By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Oh dear – another dreadful article in the Telegraph!
Bonanza! Cut wind farm costs!
They make it sound like we’re all going to be better off!
According to the Telegraph:
“Ed Miliband will plough hundreds of millions of pounds into battery storage technology as the cost of ordering wind farms to shut down spirals out of control.
GB Energy, which is backed by the taxpayer, will use a chunk of its newly minted budget to invest in energy storage systems as households and businesses are forced to foot the bill to prevent the creaking power grid from getting congested.
More than £700m has been spent so far this year on switching off wind farms to avoid overloading the grid as well as firing up alternatives to keep the lights on. This is up from about £450m over the same period in 2024, with the money ultimately coming from energy bills.
Officials are also keen to ensure clean power remains reliable during periods of high demand.
An industry source said: “How do you get around the fact that the wind blows one day, doesn’t blow the next? They have to keep switching off the turbines because they can’t store the energy. GB Energy think they’ve got a role to play in trying to fund the innovation.”
Far from cutting costs, however, building lots of battery storage will simply add to them, as NESO’s Clean Power 2030 plan admitted:
https://www.neso.energy/publications/clean-power-2030
As well as the capital and operating costs, battery storage is not 100% efficient – it loses a certain amount of electricity every time it cycles. These are known as round-trip losses. A cost of £10/MWh works out at £3 billion a year on current generation levels, all of which will get added onto power bills.
Meanwhile constraint payments will carry on rising regardless – NESO reckon growth in wind and solar power will add another £15/MWh to the cost of electricity, £4.5 billion a year by 2030:
But there is also another, more serious misunderstanding in the Telegraph report, one that is commonplace in the media. This is that storage will keep the electricity flowing for the days and weeks when the wind stops blowing.
According to the Telegraph:
There is particular need for so-called long-duration storage that can be deployed over weeks rather than days to counter periods of “dunkelflaute”, when cloudy skies and stagnant wind conditions reduce the output of renewables.
Under Mr Miliband’s plan for a clean power system by 2030, the amount of long-duration energy storage is expected to rise from about three gigawatts today to between four and six gigawatts – enough to power millions of homes.
Traditional lithium ion batteries are not ideal for this owing to their high cost and relatively short-term output, as well as degradation over time and the large numbers that would need to be built.
Possible alternatives include “flow” batteries, which store energy in liquid electrolytes, pumped hydro storage, compressed air storage, heat storage such as thermal bricks or molten salt, and caves that can be used to store hydrogen.
Apart from hydrogen storage, which is not feasible at scale in the next decade at least, this “long-duration storage” does not exist. As usual, the Telegraph talk about “six gigawatts”, but don’t mention how much electricity this will supply.
Pumped storage, for instance, might supply power for a few hours at most; compressed air is no better.
NESO inform us though that 5-8 GW will store 50-99 GWh, in other words about ten hours supply. This of course will be irrelevant when we are short of power for days on end.
Moreover, 50 GWh would only be enough to run the grid for an hour.
It is time that the Telegraph started asking real questions about Miliband’s mad agenda, instead of these silly, puff pieces.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Paul Homewood
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