OT Giant batteries.

[harryagain]

[Chris Hogg]

Quote: "The container-sized arrays store 2MW and would be installed on-site at power plants."

Shame about the units!

[harryagain]

Yep. I'd have made a sarcastic comment but the comments thing is closed.

[Andy Burns]

No doubt the battery operators will seek subsidies to milk the energy customers on top of the subsidies to the windmill & PV owners ...

Needs some framework to force the non-dispatchable generators to sell in the first instance to the energy storage owners (pumped, battery, liquid air, what have you) and the storage owners to compete on the open market with the dispatchable generators and interconnectors, making a premium where they can react more quickly to demand than "big" power plants.

[Brian Gaff]

We still have not solved this power storage issue have we. Brian

[Chris Hogg]

I read the comments later. Several people got there before either of us. One of them says that the batteries are actually 1MWh, and can supply 2MW for 30 minutes at full whack.

Did a few calculations. Dinorwig, the only energy storage system in the UK even approaching the scale of what's needed to provide enough back-up power to cope with variable output from renewables, can supply

1800MW for 6 hours That's a capacity of 10.8GWh, equivalent to 10,800 of those batteries, or a stack 60 x 60 x 3 high. Not impossible, I guess, but you'd need 111 of those stacks to cope with the full UK demand for say 24 hours (assuming 50GW for 24 hrs /10.8). I suppose if you spread them around the country, they'd be no more noticeable than solar farms. Seems a bit far-fetched though.

[Bill Wright]

No, yet on QT last night the Greeny woman was allowed to say, unchallenged, "wind and sun can be turned on and off" and "you can store electricity for the grid in batteries." It was near the end of the prog if you want to see it.

Bill

[Dave Liquorice]

Bloody Hell! Good job I wasn't working on it or the nation would have heard a, er, "small explosion"...

(Some time crew/pole op on QT).

[Johny B Good]

Large scale energy storage facilities, such as the existing Pumped Storage at Dinorwig and Ffestiniog, buy and sell electric energy at prices that are lierally based on the classic "Supply & Demand" marketing model.

IOW, Dinorwig and Ffestiniog buy power at off-peak price in the wee small hours from the National Grid and then sell it back at a higher price during peak demands throughout the rest of the day.

The 'profit' made by the PS stations goes towards the running costs including covering the round trip losses of the "charge/discharge" cycle (overall efficiency of around 77% afaicr - remarkably similar to a lead acid battery in its first flush of youth on the 20 hour discharge rate).

The National Grid operators are only too happy with this arrangement since it works out much cheaper than the costs of keeping a gas turbine powered station or two on hot standby.

It should come as no surprise that this is the case since both PS facilities were planned and designed and built in the days of a Central Electricity Generating authority, long before Thatcher got her claws into such a national treasure. The facilities wouldn't have been built if they hadn't represented such a good long term investment in improving the efficiency of the National Grid's capacity to satisfy peak demand loads.

Any other new technologies for tackling the job of load balancing currently being done by Dinorwig and Ffestiniog PS will have to compete without any subsidies on running costs.

I'm sure 'market forces' will still allow such "battery" storage stations to get their nose into the trough alongside of the existing PS facilities without the need for any subsidies whatsoever otherwise there'd be no point in their existence. It's not as if they need to outbid the existing PS operators, just the more expensive alternatives elsewhere in the National Grid.

[Chris J Dixon]

Parry People Movers anybody?

Chris

[dennis]

Blaming stuff on Maggie just makes you sound stupid so why should we believe anything you say?

I suppose you are one of the left wing that choose to forget that the Labour government prior to Maggie closed more coal mines than Maggie ever did and still blame her.

Or maybe choose to forget that it was unionised greed that was the big problem and nothing any government did.

[Dave Liquorice]

energy

diesel(*).

How much energy is actually in a spun up turbine? Synchronous speed is only 500 rpm, most car engines idle faster...

An energy storage fly wheel will be in the region of 30 times faster, 15,000 rpm or more.

[Huge]

Given that the shaft was about a foot across, I'd hazard a guess at "a lot".

[bert]

In message , Chris Hogg writes

24 hours? A half decent winter anticyclone can easily last 2 or 3 weeks

[Chris Hogg]

Quite. Which underlines just how ineffective they'd be as energy storage on a scale adequate to cope with typical fluctuations in renewable energy if that was to be adopted on a significant scale. Only the capacity of pumped storage gets remotely near enough, and that's only for a short while. We'd need getting on for 800 Dinorwigs to keep us going for a week.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I have seen one or two companies at housebuilding exhibitions who do large battery systems which charge overnight and can feedback during peak period and/or supply you with the cheap rate electricity at peak time. They haven't caught on here, partly because there's no FIT payment for them.