to 'decarbonize'.
I don't deny that wind, solar, and battery are a great idea, but I would like to know what the real world implications of a full scale implememtation of them will be. Just how many acres of land will need to be turned over to 'green' energy supply ? What will be the cost to each householder ? What's the expected lifespan of a grid scale battery farm ? Undoubtedly a lot of them will be funded from corporate financing - at what point will the 'green' funding bubble burst when the finance houses realise they're over-exposed, causing unforseen knock-on effects ?
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
A lot of the extra capacity will need to go further offshore into deeper waters, which means new ways of siting and anchoring the platforms and new models of wind turbines, along with new methods of reliably getting the electricity onshore. One suggestion was to use surplus capacity to generate hydrogen direct from the turbines - though it wasn't clear if the intention was to make the hydrogen on the platforms and get the energy back to shore that way, or use more tradtional 'onshore' hydrogen production.
