There is no real; purpose built storage on the grid except Dinorwig, Cruachan et al... BUT the spinning mass of the power stations is something that can keep the grid surprisingly stable over very short duration (seconds) overloads and load variations.
Beyond that hydro and punmped will respond to price spikes by cutting into that money bank of stored water they have...thank heavens there is some sort of free market so that mechanism works at least...
The rest of the storage is in nuclear fuel rods, piles of coal and cubic meters of gas..
I'll save you the bother. The energy storage capacity of a scaled up clockwork mainspring, even when Nitinol is used to get an eightfold improvement over the conventional spring steel alloys typically used in clocks and clockwork toys would fall woefully short of the target requirement.
If you're looking at wind up energy storage, you do much better with rubber bands[1] but even rubber band energy storage still falls far short of the requirements to store all of this free energy that has to go to unused by virtue of it being generated at inconvenient times of the day.
[1] Whilst rubber can store significantly more energy in a given volume than even a Nitinol main spring, it does have a limited service life as model aeroplane enthusiasts and catapult users know only too well. You certainly wouldn't want to be around a fully charged 1MWH rubber band energy store when the elastic snaps! :-)
Quite. I was recently talking to a chap who'd bought an electric car five years ago. He got a range of 80 miles per charge when it was new, but it's down to 50 miles now. So those massive Tesla storage batteries, which are just thousands of individual cells connected together, will need completely replacing after say ten years at most, an even shorter life than the windmills and solar panels they're supposed to be supporting.
The alternative source is nuclear or gas. Energy from such sources is offset by excess supply (from the renewable source) when the weather is favourable - it all works on long term averages not minute by minute details. In the long term energy requirements can be met by renewables even if sometimes energy is being supplied to the grid by other sources.
I think the barn idea is about lopping peak demand, similar to load-shedding, rather than being able to make up for any large shortfall when it's dark or not windy?
Which, with a load of 40GW (see my earlier calculation) would keep the lights on in the UK for just....wait for it....40 minutes! Long enough to find the candles, Gaz lamp and matches, I suppose!
The trouble is that although Pumped Storage is generally accepted as a 'good thing', we haven't got the topography to implement it in any way sufficient to make a significant difference to stored energy relative to what's needed for an all-renewable supply, as table 5-1 on p. 15 shows. Adding up the capacities on the RH column (taking means where necessary and including a figure for Glenmuchloch of 1.7 GWh*), gives a total capacity of 136.8 GWh, which will keep the lights on for 3 hrs
25 minutes on a cold winter's evening WTWDBATSDS. Long enough to watch a bit of telly, before you retreat, shivering, to bed. (Muaitheabhal, on the Outer Hebrides, is reticent about it's capacity; plenty of puff about how many homes it'll supply (200,000), but nothing on how long for!)
But the monster and near-fantasy Strathdearn scheme proposed by the 'Scottish Scientist' would be more than adequate at 6,800 GWh**, except that it'll never be built!
Is that a change from how it was planned then? I thought it was to even out fluctuations (at the border between regional grids?) caused by too much reliance on wind power at times of no wind, and avoid blackouts rather than make black starts?
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