Well combined cycle plant is perhaps 65% efficient, lose 10% of that in transmission. A boiler will be > 90% efficient. So gas at point of use wins when compared to resistive electric heating. If you run a heat pump locally, then you might get a year round COP of say 2:1 - which gives lekky a slight edge in overall efficiency, although at double the cost to the end user (if we assume electric per kWh is 4x the price of gas)
This is why we need much more efficient batteries to store energy when it can be produced, for when it cannot. I mean everyone does not have a convenient mountain and a couple of lagoons to hand. Brian
If you were aware of the appalling conditions that exist in the cobalt mines in The Congo, child labourers, close to slave labour, dangerous mining conditions, no H&S anywhere to be seen etc. you wouldn't be so keen to be banging on about batteries.
Like all things renewable, there's a massive downside that the greens never talk about, like the thousands of birds killed by wind turbines, or the massive deforestation and natural habitat destruction in the drive to plant palm nut plantations for bio-diesel.
Was it this stuff ? :-
Brian is always banging on about batteries, as if there's some battery technology lying fallow, only needing an injection of research to make it the answer to all our dreams, and that perversely we're all ignoring it.
Tesla were making noises for the last couple of years about stopping use of cobalt, but they've just just signed a new deal to mine about 6000 tonnes/year
Batteries have returned more than 80% of the electrical energy put into them for more than a 100 years. Batteries have merely got lighter and smaller which is handy for transport and phones but has no relevance for storing grid energy - unless you think it's possible to be more than
100% efficient.Another Dave
There is also the issue of scale. The largest battery storage facility in the world is the Australian system with (currently[1]) 128MWh of capacity and a max delivery rate of 100MW.
[1] They are upgrading that by 65MWh / 50MW sometime this year.In UK terms, that's one very small power station or one 200th of our minimum baseload energy requirement in summer. We would need over 450 similar sized stations, just to match the small amount of pumped hydro storage we currently have.
(Tesla's gigafactory has a claimed annual manufacturing output of cells equal to something like 50GWh. How many decades worth or production would we need to buy to support a 100% renewable grid without gas/nuclear etc?)
On a property with 9 inch solid walls you could use inch thick insulation laminated onto PB and have it skimmed to give a hard finish. You would only lose an inch but the effect on your heating bills and comfort would be noticible. An inch of 'celotex' is more less equiv to a 65mm cavity filled with rockwool.
What sort of Wendy house do you live in ?.
Who ever lives in that property in 20 years time is going to need deep pockets to pay the heating bills.
Just as an aside, given lead is *very* recyclable and we aren't talking of anything that needs to be light or compact here, wouldn't LA be viable for that sort of use?
Very easy to manage the DOD in such a system and you could even capture any hydrogen to power other machines?
I believe they are very simple to produce (went round the Chloride factory and saw it for myself) and they can even re-use the casings (that could be glass, also plentiful and very recyclable)?
For any battery storage solution to be anything like 'green' it has to use a readily available material that is easy to turn into a battery and easy to recycle when spent?
Cheers, T i m
And the production of batteries is so green!
And how much longer if the batteries have to be replaced every decade. With the current expectation that we will all be driving electric cars rather than using petrol/diesel and new builds will not have a mains gas supply so winter heating will be electric how much more capacity will be required on the grid in the next 20 to 30 years.
Yes, I understand they did that too, probable explanation for the spalled brick I need to replace.
I have just finished removing the Schrijver damp treatment, a sort of air-brick which I doubt does anything for a solid wall; in a solid wall it is worse than useless, it bridges the cavity and creates a tunnel from outside direct to the inner wall.
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Hmph. I make it 125 such stations. On the basis that Dinorwig does 2GW for 8 hours, that's 16,000 MWh. What else do we have?
Dinorwig is a bit smaller than that. However the combined capacity of the 4 main pumped hydro plant:
Location Power (MW) Capacity (GWh)
Dinorwig 1,728 9.1 Cruachan 440 10.0 Festiniog 360 1.3 Foyers 305 6.3
Totals 2,833 26.7
(I think in my original comment was estimating 30GWh of currently installed pumped storage)
x3 approximately. For nuclear. x 100 for renewables
Here's another calculation:
Tesla's giant Oz battery is rated at 100MW. It can supply 30,000 homes for 1 hour, it says here
Average UK consumption is say 35GW. If we get stuck under a blocking high in winter for say 5 days, with bugger all wind or solar generation, and rely solely on batteries to keep the country running, then they will need to be capable of supplying 4,200GWh of electrical energy (35 x 24 x 5).
So we'd need 42,000 of Tesla's giant Oz batteries to keep the UK running for five days (4,200 / 0.1).
Numbers will vary depending on what you take as the UK average consumption in winter, and what other sources of renewable electricity are available. And that's only for demand at existing rates. Add in the entire UK fleet of electric vehicles, domestic heating etc. and you're talking several times that number.
Anyone who thinks that we can rely on batteries to get us through the dark, cold days of winter WTSDSATWDB is living in cloud cuckoo land.
They may be OK for peak-lopping for short periods at times of high demand in place of instantly available diesel generators or OCGT's, but that's all they'll be good for.
Righto, thanks for that. I was unaware we had anything else.
Germany has also been storing compressed air in caverns and there is a new facility in the midlands that stores liquid air, I don't know the energy input:output but like pumped hydro it is not as lossy in storage as a chemical battery. The profit is always in the difference in cost of the input energy from the peak prices.
The high pressure air recovery is via the output stage of a gas turbine, so some fossil fuel is used, and as the exhaust temperature is well above ambient the heat given out during isothermal compression is replaced.
Many years ago I suggested this sort of mechanism for cooling the tube via expanding ambient compressed air through multistage turbine gensets and back feeding the rails but only using ambient heat to re heat the expanding gas and do work.
battery way better than pumped storage, if charge/discharge rates are reasonably low.
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