Ratcliffe coal

I don't have one

Ah, so just belling the cat then.

Imaginary battery storage is a thing.

It's funny when a trade category is measured in terms of its "in the pipeline" aspect. Some of those projects are "paper tigers" with no boots on the ground. And no one to pay for them.

The press release was actually announcing a 40MW battery. We can never be sure whether these projects are megawatts or megawatt-hours. Usually, a battery like that, is not to be discharged faster than about three hours. (Conservative charge and discharge behavior helps you get to 5000 cycles.)

Jamesfield Farm standalone Battery Energy 49MW/98MWh Storage System near Abernethy, Scotland.

Another 20 of those, and you have something (approaching winter solar storage). Another 200 of those, and you're ready for solar summer. Another 400 and you'll be in "trade report country" (the imaginary value).

We have some amount of solar here, but they never seem to tell us what we paid for it. There was a large sum of money spent, with no trackable assets as output.

Energy utilities are so so intangible. Who knew.

But we know what a reactor costs. Or for that matter, a hydro project that went 3x over budget. We seem to be able to measure some of the bigger ones. The chump-change is untrackable.

Paul

But what does any of this actually mean? Batteries capable of supplying 16GW or as it might be 40MW for one minute? Or something more useful than that.

It quite clearly says

So it could supply 1/40th of ratcliffe for 2 hours

Lithium ion batteries can be discharged in as little as one minute. If you want a record breaking model plane tha'ts how fast you do it.

Remember these batteries are NOT to store renewable energy in: they replace spinning mass to help allow decent grid frequency stabilisation if a power station goes down. Or more likely a windfarm trips.

They never quote capacity because even some Greens can count beyond ten without taking their socks off.

A small power station is around 600MW...

At face value, this spec

means the megawatt-hours is 99. That's the energy stored in the thing. If you added more batteries in parallel, the 99 number would go up.

Whereas the 49.5 is the maximum rate it drains at (this includes the capabilities of the inverter connected to the grid). If you pushed it to the wall, they claim it can jam 49.5MW into its grid connection. It will stay up for 2 hours, pushed to the wall.

Hours Rate (on a 99MHh battery) 2 49.5MW lotsa toasters/electricfires (battery-discharge-rate-limited) (inverter-limited) 10 10 20 5 40 2.5MW lotsa LED lightbulbs, light loading, people told to conserve

Paul

Yes yes, I know all this. My point is that the journos appear, regularly, not to. They quote the drain rate and imagine that this one figure suffices to tell people all they need to know. It's extremely misleading.

A while back I did some calcs on the cost of batteries to run the grid for 5 days or so, based on that one Tesla installed in South Australia. It took a lot of googling to find that actual *capacity* of that unit.

Indeed, and as I said, these units are not there to store renewable energy for when the sun dont shine. They are there to replace uber short term storage embodied by spinning turbine mass.

Sure. I just used that as an example for the calcs. A bigger installation would presumably cost less per kWh stored.

It does seem to be a consistent practice.

But it's also confusing stuff, if you're Xerox-copying a press release.

This one is connected to their grid with a 500 KV interconnect. And the discharge rate on this, is a bit faster than I would have expected. But then again, you can rearrange the numbers a bit and get... 2.

It's a clean-burning technology. Burns good like a wind turbine.

Not just journos. It crops up when companies apply for planning permission. For example, a year ago a company was given PP to build a storage battery in mid-Cornwall with a 49.5MW capacity. No mention of MWh AFAICS, so I emailed them and asked. They did actually reply (which surprised me slightly), with the answer that it would supply for 2hrs, so the proposed capacity was 99MWh.

You have an EV that potentially could become your own local storage device when leccy is on offer for free.

Like fusion power, this “potential” never seems to get any closer. There have been a few trials but it’s a long way from being available to the great unwashed and it may only work with a new generation of EVs.

Tim

Sounds like a management nightmare.

I'm hearing rumours that the life on an EV is only about 10 years, because the battery dies.

Putting more charge cycles through it won't help.

Andy

That would depend on how much is has been used?. People are so biassed in both directions that is hard to know what to do, and in such cases , its better to do nowt.

There are rumours here in (.ie) that people are looking for places to dump old EV's and disapper.

Battery degradation is not a big problem on the newer models which have done a high mileage. Plenty of stats out there.

The batteries are worth a pretty penny on the scrap market, so I'm sure there are many happy to take anyone's dumped EV for nowt.

Theo

Even without such a feature, an EV benefits from any free or discounted electricity, provided the battery is not full charged. You are simply deferring the benefit until the next time that you use it. Also makes up for the loss of charge that must happen even when the vehicle is parked up, something that isnt an issue for a I/C car (from the fuel point of view).