Induced atmospheric oscilltions

It's here already. Its called uranium, and better still, it comes already charged up so there is no need for f****ng windmills.

LOL…right on!

Sounds perfect, but when the nuclear power station at Hunterston, on the Clyde, was built, storage was needed for the energy produced at night when nobody wanted it. So the pumped storage system at Cruachan was built as part of he project.

Not eactly true. The decision is commercial, What is cheaper - another power station than runs 2 hrs a day or pumped storage

In they case of the good sites at Dinorwig and Ffestiniog, it made sense. There are a dozen small sites in Scotland but they tend to be more remote and of less capacity.,

Overwhelmingly a gas power station is more cost effective, and in future there are ideas like Natrium to make nuclear power more flexible,

Note that the problem pumped storage solves is made infinitely worse by adding renewable energy.

RJH?

Storage is trivial on a small scale, but gets significantly more complex and expensive at the power station kind of level. At grid scale it currently looks like it is cloud Cuckoo land!

A lot of the storage problem could achieved by every domestic dwelling in the UK having a 30KWh* battery. It would only be an up front cost of around £600 billion. :) This ignores industry and commercial storage.

You had the ideal opportunity to use that marvelous zeigeist word dunkelflaute

Dunelflaute wouldn't be a problem if the UK wasn't becoming so reliant on solar and wind, and even more so in the next 10 to 20 years.

I agree we are at the stage when every household should be incentivised to have a battery over having solar PV panels but this only for peak lopping and virtual load shifting.

Also 10kWh battery takes up space and 3 of them more.

Batteries are good for a few day's power at most.You cannot get around the fact that PV generates so little in the three winter months Mid November to mid Februar and wind is variable too.

I think it would need countries with more reliable and constant renewable power to synthesis a transportable fuel, in the same way Noway and Canada made fixed nitrogen fertiliser using hydro electric.

Knowledge gap issue...

What practical safety problems arise where local stored energy is linked to the incoming mains supply? Managing cable repairs etc.

That is one of the reasons why the cost of storing energy in batteries locally is several times higher than doing it centrally.

The reason we *have* a grid at all is because having a steam engine on your basement didn't work as cheaply as stringing wires round the neighbourhood and having one big steam engine downtown.

Greens are always full of pie in the sky solutions to their imagined problems.

The cheapest solution to the problems of 'renewable' energy is simply not to use it in the first place and if you are scared of CO2 build nuclear power stations instead.

The Cruachan scheme was done by a nationalised electricity business, I suspect it was an engineering decision, Now, Cruachan is owned by Drax who are doubling its capacity.

Engineering includes cost. When I went round Ffestiniog they said the decision was simple - pumped storage or another power station. Pumped storage was cheaper.

There are many quite suitable pumped storage sites in Scotland, that haven't been exploited yet. The decision is always cost wise.

All domestic battery installations that can provide home power in the event of loss of grid supply already have to be either on a separate circuit (cheap option) or have a “break before make” changeover switch. This switch can be manual or automatic. This ensures no “back-feeding” into the grid.

Tim

No such super-high energy density battery for me thank you, how many people would willingly have an unexploded incendiary bomb sitting at the heart of their house?

I have 19 kWhrs of battery and I sleep okay. liFePo batteries have a negligible risk of immolation.

Tim

But are "they" not suggesting limiting regional distribution grids rather than an all encompassing National Grid. The power generated in Scotland may stay in Scotland

Don't think I have ever even implied that.

Indeed. And already widely implemented, not least by solar/domestic storage, and by proxy in EVs.

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far. There are ambitions to support the grid, but not AFAIAW fully. Regional schemes have come close - tidal for example.

But until large scale storage can be found, alternatives like nuclear and fossil sources will need to be used.

I would add that all of these discussions never mention cutting back consumption. Always maintaining or 'growing'. That's a whole other set of possibilities.

Plus many of the home storage solutions are not setup for off grid operation and are "grid tied" - which means without a mains supply you can't make use of your stored energy.

Also grid tied storage does nothing to aid grid stability as there is no spinning mass to resist unexpected load changes.

Indeed, transport and space heating would probably add another 30 - 40% demand on the grid.