Europe's Biggest Battery Storage System Switched On (bbc.com) 160
What is thought to be Europe's biggest battery energy storage system has begun operating near Hull. The BBC reports: The site, said to be able to store enough electricity to power 300,000 homes for two hours, went online at Pillswood, Cottingham, on Monday. Its launch was brought forward four months as the UK faces possible energy shortages this winter. The facility was developed by North Yorkshire renewable power firm Harmony Energy using technology made by Tesla.
The Pillswood facility has the capacity to store up to 196 MWh energy in a single cycle. It has been built next to the National Grid's Creyke Beck substation, which will be connected to Dogger Bank, the world's largest offshore wind farm, when it launches in the North Sea later this decade. The system, which will use Tesla's AI software to match energy supply to demand, had been due to be switched on in two stages in December 2022 and March 2023. Peter Kavanagh, director of Harmony Energy, said: "Battery energy storage systems are essential to unlocking the full potential of renewable energy in the UK and we hope this particular one highlights Yorkshire as a leader in green energy solutions."
"These projects are not supported by taxpayer subsidy and will play a major role in contributing to the Net Zero transition, as well as ensuring the future security of the UK's energy supply and reduced reliance on foreign gas imports."
The Pillswood facility has the capacity to store up to 196 MWh energy in a single cycle. It has been built next to the National Grid's Creyke Beck substation, which will be connected to Dogger Bank, the world's largest offshore wind farm, when it launches in the North Sea later this decade. The system, which will use Tesla's AI software to match energy supply to demand, had been due to be switched on in two stages in December 2022 and March 2023. Peter Kavanagh, director of Harmony Energy, said: "Battery energy storage systems are essential to unlocking the full potential of renewable energy in the UK and we hope this particular one highlights Yorkshire as a leader in green energy solutions."
"These projects are not supported by taxpayer subsidy and will play a major role in contributing to the Net Zero transition, as well as ensuring the future security of the UK's energy supply and reduced reliance on foreign gas imports."
Not supported by subsidy (Score:5, Insightful)
They really should be. This is exactly the kind of thing subsidies are for. Promoting technology that meets the policy goals of government. ... If the government had any policy at all that is.
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This usually do not need, they charge the batteries on low energy prices and them sell it on high energy prices... that usually happen daily, that is enough to pay for the project in a few months (at least what happen in australia)
Re:Not supported by subsidy (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, but the capex required to build it is big - there the government could help, either with a subsidy to make the capex lower, or else favourable loans that mean some part of that capex is very cheap money (the rest coming from whatever funding sources the operator has), or possibly electricity price guarantees (as they do with nuclear).
Without knowing the precise details, I would guess the UK probably needs a few dozen of these battery facilities all around the country. The market may think differently, or may think it's do-able in 10 years, but the government could stimulate that to make it all happen inside 2 years (or whatever).
So many other things are propped up by government, many of which people have either never heard of or don't understand. Here's one which we all can understand to be useful - why not jump on that bandwagon a bit?
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I expect the break even time to be in years, otherwise everybody would be doing it.
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Price arbitrage is certainly one money earner for these batteries, but it's not the *only* earner. Turns out, there's also value in ancillary services such as providing "inertia" to the grid. Ie, helping control the frequency of the grid.
Smaller batteries can't really participate in this market, which is why it's not been until the "age of the big batteries" to unlock all this value.
Re:Not supported by subsidy (Score:4, Insightful)
It has been done without subsidy so why complain that it should have been subsidised? Markets often work, that's why they have always existed and always will ;-) Subsidy (actually taxpayers' earned money) is not an infinite resource so it's better to direct it to those schemes which might actually *need* it.
For risky but high profit systems, loans better (Score:2, Interesting)
Given this system is likely to make a decent profit, a government loan or loan guarantee might be better than a subsidy. Whilst there are other examples of these battery banks it is a risky project because:
However, if enough of these early examples work out well then commercial entities will be more likely to finance them. Harmony got a fair bit of finance from th
Re:Not supported by subsidy (Score:4, Funny)
Well, let's be real. Does the UK even have a government in any meaningful sense at this time?
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That depends on what kind of batteries they are. Unfortunately, the linked article was not written for us, so it has no useful information in it beyond the capacity and location.
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That depends on what kind of batteries they are. Unfortunately, the linked article was not written for us, so it has no useful information in it beyond the capacity and location.
Some other articles on this opening reference the Tesla Megapack [wikipedia.org], which is based on Lithium-Ion cells so thermal runaway is certainly a concern. Tesla's pack management tech is generally pretty good, I don't recall hearing of any issues of that nature in their other large battery projects so one would assume they are addressing this issue.
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Tesla uses both NMC and LFP cells, and the difference is extremely important. The articles I found on the subject of this particular battery facility said they were using Tesla management software or something, but they didn't say anything about the cells.
Re: Not supported by subsidy (Score:4, Informative)
Tesla Megapack fires have already been fought in Australia and California. The one near me in California resulted in road closures because they didn't want people driving through the fumes. Essentially how it was fought was firefighters sprayed water on everything for 10 hours straight to keep it from spreading. And that seemed to work.
Expect these events to occur more frequently as many places are mandating batteries in their energy grid. California set goals for PG&E to reach by 2030, as part of a combination of requirements for moving to renewables and increasing grid reliably. I expect Europe, Australia, and other places that are deploying grid batteries are thinking along the same lines.
Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:3, Informative)
I’m always intrigued by how little storage is needed to provide really effective smoothing for renewables. Obviously, this particular facility is just part of the UK’s energy system, which is a whole lot more than just Dogger Bank and a battery pack, but seeing judicious, surgical application of storage for smoothing is really something.
From the other side of the world, this guy runs simulations of storage needs. Equally interesting: https://twitter.com/davidosmon... [twitter.com]
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and the batteries don't even need to power for some hours, it is just for a few minutes, until a gas or nuclear central pump up their energy production. instead of operating at 20% over demand, those centrals can operate maybe 5% or lower, if the battery gives enough security for enough time to rise the production when needed
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Power generations systems that use steam turbines (nuclear, coal, and some types of gas generators) are not good for surge demand. It can take a couple of hours or longer for them to ramp up to meet demand. Gas turbines (think jet turbines) and hydro can ramp up power generation within 10 minutes though. It really depends on the surge capacity of the UK power grid vs. the base load capacity.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
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Indeed - something the UK government should be maximising the benefit of. It's like oil wealthy nations not bothering with extracting their oil.
There has been a lot of investment. But even on a day like today we rarely get more than 50% of capacity out of some of the largest windfarms in the world because the wind doesn't blow everywhere all the time. As I type this the UK is using 39.4GW of electricity, 14 of which are coming from wind despite an on-paper capacity of 27GW on a day with storm warnings in every sea area around the country.
Having said that, we have more power than we need at the moment and are flogging the excess overseas - mostly to
Re:Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:5, Informative)
No, this is quite wrong. As you can see from these charts:
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind [gridwatch.co.uk]
or the equally interesting
http://www.gridwatch.templar.c... [templar.co.uk]
The fact is that this size of installation may be useful for smoothing out the intra day peaks and valleys, and perhaps will reduce reliance on gas somewhat, but its not the solution to wind and solar intermittency. The only solution to that is gas.
The problem is that wind in the UK and in Europe has long periods of minimal production at unpredictable intervals. They are caused by weather. There are also blocking highs, which produce calm clear days for a week or so at a time, and they can develop in summer or winter. They are common in January and February, and can last ten days or even two weeks, just when demand is greatest on the long, cold, dark, calm winter nights.
The main effect of the UK's attempt to move to wind and solar for its generation has been to increase its dependence on and use of gas. The reason is that gas plant can start rapidly, and that is what you have to have when wind fluctuates on the scale shown in the above links.
If you want to see the real scale of the gas dependency look at this top level:
https://gridwatch.co.uk/ [gridwatch.co.uk]
Today, right now, wind is providing about 14GW and gas 38% of demand. Yesterday gas was providing 50%, and wind was in single figures. Nuclear is constant at 11-12%. Solar is worthless now and for the next three months.
You cannot do this with battery storage. The only thing that works is gas backup. It is so essential that the way to think about it is not that they have installed wind and solar, with gas backup. What they have actually done is install gas, supplemented by wind and solar.
The Labour Party head, Keir Starmer, has announced they will have a program of getting to 100% generation from wind and solar by 2030. This is an example of the collective insanity that takes over otherwise intelligent people when they start talking about renewables. It is simply impossible. The only result of attempting it will be even more use of, and even larger scale build out, of CCGT (gas). But it will once more be sold as renewables supplemented by gas, when its exactly the reverse in reality.
Batteries have their use in smoothing the intra day peaks. But that is not the problem with trying to move to renewables. The problem is the week or ten day collapses. And the problem is also that solar predictably vanishes in November through February.
If people really wanted to take Britain to renewables, there is only one seriously possible method, and that is tidal, if it can be made to work. The reason is that it has a very long north-south coastline, which means that the tides occur at different points through the day. So you can, if you can position them right, get pretty much continuous power generation from a widely dispersed network of tidal stations.
If you can make them work. There are some signs that maybe it will be possible in the next five years or so. But wind and solar are not the answer to anything. Except subsidy farmers. And that is another very interesting story.
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Yeah, no to almost all of that. It's just the same old crap we've heard forever. Show me an example of a 10 to 14 day blocking period in January or February in the data and then let's chat. Which year did it happen most recently? What was the reduction in wind power output during this period?
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Yes. The other thing of course is what happens when the wind picks up again? Then you have to have enough reserve power to recharge as well as supply normal demand.
I think the question he poses should be put the other way around. Show someplace where battery + wind + solar is supplying continuous power. Keep asking, but never get any pointers.
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Show someplace where battery + wind + solar is supplying continuous power. Keep asking, but never get any pointers.
Wind and solar are not the only renewables - there also are hydro and geothermal (and probably more). Iceland is on 100% renewable energy, except for transportation (and they are working on that). New Zealand is at 80+% for electricity.
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Wind and solar are the only renewables you can just install wherever. You have to luck into hydro and geothermal.
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Wind and solar are the only renewables you can just install wherever.
No there not. You can't just bang up a wind/solar farm wherever you want too. Just like hydro and geothermal there are only a few selective places you can put up farms and they be productive. Honestly, when it's all said and done there is probably just as much work put in to locating a suitable site all 4 renewables mention.
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Well obviously not just anywhere but like you can find decent places to put solar and wind in most countries. The capacity factor will vary of course.
There's literally nowhere to build geothermal or hydro here, or in many other countries.
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Re:Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why you should look at the simulation I linked to. Which shows that a surprisingly, indeed counter-intuitively, small amount of storage provides a lot of smoothing. I don't think anyone's claiming that the UK's instantaneous dispatchable storage needs are now met with this single battery system, or even that Dogger Bank is now fully smoothed. The claim is simply that this battery system will provide a whole shitload of smoothing.
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You can go here [caiso.com] which shows renewables generation in California and look for a 5-minute interval where wind was generating 0 MW of power.
Searching over the past couple of weeks, the closest I found was on 2022-11-21 at 15:40 where wind was producing 237MW of power. So in California's case, you could say that wind in California alone can supply 237 MW of baseload power.
Linking up with wind farms across the continent and into Canada an
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https://californiaglobe.com/ar... [californiaglobe.com]
That's how well its working! You notice they didn't just build 5 more wind farms? Or install a few more batteries?
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Why would I attempt to show that?
1) It's not the goal. The goal is not *only* solar and wind and storage in any system I know of. They all use more low carbon sources than that -- hydro, tidal, nuclear, etc. They also all intend massive build-outs, which are far from over, plus use of smart grids, demand management, interconnectors, etc.
2) We don't have to get to 0% gas to be a whole lot less carbon intensive than today. If we get to 80%, sweet. 90%, even better.
You're setting up a bizarre straw man.
Re:Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:4, Informative)
The Leader of the Labour Party in the UK, Keir Starmer, has stated publicly that when and if elected his party will bring the UK to a wind and solar powered grid by 2030. The Net Zero project in the UK, as a matter of law since the Climate Change Act of 2008, does actually commit to net zero emissions.
This must mean the elimination of gas and coal fired generation from the grid.
If you look at the charts I cited, you will see that hydro and biomass are trivial in the UK, and will remain so. Solar vanishes in the winter, as the charts show. This leaves wind, which requires some kind of storage or backup.
It would be possible to have huge hydro storage in the UK to complement the wind. The late David Mackay estimated that to power the UK from wind and solar plus pumped storage would require the conversion of most of the Lake District, the Welsh mountains and the Scottish Highlands to that use. Buy or download his book here:
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
But this is obviously going to be neither politically acceptable nor financially possible. So this leaves gas. As the charts show, and as the gridwatch site shows on a regular basis, the main effect of the UK's effort to move to wind has been to increase its use of gas. The other day, for instance, gas was 50% of use, nuclear 12%, wind in single figures and solar almost nothing.
Even if you have a target of reducing gas and coal to a small percentage of total generation, rather than eliminate them entirely, experience shows it is not going to happen, because of intermittency. The UK, as a for instance, is never going to get to 80% wind and solar. Not even close. The US is even more of a no-hoper.
As the numbers I have just cited show, the UK, and everywhere else that has tried it on a national scale, is not in fact running a wind generation system supplemented and backed up by gas. It is actually running a gas powered system supplemented by wind (and solar in the summer). It is not represented as being that, but that is what it is. The question is therefore: where is the business case for this?
What you have to show is that the reductions in fuel consumption due to the supplemental use of the wind and solar pay for the installation and maintenance of the wind and solar and also the additional transmission facilities to bring the power into the grid at a useful point. You have to do it in the standard way, using Net Present Value analysis.
I have never seen a case showing this and don't believe it is possible to make one. Absent compulsion to buy and subsidies wind generated power would not have a market. In the UK Paul Homewood has added up all the sources of subsidy from publicly available official sources, and come up with a number of about 450 sterling per household per year. And that is to deliver the kind of performance that the charts cited show.
People here and on other forums talk vaguely about interconnection, the wind blowing everywhere etc. They never supply any numbers. It all vague assertions at the level of literary critics making assertions about engineering topics.
By the way, this last summer in the UK was a very low wind period which combined with a gas shortage. The result? Narrowly averted blackouts, and spot pricing going through the roof. Next time, as they try and move closer to Net Zero, it will be worse. They are now openly talking about three hour rolling blackouts this winter. This is what happens to a country when it tries to move its power generation to intermittent generators without providing total backup capability. But if you do that, you would be better off dispensing with the intermittent supplementation.
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South Australia is the world's largest GW+ scale grid that's getting close. They're at about 70% renewables, annualized [sa.gov.au], and demonstrating that it can actually be done at a nation level (outside of Iceland, NZ, etc). They're on track to reach 85% in just a few years.
.
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That's March, not January or February. And 7 days is a whole lot different from 10 to 14. And 30% is a whole lot different to nothing, not least when other sources are available, eg solar. And you seem to assume that the goal has to be 0% gas use. I don't see why. We can just use gas as a major source for 7/365 days, instead of 365/365 days, meaning the gas lasts that much longer.
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The point of the battery storage is to take a highly verbal system in the short term, like wind, and make it more predictable for the short term. Longer term, 8 to 10 day, wind is predictable and used all the time in the maritime world. With battery storage you can better plan for the low wind days and bring up capacity on your nuke plants. The energy grid is a system which seems you have ignored, stabilizing that system is a win and there's noting here to complain about.
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Bingo!
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I'm not the one who made the original claim and wouldn't have put it that way. That said check out January 18-26 here: https://www.rte-france.com/en/... [rte-france.com]
Even if you scaled wind installed capacity by 10, you'd be still running huge deficits the whole time. With some napkin math, maybe like 5TWh of storage would be needed to fill in.
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UK residential homes don't have aircon since it rarely gets hot enough for it to be used. UK homes are also better insulated than US homes, reducing the amount of power needed in the winter.
In 2021, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,632 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of about 886 kWh per month
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... [eia.gov]
According to Ofgem, the average British household uses 242 kWh of electricity/month
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/e... [britishgas.co.uk]
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Not easy to find the equivalent stat for US gas use, but the second graph shows the US residential gas use to be almost the same as residential electricity use (5.04Q BTU vs 4.83Q BTU in 2021), which would make US residential gas use about 10MWh/year.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl... [eia.gov]
Gas is still much cheaper than electricity in the UK:
34.0p/kWh for electricity and 10.3p/kWh for gas
https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]
Regardless of environmental issues, people are unlikely to make the switch to heat pumps until it is economical to do so.
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Our family of three used 8500 kWh gas and 1850 kWh electricity in 2021. That was much higher than the year before. We're fairly efficient, with our total bill coming in at 65-70% the UK household average.
Please check my sums:
196mWh*1000/300000 homes = 0.65kWh per home
My daily usage on average is 1850kWh/365 days = 5.1 kWh per day
0.65kWh/(5.1kWh/24 hours) = 3.06 hrs
The article said 2 hours, but as I said, we're below average. Sounds like 300,000 homes is about right on average.
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Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan.
You're absolutely right that European households in general use far less electricity than households in the US.
That's because electricity is only 24% of the total household energy use by a European home.
At the end of the day, total US household energy usage and total UK household energy usage are pretty close. 101 vs 83 GJ/Household/Year respectively.
But the claim that UK homes are "better insulated" isn't really supported in your citations, or t
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Interesting statistics, do you have a link?
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Here [aceee.org] you go.
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My stats do not prove that UK homes are more or less insulated.
A possible explanation for higher UK heating energy use is that since it's mostly done with natural gas, old natural gas furnaces can be wildly inefficient (as bad as 50%)
The only thing that can be conclusively said, is that UK homes use more energy for heating.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any data to dig further into that hole.
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Just had a quick look at the numbers - you worked it out at 325W/H.
325 x 24 x 30 /1000 = 234 kWh/month - which is similar to the 242 kWh/month figure quoted below.
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I average 150W consumption. Electric stove and oven but no A/C or electric heater. NAS and fish tank that are on 24/7 and a desktop PC+monitors that's up like 12-16 hours day (omg) now that I WFH.
That's probably fairly typical for any European household that doesn't use A/C or electric heating. If this random page (https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Energy/Electricity/Consumption-by-households-per-capita) can be trusted, the annual EU household consumption is like 1600kWh which works out ot abo
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Central Europe: I remember the entire month of february being a blocking period, circa 2008. -15C temperatures, no wind, clear skies.
Germany/UK: summer/autumn 2021 -- low wind conditions, UK reported 32% (April - September) less power generated than expected. (That's 11% of yearly expected production) Quote:
> [The 2021 summer was ] "one of the least windy across most of the UK and Ireland and one of the driest in SSE's Hydro catchment areas in the last seventy years,"
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Summer time is a completely different story. You said "clear skies". Guess what we get lots of with clear skies in the summer....?
Winter dark still days are much much more of an issue.
But as I've said at length and ad nauseam, with a finite amount of gas available, if we can use less of it on 60, 70, 80 or 90% of the days in the year, we make the gas we've got left last that much longer (and of course, reduce our carbon intensity per unit of time, too).
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Yeah, no to almost all of that. It's just the same old crap we've heard forever. Show me an example of a 10 to 14 day blocking period in January or February in the data and then let's chat. Which year did it happen most recently? What was the reduction in wind power output during this period?
Nice cherry-picking. What about August when temperatures reach 32 degrees C in London and there's basically zero wind for weeks on end as everyone turns on air-con?
Wind is useful but it's insufficient and unreliable and that's not going to change at a national scale any time soon.
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Ah, but we also over-provision solar by a factor of 20 and there there's no problem!
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Given how fast solar costs are falling... yes, we can and will do exactly this (although 20x is prob not going to happen)
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Of course, the costs will keep falling forever at the current rates and land and labor cost nothing
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We don't need costs to fall forever at the current rate, but equally there's zero sign of the declines halting any time soon. We can be confident that both wind and solar are going to get much, much cheaper than today.
Here's an analysis by Rystad, for example: https://www.rystadenergy.com/n... [rystadenergy.com]
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Power drain from air-con is not a big issue in the UK.
A 2008 report found that only 0.5% of UK homes had air conditioning.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
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Power drain from air-con is not a big issue in the UK.
A 2008 report found that only 0.5% of UK homes had air conditioning.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
2008?
In any case I didn't say UK I said London. I can tell you that there is a hell of a lot more aircon in London now than there was 14 years ago, because it's needed a lot more than it was 14 years ago. Sales of portable aircon in the south of England have been building generally too, but it is still very unusual to see fixed units sticking out of houses.
Re:Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:5, Informative)
Counterpoint, with data. [twitter.com]
Re:Interesting how little storage is needed (Score:5, Informative)
TL/DR for those who can't be bothered: this graph [twimg.com] plots wind capacity vs. solar capacity vs. storage vs. how much of your grid can be powered by renewables, using Denmark as an example (note: the numbers can exceed 100% because you can overbuild peak capacity). While it's difficult to get to literally 100% of your power with only (A) local (B) solar+wind+storage, it's easy to get close to it. The Pareto Principle matters. You don't need 100% solutions, you just need "good enough" solutions.At some point you get to the point where even simple things like burning waste biomass could provide the rest - let alone (A) HVDC links to even out supply and demand between different regions; (B) existing low-carbon plants (hydro, nuclear, etc) (C) tidal, wave, geo, and so on. Even completely ignoring all of those other things, you can get "close enough" with a proper mix.
We do still need to see price reductions to scale better, but said price reductions honestly seem already baked in. Both wind and solar's trends look to continue at least for the next several years, and currently battery storage systems are like $350/kWh, but by the mid to late 2020s I wouldn't be surprised to see the $50-100/kWh range, and there's potential - in the longer-term - for as low as perhaps $25/kWh (though that would probably require a non-li-ion chemistry). It should be noted that a linear drop in storage prices corresponds to an exponential increase in storage demand.
A side effect of this transition: if you overbuild peak capacity, then for most of the year you have power available in excess. Which will be sold dirt-cheap, and more specifically, industries can count on a certain percentage of every year having said dirt-cheap power, for the lifetime of their projects. Which will be a boon for power-intensive but time-flexible industries - to pick an example, desalination. Even things like supplemental greenhouse lighting can afford to ramp down the lighting severalfold during periods of high prices - lower yield during those periods, but dirt-cheap power for the rest of the year.
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To be more explicit on why I expect massive price reductions on storage (beyond simple trends):
1) Currently cells are ~100/kWh, yet storage systems are 3 1/2 times as expensive. This has several reasons, but one of them is the fact that the low supply of such systems favours systems with less storage compared to power; a larger fraction of the cost thus becomes non-storage overhead, esp. the DC/AC converters.
2) Additionally, to borrow an internet term, storage is the "red-headed stepchild" of the li-ion ba
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One little comment-- stationary energy projects generally use cells that are not at spec for EVs, which brings down their cost significantly. The power electronics (and magnetics) will never be less than half the project cost, well, unless you could make a 500kV battery bank to buffer a HVDC line directly.
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Thank you! That was exactly the tweet thread I was looking for. I saw it ages ago, and couldn't find it easily again. The Australian one isn't as good as this.
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The only point of disagreement I have is that because as you note wind and solar do not work without CCGTs but CCGTs work just fine without wind and solar, we are indeed backing wind up with CCGTs. Not the other way around.
Because if we just ran CCGTs, we wouldn't need to pair it with wind and solar.
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The dependence on gas started when Britain found oil in the North Sea, and started extracting it. Gas was a byproduct. So they migrated to gas:
https://euanmearns.com/uk-elec... [euanmearns.com]
That switch was over by the 1990s. No relation to renewables build out.
An argument can be made for gas being kept around because of them.
For the rest about gas peaker plants being necessary to smooth out renewable intermittence, Spain and Germany are a good example for that.
Adding a source for anyone inclined to look at electricity ge
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How do you so definitively rule out green hydrogen?
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source [hydrogen-central.com]
For now this is only temporary and due to the high price of gas due to sanctions on Russia. Green hydrogen is only now getting cheap enough to compete with gas when its price is spiking. But green hydrogen seems to be on a good price trajectory.
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Solar is a solution for reducing grid dependence, which is a good thing. Tidal and wave energy could be interesting, but they are far from simple solutions. Essentially you get a "run of the river" hydroelectric plant for the cost of enclosing a large bay with a seawall going to tidal, and that has a whole host of environmental issues.
A little math on the lede⦠(Score:2)
300,000 houses for 2 hours is 600,000 house*hours.
Or 2 houses for 300,000 hours. Glib but useless.
Or (sqrt) 774 houses for 774 hours (a month or so).
More practically, it can power 3,500 houses for a week (168 hours).
Or 12,500 for two days.
Those last two bits make sense to helping even out production or just add to the mix.
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You have some good points which I largely agree with except for the "gas supplemented by renewables". I agree that gas is and will be important to provide power when intermittent renewables are not available. Still, if most energy is from wind and solar and a small fraction from gas, saying "gas is supplemented by renewables" makes no sense, even if it plays a crucial role.
And gas can also be renewable, because it can be generated from biomass or electricity. We will also to continue to need gas for industr
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No, this is an example of the general rule that you can determine whether a politician is lying by checking to see if his (or her) lips are moving.
It's probably a safe bet that they mostly think people will forget this promise as soon as something more interesting comes along to watch. And they're mostly right....
Gas is a transition fuel that is better than oil (Score:2)
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Perhaps I should have said "lower than this winter". European countries all filled their storage to near capacity, but the UK didn't have any.
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st In Time was hailed as a game changer, but what it really has done in every corner of the economy is caused massive volatility. Be it energy, chips, food, ... I'm not sure it was such a good trade.
Toyota invented JIT inventory as we know it and then they went on to revise it, they realized it only works when you have intimate and positive relationships with suppliers so you know what you need to stock and what you don't. Most people are still using the alpha version of JIT and it shows. It works best for fully vertically integrated companies like Brembo, they own mines and foundries, do their own machining etc. They know exactly what's what, when, and why.
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Thanks for sharing that Twitter link - certainly an interesting simulation.
But... that simulation assumes 120 GWh of storage. That's ~600x the capacity of the battery bank described in this article, which is supposedly the biggest in Europe. Building that storage capacity wouldn't be a small task for even just powering Australia, let alone trying to do so for Europe or the US.
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Yeah, it’s an ok link but it’s not great. The link Rei posted is much better, bc it has multiple simulations in there:
https://twitter.com/enn_nafnla... [twitter.com]
So remind me... (Score:2)
The UK *IS* part of EU now, or not? ;-)
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Re: So remind me... (Score:4, Insightful)
The article says biggest battery in Europe, not the EU!
No! Hint - the EU is not equal to Europe! (Score:2)
In the same way that Canadians take exception to the citizens of the Empire calling themselves Americans, it is foolish to view Europe as meaning the EU and 'European' to mean a citizen of the EU.
For the record, I voted against leaving the EU, but given its present trajectory into being subsidy generator for Italy, amongst other misdemeanours, I'm pleased we're out.
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To be fair, considering the political shit show that is the UK, so are most EU citizens.
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No, the UK is not part of the EU. It is in Europe. Take a lot of earth movers or a geographer to change that.
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I am glad to have them as my western neighbors.
It is not part of the political abomination that is the EU, though.
"Europe" or "UK" ? Choose one. (Score:2)
Yeah, kinda jumps out the UK is referred to as part of Europe after the whole Brexit thing, right?
That said, is European Union is really just an economic/political thing and Europe is a geographic thing?
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is European Union is really just an economic/political thing and Europe is a geographic thing?
The two are different, but...
All countries entirely included on the European continent are either EU member, EU candidate, EU applicant, EU potential candidate (all of these intend to become members), or EU associated country (do not intend to join but have a a bilateral agreement that makes them apply many aspects of EU legislation). The exception is Belarus and now the special case is UK.
Assuming no world disaster, the difference is only transitional: all Europe either has stable arrangements with EU that
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You seems to have forgotten about a lot of European countries! Excluding a country because it is not 'entirely on the European continent' seems a bit odd e.g. you would also have to exclude several EU countries for the same reason.
There are about 447 million people in the EU and about 746 million people in Europe so a little under 60% of people in Europe live in EU states.
There are 27 countries that are in the EU.
At the end of the following page is a list of 23 European countries that are not in the EU(5 of
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Thanks for the list. I did not forget them, I chose a scope excluding the transcontinental countries (excluding therefore Russia, Turkey, and the Caucasus), and stated that all the remaining except Belarus and UK are Candidates or Applicants or Associates.
This includes Moldova, Ukraine (Candidates), Bosnia (Applicant), Kosovo (recognized as potential candidate), Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia (Candidates in phase of negotiations), which in the long term will become part of EU. Except those who
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Yeah, kinda jumps out the UK is referred to as part of Europe after the whole Brexit thing, right?
Depends what you mean by "part of Europe". Of course the UK is still physically located in Europe. That statement merely gives a geographic designation; it's close to a truism and means very little.
More than a geographic meaning is usually implied, somehow, but that is always completely arbitrary, subjective and hence useless.
If there is a reasonably well-defined and meaningful legal, economic and political dimension to Europe, the EU is your closest approximation.
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My evil internal chuckle says they should petition to be their own continent...
Good news for nuclear fission power (Score:2, Insightful)
One big complaint against nuclear power is that the big steam turbines can't vary their output quickly. One way to deal with that is to use batteries.
France built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 1970s and 1980s and then discovered the problem of matching supply to demand. They found they could lower output relatively quickly, to deal with reduced demand at night, but could not bring them up to power fast enough. With careful scheduling of reducing nuclear power plant output, rotating which power pla
Less than 200 MWh is tiny (Score:2)
As well explained by other members, this battery capacity is extremely small.
It can store less than 10 minutes of the output of a modern EPR.
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Yeah, I can't figure the math on that. If it holds 196 MWh of energy, and that's enough to power 300,000 homes for two hours, each home can use an average of 327 W of power. That doesn't add up to me. My electric bill shows a daily average of 44 kWh, which is almost six times as much power. Do these homes not have heat pumps or cooking appliances?
Re: For 2 hours? (Score:2)
The average consumption in the UK is 10kwh per day for electricity. This doesnâ(TM)t include gas which is commonly used for cooking and heating.
So numbers check out.
Re: For 2 hours? (Score:2)
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No, it is perfectly reasonable if you use the average power usage of the household being served by the storage in question.
As they indeed do.
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Yeah, the math is wrong there - because houses in Europe and elsewhere generally don't get a lot of power. The average North American new home by default these day
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Europe is a big place. Some countries are all-electric and larger services are the norm. Also, American utilities only provide about 1/3 of the rated capacity to a residential customer, as the electrical code forces massive oversizing to manage fire risk.