Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up What's claimed to be Europe’s largest battery has come to Scotland, after a new facility came online in the country’s north. Located at a site named Blackhillock near the small town of Keith, the battery can deliver up to 200MW of electricity and can store as much as 400MWh. Charging current flows into the facility from …
They only need to flood one for us to object.
And we (the decedents of those displaced) been trying to drink the darn reservoir dry ever since, just so we can go see our ancestral homes once more.
Well, it's that or take up scuba diving and go swim in the darn reservoir to see if the buildings are still down there...
Also, for most of its life Dinorwig was an unprofitable white elephant that never covered its costs. Whilst it's now viable based on successive writedowns through the privatisation process, it wouldn't be economic to repeat, and that's pretty much true for most pumped storage.
Dinorwig worked very well when it was used as it was intended to be used: as short term store charged by nuclear base load and discharged to fill the gap while spinning or warm reserve came online. It onky made sense as a system like that, so when it was privatised it became, as your say, completely unprofitable.
Basically, some bits of systems aren't there to make money but to enable the system as a whole to make money. Like IT departments, say, whose staff often forget this.
The UK has four pump storage schemes in use: Cruachan (440MW) and Foyers (300MW) in Scotland, and Dinorwig (1800MW) and Ffestiniog (360MW) in Wales. These give a combined storage of 32GWh.
Work has started to upgrade Cruachan to 1000MW (using the same reservoirs so the storage capacity doesn't change).
Another one is probably going to be built in Scotland, the Coire Glas Project, which would provide another 1300MW, but with a capacity of 30GWh (full power for a whole day) and there are a couple of others that are at the proposal stage.
Yes, and all those numbers explain exactly why this is not a way forward, to make Wind or Solar viable.For even a “first cut”, for Solar you need about 8-12 hours storage. But the big fact is that Wind becalming typically lasts on a scale of 1-3 weeks. 100-500 hours….@30GW = 15TWh. This doesn’t touch the sides, and never could.
If a scale-up of x2 or x10 gets you where you want to be, then it may be worth pursuing. If a scale-up of 500x would still put you at the “well below practical scale” stage….then *stop digging*. It’s the wrong technology.
Part of it is degree of readiness.
If you need a thermal power station to deliver 4GW at a moment's notice it needs to be turning and burning.
With a day's notice it may not even need the pilot light on.
With a week's notice you could announce an unscheduled Bank Holiday.
Yes, this.
The objections to wind/solar/battery always seem to boil down to "but it isn't close to ready to supply 100% of electricity so we should forget the whole thing".
It isn't like all our fossil fuel plants will be razed. The ones that are old and with too much maintenance debt eventually will be. Then the ones that are the least efficient or most polluting will be. But the newer or cleaner ones will just go from running 24x7 to running less, to being on "standby" where they can be spun up if there's a really cloudy or still week, or a natural disaster takes out part of the grid.
The loss of large thermal power stations has been happening for several decades and they have often been decommissioned prior to the replacement energy source being built. The decision to close a power station is usually political.
The objection is actually more along the lines of:
We are paying generators to turn off as the grid infrastructure is not there.
We are paying more than we should due to marginal pricing and the energy source that picks up the slack when the renewables drop out is the most expensive.
We have allowed ourselves to become reliant on imports from other countries and this can get VERY expensive.
We are also paying for the legacy of the dash for gas as at the time no-one thought it was going to be so expensive.
The public HAS been sold the line for quite a while that renewables ARE ready to supply 100% of the energy demand AND they are cheaper (the figure of 9x cheaper was banded about) yet bills keep going up and up.
> The public HAS been sold the line for quite a while that renewables ARE ready to supply 100% of the energy demand AND they are cheaper (the figure of 9x cheaper was banded about) yet bills keep going up and up.
The problem (as you slightly hinted at) is the Market for electricity is geared that the wholesale price the the reselling company you buy your electricity from is set by whichever one is the most expensive at the time of the auction, with the generators having a "strike price" for themselves.
If the price set at that moment is below a companies strike price then they get is made up (by the government I think), if the price is above the strike price then they have to pay it back.
OFGEM then sets a price to us that should cover all that
OK, that is my simplistic understanding of it, I could well have got it wrong. But the bottom line is that for most of the time Gas generation has been used to set the price which was great whilst gas was cheap....the moment it wasn't the price skyrocketed is it provided the lions share and was always available.
Back on the days of the CEGB my understanding is that they used the most economical power generators first and as demand increased they would then used the next cheapest etc with the price we paid being the average cost of the whole thing.
Today it is the energy market that is broken.
"Today it is the energy market that is broken."
Very much so. The two countries in Europe that use this model are the UK and Germany. Oddly that also correlates to the two with the highest electricity prices... go figure!
The smart meter rollout was utterly botched by allowing supplier linked meters to be rolled out while at the same time the govt advice to keep your bills low was 'shop around'. The meters should have been supplier agnostic from the very start. But as the saying goes, if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing twice.
OK, that is my simplistic understanding of it, I could well have got it wrong. But the bottom line is that for most of the time Gas generation has been used to set the price which was great whilst gas was cheap....the moment it wasn't the price skyrocketed is it provided the lions share and was always available.
Not entirely true, ie depends what you mean by 'most of the time'. For much of the time, the price setter had been 'renewables', which was pretty much the intention in order to subsidise wind farmers. Then there was 2022 and decisions to ban EU members from buying cheap gas, the mysterious explosion of Nord Stream, attempts to blow up Turk Stream and assorted bits of geopolitics that gave traders the jitters and made gas prices fluctuate. But handy site here-
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-portal/wholesale-market-indicators
So at the end of February, gas prices had dropped to pre-2022 levels, mostly due to mild weather but have since gone back up. But still below CfD strike prices for 'renewables'. Then this week in EUroland, there's been some other oddities, like the wholesale price of electricity going negative due to it being nice and sunny.. Except with the way the market is rigged in the UK, most users (ie people without solar PV and a FiT) won't see any benefit because we have to pay generators to not deliver their product. Energy policy really is broken.
Back on the days of the CEGB my understanding is that they used the most economical power generators first and as demand increased they would then used the next cheapest etc with the price we paid being the average cost of the whole thing.
That would benefit consumers, industry and incentivise more people and businesses to go electric to meet 'Net Zero' targets, along with reducing inflation. But the way the market is currently rigged, and with 'renewables' lobbyists firmly in chage of both the Climate Change Committee and Ofgem, isn't likely to happen any time soon.. Especially not with Ed Millibrain in charge of the whole mess.
It isn't like all our fossil fuel plants will be razed. The ones that are old and with too much maintenance debt eventually will be. Then the ones that are the least efficient or most polluting will be. But the newer or cleaner ones will just go from running 24x7 to running less, to being on "standby" where they can be spun up if there's a really cloudy or still week, or a natural disaster takes out part of the grid.
This just doesn't work in practice; taking a station designed to run continuously and only spinning it up occasionally destroys the economics of the station causing the owners to walk away - unless you are willing to pay more for it to sit idle. The reason it is more than when running is that a refit will give 15 years of life when run continuously, but if started and stopped up to twice a day (as can happen if it is low in the efficiency pecking order), it can burn through it's maintenance allowance of restarts in as little as 2 years. Plus it will be deluged by complaints from locals, as instead of a restart in the middle of the night every 18 months, now people see it emitting yellow smoke every morning as it fires up for a few hours to cover the shortfall of renewables, but never gets up to operating temperature.
Standby plants still need to be built and maintained, and all those costs are borne by the increasingly few GWh they produce. This has four problems:
#1 It just plays into the hands of the environmentalists who want to claim fossil fuels are expensive. They aren’t, they are just being the patsy for transfer costs from Wind.
#2 You’re assuming that companies will be prepared to keep gas plants on standby, by being paid subsidy from govt to do so. The lesson from coal, is that they *are not prepared to do that*. Turned out there was *no* price that govt could pay, which companies were prepared to accept to keep coal as standby. They simply decided that running a shell was not a business they were interested in, and shut it down against the protest of govt
#3 At some point, maybe 20 years from now, those empty gas-fired shells running 30 days per year, are still going end-of-life. They will shut down and need to be replaced. New gas plants will need to be built, for the sole purpose of running for 30 days per year. Hands up if you want to bid for the contract of building and owning that? With zero guaranteed running time = zero revenue in any particular year. Yeah. Me neither. So how exactly does this “sustainable” future work? Not very sustainable is it. It only works by living on your parents trust fund.
#4 These gas plants, which will be running for 30 days backup per year. Where are they getting their gas from? In todays world, there is a constant pipeline from wells running 24/7, througn refineries running 24/7, 500,000 tonne supertankers which take 30 days to cross the world, and re-gasification of LNG at receiver ports.
In your intermittent world, the entire world fossil fuel infrastructure also needs to start up and shut down on a dime. Except, it’s got an end-to-end latency of *months*. Tell me, how do you predict the wind months ahead, to turn the whole industrial infrastructure off and on again? This does not work. Its toy model economics.
"But the newer or cleaner ones will just go from running 24x7 to running less, to being on "standby" where they can be spun up if there's a really cloudy or still week..."
That is the issue. The standby station will only be used roughly 10% of the time. Thus, they will have a capacity factor of 10% making their energy costs very expensive. One will have to pay for all the maintenance and personnel costs for something that just idles 90% of the time. One will have to have as much of the idle capacity as there is demand in the country since the output of both both wind and solar can fall by a factor of a 100 for a the duration of a week.
Of course, if one is willing to suffer some form of blackout for 10% of the time (for up to week at a time) then one might not need the same dispatchable capacity and it wouldn't be as expensive. Perhaps only hospitals and other critical infrastructure (e.g. some minister's dog house /s) can be connected to the "reliable" sources.
To reiterate - pumped storage is great for short bursts of peak demand or to tide the system over until slower machines come on-line. That's what it was created for (my Father designed Dinorwig). When it was constructed, the turbine hall was - briefly - "the largest room in the world"!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Many more of these needed, with the added benefit you get a reservoir for free. Obvs you can’t just deplete its water for normal supplies
..
… but it gives you options ….esp. over a hot summer where solar will be at it’s peak during the day and the general need for it will be lower than in winter.
“Many” more of these, indeed, to provide actual full backup for fully wind and solar (zero fossil fuel).
About 20,000 Dinorwigs in fact. That’s for the electricity usage we have today, it doesn’t include what we would need for the much grid demand when all vehicles go electric; and all home heating/cooking goes electric.
And in fact when the hotter summers mean that UK homes start to install air-conditioning to stop people dying. Remember, those heat pumps you’re telling people to install instead of gas boilers, all run in reverse as air-conditioners. This is great, a genuine Green Dividend……except how are you going to stop people actually *using* them?
This is great, a genuine Green Dividend……except how are you going to stop people actually *using* them?
you have everyone install smart meters that can be remotely controlled to drop high amperage circuits like heat pumps / car charging but keep your lights & fridge on.
Look why bother giving a figure "We store enough energy to supply 3.1m houses with energy for 2 hours" when the 3.1m houses doesnt have any real world parallel!
A quick Internet search shows there are approximately 2.5m houses in Scotland. So surely a statement along the lines of "We can supply energy for EVERY house in scotland for ~2.5 hours!" would be a much better sound bite.
But it is great that they are implementing this, and using European tech to do it! :)
Maybe 400W today, but that's with gasoline powered cars (and some percentage of homes using natural gas for heat) but if over the next few decades they turn to electric cars and heat pumps maybe they need more like 1 KW.
I will readily admit I don't know what kind of heat is common in Scotland, maybe electric resistance heat is more common than gas and heat pumps taking over for both resistance and gas would mean less overall electric usage.
No may about it. Some of the local councils have removed wood / coal burning fireplaces and replaced them with electric heating - I seem to recall that was just before that village lost power for a week or two.
In terms of heating we have mains gas, calor gas (either tank in garden or cylinders), oil, electric (often night storage) and a bit of solar / heat pump.
In towns and cities I'd guess emphasis on mains gas, in the villages and isolated dwellings oil is probably most common. We also have bloody great wadges of wind turbines often not turning at all.
We also have bloody great wadges of wind turbines often not turning at all.
Sometimes you can see them turning when there's no wind, which is sometimes necessary to avoid damage to the windmill's shafts and bearings. When that's also combined with anti-icing, it can mean windmills switch from being energy producers to energy consumers. Which is a genius move because that happens when demand is usuall high because it's cold and there's no wind. Just another of the many ways 'renewables' increase the problems rather than solve them. There's been a couple of times last year where wind generation has gone negative because of this.
400W is great for overnight when we are asleep.
Not so good when the household is up and about and lots of things are switched on.
That's the problem with "averages", during the evening peaks in mid-winter which is when it would probably be most needed that number would fall considerably
"400W is great for overnight when we are asleep."
No, it's the full year average... it doesn't care when the shift worker sleeps. Given that it's the average it's likely way more than most households use whilst they're asleep (might not be overnight).
So what number would you use if you don't use the mean - would you use the median, the max, the max of an individual household or of the Scottish grid as a whole, or just houses in Scotland?
The whole point of using averages isn't to say "Oh we can supply eleventy gadzillion homes irrespective of what they're doing", it's to say "this is about how much power a house uses, and we cover that lots of times over".
One would have hoped that people on here would have some mathematical ability, and be able to understand averages.
There is certainly an argument to say "you're looking at a 2 hour discharge time at full chat, so you need to take the peak two hour load (again, needs to be averaged across a wide timescale) and report on that... but they could also discharge over 4 hours, so maybe they should use that number, or 8 hours....
The only number that represents a consistent metric to present is the overall average. It might be interesting to say "this power is 60% of the peak domestic load seen in Scotland last year", but that's a different metric, and they already gave that by giving the numbers... we look up what those numbers represent, but for the average joe the "two hours for all the houses in Scotland" is the easiest comparison metric to present.
"The whole point of using averages isn't to say"
Sadly this is exactly what very long averages DO say.
My daily average is more like 700W. However my peak has exceeded 15kW. So I have about a 20:1 peak to mean.
Where I live there are 8 properties connected to a single transformer. I have a 100A fuse in my house and I know the transformer has a 150A fuse as it has blown in the past and I chatted to the guy who was replacing it. One of the properties is a group of holiday cabins and the owner applied to add 4x 7kW EV chargers. That got shot down pretty hard. You cannot rule out all of the chargers being used at once. You could run your year long average on the EV chargers for the holiday cabins and get a really low figure as they will only be used during the summer. The reality is *very* different.
My point is that generation needs to be scaled to instantaneous demand, not an average.
For the last 24 hours my average is 542W and a peak of 4002W. 8:1 peak to mean. And my usage is quite predictable. A peak in the morning for the kettle, if someone is home during the day a peak at lunch for lunch and a rising usage in the evening with a potential longer period of high demand for cooking supper. Now its unlikely that us and next door have the kettle on at exactly the same time every morning but there will be overlap for supper and both houses will turn on lights as it gets dark.
One of the reasons they built pump storage such as Dinorwig is to serve as a peak generator and one of the example cases was people putting the kettle on after the football or after watching Corrie.
They even have some graphs showing the demand spikes during the footie.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091229024828/http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/1C4B1304-ED58-4631-8A84-3859FB8B4B38/17136/demand.pdf
You see jumps in the order of a couple of GW, not MW.
"They even have some graphs showing the demand spikes during the footie."
Can we ban the soccer matches? pretty please.
Far too great a rise in domestic violence as a result of "large" football matches.
And this battery is designed to support loads of 200MW, it's not intended to be the sole supplier of peak load, but it absolutely is intended to contribute to exactly the "problem" you mention.
The description of the use in terms of averages is something that people who are not mathematically adept can just about understand, and it's a pretty consistently applied metric.
For the rest of us the 200MW/400MWh is all that needs to be said.w
"there is something wrong in the figures somewhere..."
And also the fatuous assumption that the annual average consumption reliably represents instantaneous demand (or even demand over a few hours). The notional 1 kW won't even make your tea (the typical modern kettle draws 2 kW). The erroneous thinking matters primarily because the "big battery" is essentially an emergency fallback device (a giant UPS), not a device for continuous delivery under normal conditions.
It's, presumably, designed to be used as an arbitrage system - probably over the span of 24 hours... which means it won't always be full (i.e. not a UPS).
It's not even a UPS, it's supplemental to other systems, it's brown out protection, not blackout - think of it as a capacitor on any power delivery circuit... take the not quite steady input power, and the decidedly variable output power and use a capacitor to smooth out the discrepancies...
The kettle isn't an issue, because it's uncommon for everyone to have their kettle on at the same time - it used to be more dependent on TV schedules, but with more an more people not watching TV "live" that's a weaker effect than it used to be.
It's a substantial portion of Scotland's demand which can be supplied - albeit for a short time period, but the response times are extremely fast compared with other supply options.
Bearing in mind that the gov wants us all electric for its net zero ambitions.
you have typical use as 3700kWhr per year
I have an all electric house with heatpump.
I've used 4000kwh already this year and I don't have an electric car.
The government should be prepping for the average to be 10000kWh per annum if it wants all electric.
My sparky also warned about the current domestic limit on a house being 100A.
If you are all electric you have heating at 20A, a hob at 20A, a one or more showers at 20A and an electric car pulling 20A. It would be quite easy to put your house over the 100A limit. Older properties can have 80A or even 60A supplies.
Not long until homes need 3 phase supplies.
Those fuses are slow blow....it takes a LOT more than 100A to make a BS88 60A fuse blow instantly (something like 5 to 10 times or more....) - I grew up in a house with an 8.5KW shower, electric storage heat (though my mother was utterly miserly with it and I ALWAYS remember the house being like a meat fridge....freezing!!) and electric cooker and oven with 5 folk in it and 60A fuse never blew, despite many many many kw of electric heat running overnight (side note - the SSE total heating with total control system is being shut off or has been shut off which is causing headaches galore as it was installed a Lot in Scotland....)
"If you are all electric you have heating at 20A, a hob at 20A, a one or more showers at 20A and an electric car pulling 20A. It would be quite easy to put your house over the 100A limit. Older properties can have 80A or even 60A supplies."
And that's why various of those devices can and do monitor the incoming load and adjust accordingly.
Even with storage heater charging, home battery charging, all the white goods running, and an EV charging... I've only ever managed 63A (under 15kW) over a half hour period.
I disagree. I can assimilate what 3.1m houses means - I can derive a rough figure for how many people that covers, roughly what percentage of the UK populate that represents and so forth.
But "every house in Scotland" means very little to me. I don't know how many houses there are. Being pedantic, are we talking houses or households? Are we talking about populated house(holds) or including every holiday-let, second-home and other unoccupied premises?
I'm really puzzled as to what you mean by saying "3.1m houses doesn't have any real world parallel"!! I'd have said the real world parallel was... 3.1m houses!! Can't get much more real than that, and certainly more real than a nebulous "every house in Scotland".
"and using European tech to do it!"
Despite the leaders of Scotland and the UK incessantly touting that *we*, meaning their respective fiefdoms, are going to become world leaders in green tech. How does buying the engineering from Finland (who almost certainly bought the batteries from China -- a quick perusal of their website offers up no details but I'm pretty sure they'd have it splashed all over the front page if the batteries themselves came out of a factory in Europe) make us leaders?
Its a completely commercial play. There's big money to be made by being the generator of last resort especially if you can fuel up for free.
And, yes, houses as a unit of energy consumption is complete bollocks. Running 3.1m houses at 5pm is a very different prospect from doing that at 5am.
"There's big money to be made by being the generator of last resort especially if you can fuel up for free."
I doubt it's free fuel unless the battery farmer is also the solar and/or wind farmer too. And even then, for various financial and tax reasons, the wind/solar farmer would "sell" themselves the excess energy to their battery farm at some price or other. Currently, wind and solar, if producing excess, get paid to "dump" it, so this may go some way to balancing that. Ideally there would be enough storage of one form or another to absorb any and all excess from wind and solar and also hopefully reduce the costs of having slower startups like gas powered generators having to be kept on near-instant stand-by. If storage can give an hour or threes leeway or maybe half a day, that ought to reduce at least some of the cost of stand-by fossil fuel generation.
There's a lot of talk about the hidden costs and wastes of renewables, and there most certainly are at the moment. But as more storage and generation comes on line, it should get better. Although I still struggle to see us running entirely green over a full 12 month cycle while trying to charge our EVs, eHGVs, eBuses and run electric trains, never mind electric arc furnaces for steel making etc.
We need more nuclear, but that seems to be incredibly expensive, at least here in the UK where every design seems to be some new and unique "prototype" just for the UK and not a tried and proven design available "off the peg"
Purely anecodotal... and the anecdote is from Australia, not Scotland, but...
I have a fried with a PV + battery on his home and a deal with a supplier that allows the supplier to control (within limits) whether his battery is importing, exporting or isolated. He sees the status of his connection to the grid, and the wholesale energy price on the app that comes with this setup. And he occasionally sees the wholesale energy price go negative when the sun 'unexpectedly' shines in the middle of the day. I don't think the deal allows him to charge up his battery and be paid for the privilege, but it does seem that at least for short periods, oversupply on the grid does occur. What's the opposite of 'load shedding' ?
Wholesale price can go negative in the UK too. Not very often. That's when you will see the Norway interconnect run in reverse so that they can refill their reservoirs for free to sell back to us later.
More frequently it drops very low. From a typical rate of around 120 - 150p/MWh it can drop as low as 20 when the wind is blowing and demand is low. It can also spike to over 200 when supply is tight.
Buying at 2p and selling at 200p is as close to free money as it comes. You just need to factor in the finance costs for the plant versus the number of arbitrage opportunities you can capture.
Scotland is connected to England, Wales, and the Irish Grid.
And windy.
So sometimes the connections, plus all the kettles in Scotland, are maxed out and wind has to be discarded.
Batteries near the generators allow more electricity to be captured, and it's release to be spread over longer periods.
Zenobē claims Blackhillock will somehow save folks more than £170 million over the next 15 years on their bills .. belive it when I see £1 discount off my yearly bill or is this the same style money digital meters claimed to save for each person and in fact ended up costing each person? Spin, lies and deceit !!
Unless things have changed recently or are planned for the near future then my understanding is that the electricity price for a period (24hrs I think) is set by the cost of the most expensive generation. So if just 1% of generation is from gas-powered stations then that lovely cheap renewable electricity will cost the same per unit as if it were generated by gas. I bet the likes of Tesco and Aldi look on with envy at a market where the suppliers' prices are automatically raised to that of the most expensive every day.
As a minimum there should be a legal limit on the amount of profit the power companies are allowed to make under this absurd system but, IMO, it's the best reason in the world to nationalize them.
I can sort of see OFGEMs point of view though. If they cut back on the subsidies, no one else will come into the market and the incumbents will stop investing. Government policy is to go green, so they can't afford to stop the gravy train for, I suspect, at least another 10 years. Although the imbalance of "highest cost generator wins" feels entirely wrong to me too.
@Headley_Grange: "Unless things have changed recently or are planned for the near future then my understanding is that the electricity price for a period (24hrs I think) is set by the cost of the most expensive generation. "
It was vaguely like that a long while ago (actually a 30 minute trading and balancing period, not 24 hours), and there's still a wretchedly broken pretence that the system works this way now. However, there's all manner of different subsidy schemes for renewables dating back twenty plus years that distort this supposed wholesale market. The current method is Contracts for Difference, administered by the Low Carbon Contracts Company. Whilst the theory is that CfD enables the market to work, it clearly isn't much of a market when the most expensive wind farm (Walney) is getting £208/MWh when the average wholesale price is £80-90 at the moment. Likewise Hinkley Point C, which hasn't even been finished but has a current strike price of £125/MWh. All those CfDs will keep going up by inflation for the duration of the contract - in the case of Hinkley that's until about 2063.
So you think that the sort of PFI deal where the NHS "benefited" from £13bn of PFI investment, but will pay back £80bn are just dandy, because the contract should come ahead of fairness even if the private sector investors have already recovered their investment and handsome return with zero risk?
Some of these CfD and related agreements are quite unbelievable, and they should be reviewed. If that means private sector funding is no longer available for energy system projects that might be a good thing, because government (who already decide what is to be built) will then have to pay for it. They can still use the same manufacturers and constructors as they're not the rip-off merchants who are benefitting from CfDs. That's the City.
It's the same "savings" associated with smart meters. In some cases the saving is "real" in the sense that it could avoid constraint payments to wind generators when there's no demand - your choice whether that's a real saving, or simply an artefact of a very a poorly designed subsidy scheme for renewables. How that stacks up against the capital and O&M cost of the battery system, and the inherent systemic losses of battery storage.
The power that goes into the Zenobe battery will already have been bought at a nice generous price from the Beatrice and Moray East wind farms. Moray East chose to defer their inflation linked CfD contract, meaning that this single wind farm has already hit consumers for an extra £460m, but they can/have reverted to their strike price where wholesale prices drop - an appalling contract design failure that means they can have their cake and eat it.. Beatrice benefits from an inflation linked strike price that's currently £194/MWh.
It's the same old rubbish from government - they'll credulously throw any amount of subsidies at anything that sounds vaguely net zeroish, but the way that the energy system is structured these subsidies don't come out of tax revenues, they're just added to consumer's bills. And THAT is why we have the most expensive electricity prices in the developed world.
"belive it when I see £1 discount off my yearly bill or is this the same style money digital meters claimed to save for each person and in fact ended up costing each person? Spin, lies and deceit !!"
Smart meter has saved me more than a grand a year...
Because I've not just carried on as I did before, I've engaged with time of day tariffs, smart tariffs, and the electricity market in general.
Installing something which allows you to save money is great - but you still have to do the saving of the money yourself.
Well I do hope you're not saving money and the planet by doing things like running appliances whilst people are asleep? Amongst the most common cause of domestic fires is faulty white goods, and if you're asleep and something goes wrong then the by the time (and if) the smoke alarm goes off it may be too late.
A quick news search on terms like fire, tumble dryer, washing machine, dishwasher, Beko, Hotpoint, Whirlpool will produce some graphic and tragic examples. Buying premium appliances reduces but doesn't eliminate the risk. Leaving appliances on during daytime when there's nobody in the house has little human casualty risk, but generally means that in the event of a fire the entire property and contents (and any pets) are lost.
"If you can dry outdoors, yes. Dumping a load of water into the air in your house is not a good idea in the colder months."
I'm on propane so not having to fill up cylinders as frequently is a good thing. I'm also in the desert so even in winter, many days are very dry and clothes on an outside line will dry fairly quick, especially if there is a breeze. In summer, the first hung up will be dry by the time I finish hanging an entire load. Sometimes I need to leave jeans out longer. Even if I need to use the tumble dryer, pre-drying clothes on the line is a good idea, just not today as we have rain.
Using electricity to dry the air seems to be no less effective than using it to heat a tumble dryer.
And the power used is delivered inside the house, with an efficiency rather over 100% because the energy of condensation comes out as well, and the dried air is cheaper to warm to room temp than damper air - water has a high specific heat.
It gets complicated.
That is one of the things I do... but we also clean the filters, which reduces the risk to basically naff all...
We also have smoke detection in the utility which is not anywhere near the escape routes from the bedrooms - and linked smoke alarms through the house.
Two half hour rated fire doors between the units and the escape route, so there's plenty of time for calm evacuation in the extremely unlikely event that any of the devices suffer a critical failure.
A news search doesn't actually help, what you need is to search for the fire investigation reports, and they almost always include clogged filters.
"what you need is to search for the fire investigation reports, and they almost always include clogged filters."
I am constantly amazed by peoples stupidity. We try not to use the dryer unless we have to (even here in the UK, it's not that common to go so long without at least one good "drying day" to hang stuff outside and I know, people in flats might not have that option at all), but the NUMBER ONE instruction on care and feeding of a tumble drying it to clean the filter after every use. It takes seconds and maintains the efficiency and keeps the costs down. There seems to be far, far too many people around these days that thinks every device is idiot proof and doesn't need any maintenance at all.
Definitely do the filter every use, but don't forget to still check the vent periodically. I hadn't and the amount of crud in it was remarkable, once removed the dryer started doing loads much quicker (and will be much safer).
Of course the best way to reduce your drying and the associated costs is not to have teenage daughters who will chuck something in the wash after wearing it for 30s, but apparently even environmental concerns aren't considered justification for beating them round the head with a washing basket.
"even here in the UK, it's not that common to go so long without at least one good "drying day" to hang stuff outside"
That assumes you aren't doing 4-5 washes a week, and that you have the time (around work) and space (though you do acknowledge this) to hang outside.
It also feels like it ignores winter... which is a good portion of the year.
I live far enough south that I wouldn't get frozen clothes very often, but getting clothes dry outside would feel like a sisyphean task at best.
That assumes you aren't doing 4-5 washes a week, and that you have the time (around work) and space (though you do acknowledge this) to hang outside.
That can just raise additional energy savings (or just money saving) issues. Like do you really need to do 4-5 washes a week? I think it's one of those things that constant detergent ads have conditioned people into believing. So jeans used to be rugged work clothes, now they can be pre-distressed fashion items that people wash after every wear because they're 'dirty'. Unless people have been rolling in the mud, they're almost certainly not. So stuff ends up getting washed more often than it really needs to be, wasting water, electricity but benefiting detergent manufacturers and makers of 'fast fashion' who's stuff will probably fall apart after a few wash/dry cycles.. Assuming the washer/dryer lasts that long. I wash stuff like socks & pants after every wear, bedding ever week and shirts & suits get proxy-washed at the dry cleaners, mainly because I hate ironing and they do a better job of it than me.
Some of it needs a bit of planning, and when my old machine finally packed up, I replaced it with a 10kg model. Work shirts got bought 5 or 6 at a time so there was always enough to take one off, chuck it in the laundry bag and have plenty for the rest of the week with spares if I didn't get a chance to get to the laundromat. It's also a handy traveller trick, ie instead of packing lots of stuff for a trip or holiday, pack less and just use the hotel laundry.. Which is often cheaper than paying excess baggage charges. Plus holidays often tend to become shopping trips, so more room to take stuff back home.
It also feels like it ignores winter... which is a good portion of the year.I live far enough south that I wouldn't get frozen clothes very often, but getting clothes dry outside would feel like a sisyphean task at best.
I think that can also be an element of conditioning. If you're used to hanging out laundry, you get to know if it's a good day to hang the washing out. So as long as it's dry and preferably a bit of wind, it'll dry. Downside is if nobody is around to bring it in if it rains. Plus frozen clothes can be entertaining, like bringing in a pair of trousers and letting them stand up on their own. Then again I'm maybe more used to it and have managed to end up with frozen hair a few times for being out wet. Very odd sensation..
Depends how many people in the house, depends on medical conditions, age, exercise habits, job…
Good drying days that are reliably going to stay dry for nine or more hours aren’t in great supply… and that’s the reality for many people. No point in washing and putting out to dry if it’s going to get soaked again, with not quite clean rainwater…
"Some of it needs a bit of planning, and when my old machine finally packed up"
Way back I didn't have laundry as I built a small flat upstairs at my business and would use the local laundromat. With enough socks and skids for a couple of weeks, I would use the big units to do all of my washing at once and could use a bunch of dryers at once too. The big folding tables made is easy to fold and pack up everything so I was done in around 2 hours. While waiting, I had a portable DVD player or would take my mp3/cd player and listen to a book. I ran the numbers on buying a new W/D set when I moved into a rented house and it was far cheaper to use the laundromat to the point where there might not have been any ROI on having my own. In the end, I purchased a top of the line set second hand and 20 years later, they're still fine but showing some age. I'm keeping an eye out for a front loading washer at a good price. Since I try to try outside as much as possible, the dryer may outlive me.
Way back I didn't have laundry as I built a small flat upstairs at my business and would use the local laundromat. With enough socks and skids for a couple of weeks, I would use the big units to do all of my washing at once and could use a bunch of dryers at once too. The big folding tables made is easy to fold and pack up everything so I was done in around 2 hours.
Yep, that seems to be one of the cultural differences between the US and UK. The US seems to have more laundromats and people using them, and those seem rarer in the UK. Having access to a decent sized industrial machine makes washing stuff like duvets a lot easier as well. I also noticed US apartment buildings often had laundry rooms, not just to use as horror movie locations. The UK doesn't tend to have those either, which is inconvenient, especially given UK apartments tend to be a lot smaller. And then there's the thing that sometimes puzzles Americans, like why we have washer/driers in our kitchens instead of a laundry room.. Which is again back to typical size differences between US & UK properties.
Since I try to try outside as much as possible, the dryer may outlive me.
Yep. I've rarely owned a dryer and don't really like using them. One advantage I think of drying on a line is clothes tend to end up less creased because creases drop out while stuff hangs. If they're tumble dried, creases seem to 'set' and need more ironing. And I hate ironing. But when I was looking to buy property in the US, I noticed that quite a lot of HOAs banned clothes lines because they were 'unsightly'. Some parts of Germany have also banned them, and some apartment buildings ban owners/renters from drying clothes on balconies. This seems counter-productive with the pressure to 'save energy'.
"One advantage I think of drying on a line is clothes tend to end up less creased because creases drop out while stuff hangs. "
If you take things directly out of the drier onto a hanger then they don't end up creased. Current drier does a loose tumble every few minutes for three hours after a cycle has completed, which helps.
I don't iron. Why bother, it's just going to get creased when I first sit down
If you take things directly out of the drier onto a hanger then they don't end up creased. Current drier does a loose tumble every few minutes for three hours after a cycle has completed, which helps.
Yep, I guess it's one of those habit things. If the laundry's done while you're out, that helps. The AEG washer I got has a pretty good (and quiet) spin cycle that leaves stuff pretty dry, and I'm usually around to take stuff out of the machine and hang it rather than leaving it to crease.
I don't iron. Why bother, it's just going to get creased when I first sit down.
Tradition I guess. My work expected me to be suited and booted a far amount of the time.. Which was often a bit pointless after 30m+ commute on the tube in summer.
"This seems counter-productive with the pressure to 'save energy'."
The eco/green warrior stuff is coming from the very top of government and the bans are at the local level. I may have to sneak some solar installation in on a weekend as while there's a big push in the US for people to have solar panels fitted, the local fees double the cost and take ages. It's almost as if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Or is that just me?
"Having access to a decent sized industrial machine makes washing stuff like duvets a lot easier as well. "
In another couple of weeks it will be full spring and all of my duvets will get thoroughly cleaned and put away until late fall. I'm saving up quarters for the machines.
I expect that the lack of laundry facilities in the UK can be down to there being no provision when a block of flats was being built or a building being rebuilt into flats. To add it now would mean deleting a unit and fitting a load of plumbing. I doubt the profit made from charging to use the facilities would be enough to compensate. I've seen a few developments that have ~6-8 detached or semi-detached homes where it might make sense to have built a laundry house for the development that could also have an outdoor dog washing/car washing station, storage for grounds keeping tools, etc. Given the cost for the appliances and maintenance/repairs, not having to foot the bill for all of that can be a big savings. I like being able to use large machines to do more at once. I've looked around and in the US, anything made for a home is a fairly standard size and anything larger that would be used commercially usually needs 3-phase power that I don't have.
"You could get a phase converter... Though obviously that does add somewhat to the cost/complexity."
Or just become a minor investor in a laundry with the sort of money that would cost. Yeah, it's too much to make that work. Finding commercial machines second hand that aren't beat to crap is tough too.
"I am constantly amazed by peoples stupidity. "
You smug git. Your simplistic assumption that this is all about people not cleaning the lint filter shows how little you actually understand of the problem. As mentioned elsewhere that's not the only cause of tumble dryer fires by a very long way. But where it is a lint fire, give thought to the fact that it's 20effin25, and it shouldn't be possible for a domestic appliance to catch fire in this way. It doesn't happen on premium brands, why does it happen to Hotpoint, Beko, Indesit machines? It's simple enough to have airflow and temperature sensors that can stop the machine operating if the filter is clogged, but you're busy blaming the users. Moreover, what of people who don't have the education and intelligence we have been blessed with? The people with busy or chaotic lives? The people who sometimes overlook this or get distracted?
Judgemental, patronising, middle class view: "You should read the manual. The fatal fire was your fault for being thick"
"That is one of the things I do... but we also clean the filters, which reduces the risk to basically naff all..."
I wouldn't be so confident. I can't say too much because this extends into an area I work in and I don't need to use news searches to know the situation, but be assured that clogged lint filters are very far from the only cause of fire, with door switches and condensate pumps also popular fire starters, along with simple things like wiring faults. But let's park tumble dryers - you're aware that washing machines cause more fires than tumble dryers? And that dishwashers cause near enough the same number of fires as tumble dryers?
Tumble dryers actually beat out washing machines, not by alot, but they do win (at least in England).
Looking at the last 14 years of FRS reported data... (Specifically the March 2024 Domestic appliance fires dataset)
I filtered out deliberate fires as not relevant to this conversation.
The total number of accidental fires caused by tumble dryers is 9036, washing machines 7594 and for completeness washer dryers 1035.
My assumption is that tumble driers are used less than washing machines - partly because not everyone has one, but I don't know anyone with a drier but not a washing machine, and partly because in summer months drying outside is common.
That alone significantly elevates the risk from a TD compared with a washing machine. And again, I've not filtered on cause of fire, so failure to clean the filter is in this list as well as other electrical failures.
For completeness:
Dishwashers registered 3901 fires, fridges/freezers 3181.
Even domestic computer equipment registered 605, and I've got substantially above the average amount of that running...
No, but if I'm awake then I will notice very quickly that something's badly wrong and have the opportunity to get myself and others out of the house and call the fire brigade.
London Fire Brigade advice: "Don’t leave the washing machine, tumble dryer or dishwasher on overnight and unattended." No if's no buts. And that unfortunately is based on their considerable experience. However, the argument in this thread is from people who think they know better than LFB. As competent adults they can make that choice, doesn't make it a wise one. Even with smoke alarms and a secure exit, a house fire is destructive, expensive and traumatic. Colleague of mine knows this because her house burnt down due to a faulty appliance (not white goods related). Luckily that was during a work day when everybody was out but I'd invite everybody reading this to think for a moment of a scenario where with no warning they have no home and no possessions, only the clothes on their back and whatever they carried out that morning. Is it really worth saving a few shekels on your 'leccy bill to increase the risk of that outcome? Clearly it is for some people.
There are plenty of things that are a risk that we do every day - getting out bed is a risk.
The risk of a house fire due to a faulty appliance is very small:
Fires per year per appliance in England, excluding deliberate fires:
Fridge/Freezer: 227 (I have two, so 454?) Dishwasher: 278 Washing Machine: 542 Tumble Drier: 645 Computers: 43 (And I have substantially more than the average amount of this around)
That's about 2k fires a year, across just shy of 30 million households - so that's an expected fire in a given house every 15 thousand years...
This accounts for less than 10% of house fires.
There are ten times as many car fires every year... reducing my risk of a car fire has more effect on my safety than running a maintained tumble drier overnight.
"Because I've not just carried on as I did before, I've engaged with time of day tariffs, smart tariffs, and the electricity market in general."
It's informative to be able to turn something on and see what it draws which wasn't easy to do with a mechanical meter. The digital meter they've fitted to my house doesn't have the option for a remote display (bastards) so I've used my Kill-o-Watt to sample what different things draw. If it ever becomes profitable to sign up for a TOU tariff, I'll know what to run at what time given a choice. So far, the flyer the electric company has sent me on a few occasions shows that I'd pay more with a TOU tariff. I don't see why they bother sending me this stuff if it's obviously cheaper for me to carry on with the plan I already have. My guess is they are required to feed my paper shredder.
This will have a big impact on bills, its built in Scotland to reduce curtailment.
When the wind farms in Scotland could run, but the Scottish portion of the grid doesn't need power, we're currently paying the wind farm operators the market rate for electricity, and paying gas CCGT operators in the rest of the UK for energy. This BESS will soak up a lot of that curtailment energy - lost generation - and feed it out at peak times, reducing the amount of gas generation we need. The amount of gas generation we need directly controls the unit rate of electricity, and the amount of curtailment directly affects the grid costs, which will reduce the standing charges required.
The BESS operator is going to make money, we're going to save money. The people who won't be overjoyed about this are the wind farm operators, who'll actually have to run instead of just building another wind farm where its windy but there's no demand for electricity, and the CCGT operators, who'll have less demand.
"This will have a big impact on bills,"
Yes, brace yourself for higher bills and burn an offering to ward off the giant grid battery catching fire.
There needs to be a way to send electricity price down the lines in real time or close to it (15 minute intervals?). People could then engage their battery storage to charge when prices are down whether it's a home battery and/or an EV. They'll be more economical when needing to run from that battery should power go out or when prices are high. A giant grid level battery removes the incentive to conserve and has a greater possibility of polluting the local area with toxic magic smoke as has happened too frequently in other places. I can see it boosting executive bonuses and as a way to get free government grant money. If that same grant money was divided up amongst private individuals, I think it would do more good. I'd especially like to see places such as town halls fitted with batteries so they can be used as places for people to gather, eat and stay warm should there be a supply interruption. Where I live, the senior center is opened to everybody in the summer since it can get quite hot and not everybody has AC or can afford to run it enough. I used it last year to save some money since they have good wi-fi and plenty of room to do work. It's asked that I step out if I want to use the phone.
For very low values of "often".
The likelihood of a fire is going to rise with the number of cabinets, but also with the number of installations.
The likelihood of someone bring there ready to do something will be high for a huge installation, and low for a small one.
I suspect arithmetic has been done.
There needs to be a way to send electricity price down the lines in real time or close to it (15 minute intervals?).
Are you just not aware that this already exists?
A giant grid level battery removes the incentive to conserve and has a greater possibility of polluting the local area with toxic magic smoke as has happened too frequently in other places. I can see it boosting executive bonuses and as a way to get free government grant money. If that same grant money was divided up amongst private individuals, I think it would do more good.
Ah grand, so you don't know how any of this works. Brilliant.
There is no government grant money here, just good old fashioned commercial price arbitrage. Prices are expensive between 4-8pm, and cheaper at other times, especially over night. This company has built something so they can buy cheap electricity, store it, and sell it later when its more valuable. They aren't getting public funding to do this.
It has been built in Scotland, because they have a surplus of green energy, often very cheap green energy - its often windy overnight, when prices are low. If there is no demand in Scotland for energy, but there is in the rest of the UK, the grid pays the windfarm operators to not generate electricity. This project captures that energy, increasing the MWh of green energy produced, and reducing the MWh of gas burned to generate electricity.
The amount a supplier pays for a unit of electricity depends on 2 things - the unit rate, and the standing charge. The unit rate comes from the cost of providing all the energy needed in every 30 minute block of the day, and is set by auction, with every winning generator being paid the price of the highest winning bid for that 30 minute block - almost always a gas generator. If the amount of gas required at peak times is reduced, the winning price in this auction will be lower, and all electricity at the peak times will be cheaper.
The amount they pay for the standing charge/network costs depends on the amount of curtailment in the system - how much the grid pays wind farm operators to not generate electricity. As curtailment goes up, so does the standing charge. This plant will reduce curtailment by providing additional demand for energy in Scotland.
The demand curve for electricity in the UK is extremely variable. The evening peak of 4-8pm can cost 5-20x the unit rate of off peak electricity. Most customers use a fixed rate tariff rather than agile ones, but the cost of providing that peak is the same for all customers - its just priced in to the fixed rate tariffs, and the customers on fixed rates can't avoid it. Reducing the height of that peak is the number one way of reducing electricity costs.
"There needs to be a way to send electricity price down the lines in real time or close to it (15 minute intervals?).
Are you just not aware that this already exists?"
Not everywhere and it's not being implemented that well.
A universal standard or a least some that cover large regions would be useful. If you could plug in your EV and have it charge up pretty full when prices go below a set point you choose, that could save lots of money and soak up oversupply. When prices are high, you'd only charge an EV enough to meet your needs. The same sort of thing could be integrated into a home so you could charge up a home battery, heat more water or have the house a bit cooler/hotter based on cost.
All well and good, but taking advantage of low off peak wholesale rates means consumers have to be exposed to higher peak rates. If you're up for that then fine, but the concept of Time Of Use tariffs is widely misunderstood, and to really work needs to be automated as many consumers can't make good choices against time of use tariffs. Experience in the UK is that the most widely offered time of use tariff that offers known operating hours, usually is linked to timer-managed storage heating and a simple two rate structure still sees about one third of the consumers on it being worse off than if they chose a flat rate. That's based on company analysis across a 5m customer base when I worked for a large energy supplier.
"All well and good, but taking advantage of low off peak wholesale rates means consumers have to be exposed to higher peak rates. "
Not necessarily. The low rates would come about through there being an oversupply which can be very common with wind. Instead of feathering the turbine blades and turning out of the wind, they could still generate power and sell it for some return. At this point, the key to making wind worthwhile is to pair it with usages that can tolerate the intermittency. Using price can let a customer decide at what point their situation makes sense.
To achieve net zero the government needs to encourage citizens to ideally switch to electrical energy only as electrical energy can be generated by renewable sources.
What I can see is that the UK seems to be encouraging the switch to electrciity by making it the most eexpensive option for energy. Why heat your home with gas when you can do it for 4x more with electricity?
If the price of elecricity was the same as the price of gas per unit of energy people would be queuing up for heat pumps and evs as the saving would make it a simple choice. Industry would switch to electricity wherever they could as well. Cheap 'leccy would be transformative.
But it'll never happen as it would need thinking that extended beyond the 4yr parliamentary term
"Indeed, for reasons no one seems to quite understand all the green taxes are lumped onto electricity rather than gas."
Only a fraction of the energy system costs of net zero are recognised as green taxes perhaps about a third. That's because things like grid investment to support renewables aren't separately accounted, nor are all the wind and solar subsidies, all of which are just lumped into your ever-rising 'leccy bill. Other than VAT, there's very little of electricity costs that are actually taxes - government set all the policy rules, and require the energy system to bill you for their vision/folly. Government do have plans to move the recognised element of "green not-taxes" onto gas bills, but are wary of the changes this would have. In reality it's only window dressing anyway - they've committed to huge sums being spent on pursuing net zero, using private capital. That means consumers have no choice, the system is subsidy driven and therefore inefficient, and the opportunity for private capital to earn huge, safe and inflation linked returns squeezes out investment in the real economy.
If the "green taxes" were separated out on the gas/leccy bills that wold allow whoever is in opposition to scream about tax increases. Increasing the unit cost of energy hides it so you can't call it a "tax" and when the bills go up, it's not a "tax increase", just a general grumble about higher energy costs and pass the blame onto "world economics".
They are also encouraging us to move to electricity when the distribution network has not been upgraded to cope with the new loadings.
Yes there are people who will use averages to claim that there are no upgrades needed but the reality is the IET says its needs upgrading, the grid operators say it needs upgrading, new renewable projects are waiting years for connections and current large scale renewable generation has to be turned off due to lack of capacity in the network to get the 'leccy from the source to where it is needed.
HMG seem to believe so. And then reality will hit them (and us) hard for their insanity.
Reality will hit us long before the useless shower of sh*te the UK has in government. Especially when the new head of the 'Climate Change Committee' used to head 'RenewablesUK'. And then there's Ofgem, who no longer have to focuse on consumer interests, but executing Millibrain's orders. It should become a textbook example of regulatory capture.
Also the article's title might be a bit dual use "windy storage site fires up" given the tendency for battery/subsidy farms to catch fire.
"HMG passed a law to say we have to be carbon neutral by whenever. Surely that's enough for it to just happen."
Right? It's even worse in the US since the government has less ways to force people and industry to conform to whatever green agenda they've signed the country up for. If you have a company that's considered "heavy industrial", chances are that you'll need to find a new country to base in. I've already made plenty of improvements to be more energy efficient, so it would be difficult and expensive to shave another XX% off of my usage for the goals to be met in short order. Over time I am working on things to increase efficiency, but to make those changes right away is more money than I can budget. I'm very put out that these decisions are being made by politicians with no regards to reality.
"It's even worse in the US since the government has less ways to force people and industry to conform to whatever green agenda they've signed the country up for."
And the problem is? Didn't Trump just scrap all that and shout "DRILL BABY DRILL"? Have your energy costs not just dropped through the floor making you cash rich again? Or have all those coal mines re-opening last time he was in power all closed again? They should all be re-opening sometime next week I think. I'm sure the "only 10%" tariffs on Canadian oil won't cause any problems.
"Didn't Trump just scrap all that and shout "DRILL BABY DRILL"?"
And previous Presidents said "sure, the US can reduce its carbon footprint by XX percent in the next several years" with no regards to how it would be done and what the impacts might be. I certainly wasn't advocating for the current administration's idiocy.
"f the price of elecricity was the same as the price of gas per unit of energy people would be queuing up for heat pumps and evs as the saving would make it a simple choice. Industry would switch to electricity wherever they could as well. Cheap 'leccy would be transformative."
Indeed it would, but cheap electricity is neither a policy goal, nor an outcome of the energy system that government are ensuring is built. Having established that wind costs are high but coming down and wind could provide all the energy the UK needs (intermittency issue aside), they're STILL throwing ludicrous sums at technologies that we don't need and won't scale well or cheaply like tidal and wave power, such as the tidal schemes with a current strike price of £277/MWh (about four times average wholesale price).
The real killer in the government's clueless policy is the index linking of the risk-free pricing being granted to schemes. The overwhelming majority of the costs of all renewable schemes is up front design and build, opex is minimal, perhaps 2-3% of total scheme value in O&M each year. Yet for the 25-35 year CfD life the strike price will go up each year by inflation. That's absolute stupidity of the highest order, and will guarantee that our crown of shame of the world's highest electricity price will be retained for decades to come.
"Other countries have much greener elec grids compared to the UK yet do not have the high prices....Spain, France, Nordics, Eastern provinces of Canada."
Nordics and Canada, and to an extent Spain benefit from low population density and a geography and geology that makes extensive hydro power widely practical. A fair generalisation is also that much of the hydro asset base was built under state ownership and is moderately old, so the costs are pretty low. If they'd built it under the common private models fueled by inflation linked subsidies it wouldn't be.
France is different - the country spent billions on nuclear plant through the 1960s to cover most of its demand, although that plant is coming to the end of its life and at present they can't afford to replace older kit at the prices the EPR is coming in at, and the French government has held electricity prices down deliberately.
"The UK and Germany just seem to be doing something very wrong when it comes to energy"
Yes, but I'm not sure the named countries are examples we can follow. Offshore wind is the UK's most abundant renewable resource, the problem is the way government have gone about funding it.
"they're STILL throwing ludicrous sums at technologies that we don't need and won't scale well or cheaply like tidal and wave power"
Funding some projects is not a bad thing. Maybe somebody comes along and cracks it. Any grants need to have a deep level of supervision so a company working on something like tidal power can't get grants of their org is top heavy and execs are being massively compensated. Having a variety of methods to produce power is important. Any country that's dependent on getting anything from another country needs to be thoroughly backed up, just in case. Just look at what's going on in the US. What's been going on in Russia. Even something that is rather expensive is better than none at all.
There are no dunkelflauts for tides, nor do they wait for any man.
The tidal barrage across the Rance estuary paid for itself a while ago, and turns out a predictable pattern of power. For decades past and to come.
Having something like that, even if it isn't the whole of the Severn or Bristol Channel, is quite attractive. Given a couple of adjacent lagoons one could get clever with continuous power.
"Given a couple of adjacent lagoons one could get clever with continuous power."
That sort of thing hits me as being very expensive. I'd like to see more thought being put into things that don't require continuous power. Tidal is very predictable and also drops out only twice a day during slack tide. If there's a use for the power that can deal with that, it would be a good match. Even big factories often have changeover/maintenance periods. To have to make schedules track tides isn't neat and tidy enough for MBA's, but it could mean far less cost of production.
That sort of thing hits me as being very expensive. I'd like to see more thought being put into things that don't require continuous power. Tidal is very predictable and also drops out only twice a day during slack tide.
It's one of those back to the future and neo-luddite ideas. In the days before steam, we used water mills and those often had mill ponds to act as resevoirs. Most of the mills were obsoleted, but a fair number of the ponds remain. Projects like the Severn Barrier were/are very expensive, intermittent and environmentally unfriendly because it alters the ecology of the Severn estuary. It's one of those odd things where 'Green' scams are pitched as being good for the environment, but end up harming it. Plus the Severn project also included a plan to build a few acres of artificial land, so the developers could build luxury waterfront apartments on that and make even more money from heavily subsidised land.
It's the subsidies required that are the big problem with 'Green' and 'renewable' projects. So as an example, the Rampion wind farm has generated £895m in subsidies, at the cost of spoiling the views from Brighton beach-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/03/06/rampion-wind-farm-has-been-paid-895-million-in-subsidies/#more-85983
A nice bit of business for RWE who owns that subsidy farm, not so nice for UK energy users who have to pay for those subsidies via energy bills.
"What I can see is that the UK seems to be encouraging the switch to electrciity by making it the most eexpensive option for energy. Why heat your home with gas when you can do it for 4x more with electricity?"
When you can heat at least four times as efficiently with electricity the cost differential is zero.
Take an older gas boiler - 60% efficient, or a new one at 90%... then take a heat pump at 350%, 400% or even 500% efficient (efficiency in both cases measured as useful heat output vs gas/electrical input)....
And you suddenly aren't paying more, despite using electricity rather than gas...
Given a little additional technology you can really skew the numbers as well... last year my unit cost for gas was actually 16% more than my unit cost for electricity.
Now, when I add a heat pump I am well aware that my electricity unit rate will increase... but it could go up by a factor of four (which is impossible on my current tariff) and I'd still be heating my home and water for less than now (not alot, but less).
I didn't want to mention it but I have a heat pump and the claims that the efficiency with somehow put money in my pocket Vs gas are demonstrably bollocks.
Much like a car's claimed MPG figures an heat pumps efficiency is not constant and is only achievable in the lab.
To set the scene I have a new build which is electric only. I have a latest generation heatpump, I have all appropriate insulation to meet current standards. I have underfloor heating and I have oversized radiators. In the real world the heat pump efficiency is around 200% Vs Gas. Easy to compare because the neighbour in an identical house was so frustrated with his ACHP that he had it ripped out and replaced with gas.
In the summer when it's warm it might well get better efficiency but I couldn't really care less about that for 1hr of hot water generation a day. In winter it's about 1:1 vs gas at best and in really cold weather it's worse as the pump will backflow the hot water to defrost to prevent icing on the radiators. Yes you can add solar and batter to this but your looking at £10-£20k extra which has a ROI of 7-10yr. and that ROI depends on government policy.
I'm not dismissing the tech like a daily mail reader, it does work. The usual complaints about them not generating hot water, not working when it's cold and being noisy are rubbish.
But there are lots of compromises. As said it's expensive to run mainly downt o the price of electricity. It've switched to a HP tariff which has helped but it ignores the fact that the pumps are designed as low output heating to deliver a little bit of heat over long periods. So getting two periods of cheap power helps with the hot water bill but nmot much else.
Heat pumps are effectively like massive storage heaters. They heat the slab under your house and just like other storage heaters you need to know your heating demands in advance or you heat on warm days and play catch up on cold ones.
If you have a draft in your house the heat pump cannot keep up and you will be cold. Leave a window open, cold. And remember that in a new build the regulation require you to have trickle vents in all your windows. So your nice insulated home is required to have holes punched in every window. To have fresh air without losing heat requires a MVHR which requires integration into your house from the start and that requires your builder/developer to have engaged with people who know what they are doing.
They are massively more complex than a gas boiler.
Parts are much more expensive than gas boilers
It's much harder to get someone to service it and service prices are higher.
So gas is simple, cheap and reactive to change (UK weather),
ASHP are complex, expensive and unresponsive
We're asking people to pay a lot of money to switch to a more complex and less usable heating system which uses energy at 4x the price to be 'green'.
If electricity was the same price per unit as gas my bills would be half that of gas as the system does use about half the energy.
I said it was 400% better than gas, which actually only requires a scop of about 3.5 (and I'm being generous to boilers here)
Decent installers, such as those in the heat geek scheme, average 4.2 - and since many people publish their data it's not hard to find examples of even higher scop.
"And remember that in a new build the regulation require you to have trickle vents in all your windows."
A tube of silicone sealant fixes that issue!
In winter when there is a light breeze, open up a couple of windows for 10-15 minutes to flush out humidity. Yes, you lose some heat, but just heated air. All of the stuff in the house is still warm and the temp will come right back up. It's important to keep the humidity down for a healthy home and that's worth a few quid a month.
A 4LA I hadn't encountered but it's "mechanical ventilation heat recovery" with some details on WikiP Heat Recovery Ventilation
Many+ decades ago when I was studying renal physiology I thought that counter-current heat exchangers would a great idea in our climate to "keep the cold in." Basically a passive component between the aircon and the outside. Never really heard of such an arrangement but the wiki article seems to indicate the fixed plate exchangers are something along those lines. Humidity is also a big problem in tropical/subtropical climates which likely complicates any simple solution.
I also thought the Electrolux (hydrogen/ammonia/water) cycle refrigeration would be great in very hot sunny climates but I think the ammonia is considered too hazardous for domestic use.
In these parts solar (PV) plus LiFePO4 battery is not far from being an economic standalone option. The vast majority of houses have at least 5kW of PV on their roofs and adding a 10kWh battery isn't prohibitive with many of the older existing PV panels being 120W due for replacement presumably with 300-400W panels with the need for a larger inverter even larger batteries might become attractive. Say 20kW + >20kWh. To prevent significant grid disconnection I imagine suppliers will have to offer a decent prices for any energy drawn from domestic batteries presumably with the current fixed connection and supply cost amortized into the price. (As it ought for normal supply.)
Every little doesn't help said the Blair government's science adviser, unfortunately no longer with us. Google sustainable energy without the hot air.
Batteries probably can't do the job, except for smoothing.
We need the equivalent of a coal tip able to supply power for three months stacked in the rain outside power stations. Until a solution on grid scale at a cost equivalent to that of a coal tip is found, we will continue to burn gas when the wind and sun stop.
No-one seems to have an answer to that yet. Except nuclear.
We already have "the equivalent of a coal tip able to supply power for three months stacked in the rain outside power stations" - hydro electric:
Cruachan can reach full load in 30 seconds and can maintain its maximum power production for more than 16 hours if necessaryhttps://www.drax.com/about-us/our-sites-and-businesses/cruachan-power-station/
Okay, 16 hours is not the same as three months, but that's just one hydro electric power station. Scotland alone has got two pumped-storage power stations and dozens of conventional ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Scotland
" Scotland alone has got two pumped-storage power stations and dozens of conventional ones."
I'd like to mess with a gravity storage system on the side of a hill. There's a company working on system right now that they prototyped with a "train" car on tracks that would be run up a hill when there was excess wind power and let to go down to generate electricity. It seems like that would be cheaper than pumped storage and could be economical in more places. I never liked the tower crane gravity storage as it has issues with wind and a safety failure could mean a big lump of concrete falling or the whole tower being compromised. Something on an incline with tracks could be more like a funicular.
Problem is that water is the easiest method to push stuff up and down - storage space is a real issue with a train track system...
I quite like the idea of doing this with mine shafts... lift and lower bags of rocks... the lifting gear exists, the tunnel systems allow for rail based storage away from the mine head... the issue is storage space on the surface.
"Problem is that water is the easiest method to push stuff up and down - storage space is a real issue with a train track system..."
With water, you need water. Fine in the UK, but not so good in the US Southwest. Creating a couple of large reservoirs, piping and big turbines is a big up front cost. It's also difficult to expand such a system. To do so is mainly to build another one and geography that works for pumped storage is not that abundant.
The gravity train concepts I've seen are much like a funicular so I'm not sure why you mention storage space. Power going in is driving the train up a hill and power out is generated by letting the train come down. Using mines to mitigate issues with wind on vertical systems is novel, but are there enough unused mines and are there other issues like keeping them pumped free of water that could be an problem? I wouldn't rule them out since they wouldn't work everywhere, but I'm interested in finding out if there are enough places to build them to make developing the tech worthwhile. Again, why the need for storage?
With water you rely on geography to already have at least one of the reservoirs - because building both would, as you point out, be expensive. But even in the southern US I'm sure you can find places with enough water, there are various techniques available to minimise evaporative losses - including covering the reservoir with solar panels ;)
For storage... a single train going up and down a mountain simply doesn't contain enough energy to be useful.
Consider that the Coire Glas project is going to have 30GWh of storage.
That's using a 500m elevation change, and so it's looking at using:
30GWh = 500m *10m/s^2 * 20 million tons
So... for a train to do that, let's assume you can do a km of elevation change... the train would still need to mass 10 million tons
If however you break it up into smaller pieces, and have those stored away at the top/bottom... you end up with a vast amount of storage space needed, in fact, enough space to build a reservoir...
"If however you break it up into smaller pieces, and have those stored away at the top/bottom... you end up with a vast amount of storage space needed, in fact, enough space to build a reservoir..."
The system prototype I saw was done in an area where that storage would have been rather easy since the land wasn't useful for other things and both top and bottom had flat land for a marshaling yard. . There aren't good resources online to sort out what the costs might be and if one set of tracks is expensive enough to construct that it makes more sense to cache train cars rather than add more trackage. The track in the prototype meandered a lot with power being exchanged via a third rail. That could mean a lot of train for a given set of tracks if you are sort on neutronium. Hmm, a big diesel loco is around 194t so getting to 10 million would mean a stack of them 1.2mn km long. Give or take. Ok, what if we build a giant wooden badger?
There's been some recent bad things that have happened to floating solar farms to make using them to control evaporation a concern. Strong winds can really toss those installations around. A bunch of heavy train cars aren't going to evaporate.
There are so many details that I think trying to do a rough first approximation isn't going to give a definitive answer one way or the other. My BSME was very mechanical with not much course work on liquids that I can remember. Scaling can be tricky with gases and liquids due to turbulence that doesn't come into play with lumps of metal on wheels sat on an inclined plane.
There's also efficiency in such systems that must be accounted for. Pumped is a 70-80% round trip efficiency according to Wikipedia so a train system would need to be in the 90's or so.
We shouldn't forget to pick up a bunch of baskets so we can divide up the eggs. I'm sure there's room for both sorts of systems and enough different environments that won't lend themselves to one or the other.
> There's also efficiency in such systems that must be accounted for. Pumped is a 70-80% round trip efficiency according to Wikipedia so a train system would need to be in the 90's or so.
I'd suggest that matching hydro is good enough for a first approximation, better is always nice, but there is enough benefit from 70-80% to still be useful.
> We shouldn't forget to pick up a bunch of baskets so we can divide up the eggs. I'm sure there's room for both sorts of systems and enough different environments that won't lend themselves to one or the other.
100%, the more baskets the better. Just need to not have explosive baskets...
"Using mines to mitigate issues with wind on vertical systems is novel, but are there enough unused mines and are there other issues like keeping them pumped free of water that could be an problem? I wouldn't rule them out since they wouldn't work everywhere, but I'm interested in finding out if there are enough places to build them to make developing the tech worthwhile. Again, why the need for storage?"
Somewhere arounf 5 thousand abandonned mines in the UK. Not all will be suitable, but some will, and some of those which are flooded are being used as geothermal sources, since they're nice and deep.
Storage is needed to balance supply and demand, but you knew that already.
Even without renewables we'd all have cheaper bills if the supply could be at a constant level, rather than ramping up and down continuously.
We don't need three month's supply... that's massive overkill.
But you're correct that current chemical batteries aren't likely to get us the storage we need... it's the one place where hydrogen has a serious shot at being a useful storage mechanism... the good thing is that with batteries able to do short term (hours) load we don't need to have long term storage that has high speed response.
"it's the one place where hydrogen has a serious shot at being a useful storage mechanism"
The efficiency is so low for that I would put it on the bottom of any funding budget. Ammonia production has twice the financial return and might even do better with some attention. When you look at the worldwide energy usage to produce Ammonia each year, it's staggering. Off-loading a bunch of that production to when there's excess renewable power available would mean the rest of the time energy that would have been used for production can be directed elsewhere. It's an example of what I mean when I bang on about coupling intermittent generation with some process that can operate that way.
@John Robson
"None of those three are reusable though, so it's not actually a valid comparison."
That is 100% the problem with using the wrong measurement to compare. This is the power grid for electricity generation and deliverance to the country. Supply of enough energy that is reliable and cheap enough for our country to rely on to keep our country functioning. You are right that the ones I listed are not for your comparison because you are interested in something other than delivering cheap reliable energy to keep the country running.
This is 100% the problem that has infected our government who are trying to do the wrong thing. They are trying forgetting the purpose of the electricity grid and so doing a terrible job.
"This is 100% the problem that has infected our government who are trying to do the wrong thing."
Yes, but the things they are approving are at the limit of what they can understand and the spin is working for them since they are selling it mostly to people that can't analyze it either.
"you are interested in something other than delivering cheap reliable energy to keep the country running."
I'm interested in that, but it's moderated by a need to still have a country to be kept running.
If we don't stop destroying the climate it will bite back, and it can bite harder than we can tolerate
@John Robson
"I'm interested in that, but it's moderated by a need to still have a country to be kept running."
That is a very interesting position to hold. Gonna restate it to make sure this is right- you are interested in delivering cheap reliable energy which is required to keep the country running. BUT you weigh that against still having the country.
Please tell me if that is wrong, I dont want to misunderstand.
So we know we need cheap reliable energy, but you seem to be supporting unreliable and wildly expensive energy generation. Your reasoning seems to be that there is some sort of catastrophic doom event(?) coming that will destroy the country?
If I understand that correctly, what is this doom event? Even the MMCC co2 theory stuff isnt claiming it. But we are experiencing actual problems of not having cheap reliable energy.
@John Robson
"Because renewable isn't unreliable, or wildly expensive."
Yet solar/wind + battery + reliant on gas backup is which is the route our government has gone. We could go for hydro but that would go up against green opposition. Drax isnt green however they try to sell that to themselves. Geothermal is limited to where it can go and uses fracking (which upsets greens).
Trying to get that reliable and cheap energy isnt simple but we figured out how. Even if it was a co2 issue then nukes would have been the solution.
"And yes - climate change is real, wake up and smell the coffee."
We agree climate changes, it always has. You are a believer of whichever version of the MMCC co2 theory, I am not so convinced. But even accepting the MMCC co2 theory where is this doom event? My understanding is even the MMCC co2 claims dont predict country ending catastrophe not even for the UK.
"Yet solar/wind + battery + reliant on gas backup is which is the route our government has gone."
In the same way that when you're tying to get to Scotland you might not take your first step in the highlands, you might even choose to head south to get onto a motorway...
It's the *current* situation, because building out any energy infrastructure takes time, and we need to have a functioning system whilst that happens.
@John Robson
"It's the *current* situation, because building out any energy infrastructure takes time, and we need to have a functioning system whilst that happens."
That would suggest destroying our existing functioning system is a bad idea. It also doesnt support the construction of wind/solar for the grid either. Again coming back to if the MMCC co2 crowd were serious we would have had nukes.
Don't need to preach to me about nuclear power options.
But in what way is the current system being destroyed?
It's being replaced, because that's what's needed... nothing is being destroyed here - other than things that have been retired.
And yes, building out wind/solar is absolutely supported by the concept of moving towards not being dependant on international markets for fossil fuels.
@John Robson
"But in what way is the current system being destroyed?"
We keep hearing how close we (UK) are to blackouts. This year it was reported a lack of wind and solar power brought us very close again in winter when people require reliable and cheap energy. The constant net zero push keeps our bills rising and brought us to this close to blackout situation.
"It's being replaced, because that's what's needed... nothing is being destroyed here - other than things that have been retired."
Except the reliable and cheap things being retired are not being replaced by unreliable and expensive. Which is destroying our functioning system by making it close to not functioning.
"And yes, building out wind/solar is absolutely supported by the concept of moving towards not being dependant on international markets for fossil fuels."
Of course it is. Thats why the concept is abject insanity. Reality and the fantasy dreams do not mix well which is why putting unreliables on the grid has been a terrible idea around the world.
This year it was reported a lack of wind and solar power brought us very close again in winter
With all this spare time, how's your job hunt going?
No - the cost increased because gas became more expensive...
Amazingly every unit of energy we generate without burning stuff means we need to buy less stuff.
Putting "unreliables" on the grid is the opposite of insanity - calling them unreliable, when they are nothing of the sort, that's insanity - generally paid for by the giant fossil fuel companies.
@John Robson
"No - the cost increased because gas became more expensive..."
Using a scheme that exists to prop up unreliables by paying the most expensive price. Which amusingly has the factual issue that to have unreliables you must also have gas plants to back them up and provide when the monuments dont work. So to have unreliables you must also have a backup power plant that can be relied on, but must run inefficiently (ramp up and down) which costs even more to maintain than just a working power plant.
"Amazingly every unit of energy we generate without burning stuff means we need to buy less stuff."
How? I get the theory that we dont need to burn something, except the unreliable sources dont work. They require a working solution which is often a burning solution. I am fine with energy generation that works, just not the monuments to a sky god.
"Putting "unreliables" on the grid is the opposite of insanity"
The grid requires stable electricity. So insanity to add extremely variable and unreliable energy,
"calling them unreliable, when they are nothing of the sort"
Wind and solar have disproved that line. The Germans even have a name for it.
"generally paid for by the giant fossil fuel companies."
And people who understand flicking the switch requires the grid to be working for the light to come on.
@John Robson
"Oh, it's codejunky"
Have you only just realised who you have been replying to for the last 6 days? Now I understand why you have no reasonable response to why you think things that dont work are a solution.
"FF are not the answer, in fact they are the problem."
Something you say but has little relation to reality. FF are the reason we have the rich life that we have. And actual working non-FF replacements are useful and are even used on the grid in various countries. I just reject the things that dont work and you seem to disagree.
"Have you only just realised who you have been replying to for the last 6 days?"
I tend to reply to content, not personalities...
"I just reject the things that dont work"
No - you reject things that do work, and in fact supplied half of our electricity last year.
But don't worry, I'm sure that burning more expensive fossil fuels would have been cheaper than harnessing the sun and wind. The international markets would be bound to give us a 50% discount if we buy twice as much... wouldn't they?
@John Robson
"I tend to reply to content, not personalities..."
Well you failed there. You were discussing right up to that last comment where you seemed to have no clue how to respond and decided to attack me instead.
"No - you reject things that do work, and in fact supplied half of our electricity last year."
Wind and solar? No it doesnt work. As found when it isnt supplying when people need it (over winter). That it is vastly unreliable which requires an actual FF backup to provide the necessary energy. It still doesnt work as the whole grid needs upgrading to deliver energy where it generates to where its needed (power plants are where you need them). Now they need some magic technology that doesnt exist to store energy for the weeks when it doesnt work. So it still doesnt work.
"But don't worry, I'm sure that burning more expensive fossil fuels would have been cheaper than harnessing the sun and wind"
Yes. Those expensive fossil fuels are not so expensive and are actually reliable stores or cheap energy. And the UK has gas deposits. And there is more FF than just gas. And your wind/solar only work if there is an FF backup.
I dont know which bit of reality you are trying to contest. You seem to think the monuments work because you believe they work.
"Now they need some magic technology"
Is it not said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (To those who have little real understanding?) Are you against those infernal horseless carriages too? Gadzooks!
(Still looking for electrical deliverance?)
@ChodeMonkey
"Is it not said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
That is kinda the point. As I actually said- "Now they need some magic technology that doesnt exist". It actually physically doesnt exist right now. If it becomes a possibility in future then great, but right now it actually does not exist. So its pretty much magic.
"Are you against those infernal horseless carriages too?"
You mean cave men discussing this magic technology of chariots that propel themselves somehow? Before the development of anything like an engine or even wheel but mandating that all carrying implements must be outlawed to satisfy the gods!
"Wind and solar? No it doesnt work"
Yes it does... As is clearly evidenced by the fact that it works.
That's why I stopped discussing, because there is no point in having a reasoned debate with someone who insists that the world is flat. Yes, that's the level of idiocy you're spouting at this point.
You clearly don't understand the energy markets, or the science of climate change.
@John Robson
"Yes it does... As is clearly evidenced by the fact that it works."
This is the problem. The clear evidence, which is the rest you avoided quoting, is that it doesnt work. Its not in question, it simply doesnt work. That is why there is the missing piece that is the 'magic' technology we dont have to store the energy long enough to make it work. As well as all the other costs to upgrade the infrastructure significantly to make it work. This fundamental break from reality is why what you say and what really is are opposite.
"That's why I stopped discussing, because there is no point in having a reasoned debate with someone who insists that the world is flat. Yes, that's the level of idiocy you're spouting at this point."
From my point of view I am trying to explain to you plus the evidence of reality that the world is curved no matter what you believe.
"You clearly don't understand the energy markets, or the science of climate change."
Not in the way you do which is probably why you refuse the simple realities that are publicly acknowledged and in the real physical world.
"in fact they are the problem."
Yes, the dash to gas in the 80s and 90s put the brakes on nuclear and then we had the opening of the BIG pipes from Russia into Europe and that really tied our hands, in more ways than one it seems!
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-investigate-russias-covert-funding-of-us-anti-fossil-fuel-groups/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-secretly-working-with-environmentalists-to-oppose-fracking?source=content_type%3Areact%7Cfirst_level_url%3Aarticle%7Csection%3Amain_content%7Cbutton%3Abody_link
These kinds of projects are great - particularly when they are close to renewable generation sites.
Let's not forget microgeneration, micro-grids and micro-storage, however (in-home, EVs, etc.).
At scale, this can have a similar or greater effect and may also reduce the need for grid augmentation.
That seems a bit small. To replace the coal power station at Collie, in Western Australia, we're getting this:
Collie Battery is currently being built in stages, two of which are currently under construction:
Stage 1 is sized at 219 MW / 877 MWh
Stage 2 is sized at 341 MW / 1,363 MWh
Why is coal getting replaced? Basically the coal mine is about done.
400 MWh is middling. Half the size of Collie stage 1.
Here's a nice map of Australian projects
https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-battery-storage-map-of-australia/
As to how much a nuke produces, that's all well and good, but a battery isn't the only supplier, there also the rest of the renewable generators. You really need to look at the system as a whole.
Here's a chap who runs a simulation to show how much storage would be required to make the Australian grid 98%+ renewable.
https://bsky.app/profile/davidosmond.bsky.social/post/3ljmdgqavhs2q
It might work for Australia with only 5hours of storage, but not for the UK or north Europe where from time to time thanks to a dunkelflaute we get insignificant wind and solar generation for a couple of days.
Besides dunkelflautes we also get periods with negligible wind for a couple of weeks. These result in the wholesale cost of gas shooting up following demand.
The biggest difference however is solar. Solar is terrible in winter thanks to the high latitude. London is 51.5 north, so far higher than Australia were even Tasmania is only 42 south. A search using AI (hence untrustworthy) shows that 18% of Australia is above the Tropic of Capricorn!
That seems a bit small. To replace the coal power station at Collie, in Western Australia, we're getting this:
That isn't how these things work. A coal power station generates electricity by burning coal. A battery farm generates subsidies, not electricity. They're basically arbitrage units that store future profits, not really electricity. So charge them when electricity prices are low, discharge when they're vastly higher than the normal wholesale market price because it's dark and the wind has dropped. So charge at $50/MWh, discharge at £2-3000/MWh and oh happy days. Unless you're an energy customer. Then Australia also discovered that battery/subsidy farms make millions by providing synthetic inertia, so smoothiing out the fluctuations caused by variable wind speeds.
It's all very Kafkaesque. Make billions by going back to pre-Industrial power generation and the Age of Sail, despite history showing that wind was an unreliable form of energy production. Then make billions more by selling a solution to the very problems that 'renewables' have created. On the plus side, eventually Australia should realise that reliable and affordable energy is actually a good thing, and might lift their ban on nuclear power. Australia has uranium, it has some smart people, so if those smart people manage to get into government, it could fix Australia's energy policy. Most of Europe and the UK is too far gone for that though.
"Australia has uranium,"
I'd suggest the look beyond the 1950's for reactor designs and fuels such as Thorium instead.
I was driving the other day looking at all of the new solar farms near my house and thinking they'd make more money by storing energy and selling it mainly at peak price times rather than as they make it. The key is storage that's efficient enough to make that work. The only way to insulate against that obvious tactic is to be able to store up power yourself to bridge peak rate times.
"I mean things like hot salt storage or the gravity batteries."
Gravity batteries are being worked on by at least one company I've seen. To really get efficient thermal storage is to use a material that has a phase change in a useful range. To melt salts takes very high temperatures which is a bear to handle. If you want any sort of circulation of the molten salt, you have to keep it liquid or have a good way to drain the system so it doesn't freeze in the pipes.
I'm using Cerro metal which melts at around 70C. Even the "Cerro-Safe" isn't something I want in my water supply so I'm building a thermal battery where it's kept separate. It's an interesting material to play with. I boiled a pot of water and chucked in some of the metal and while it melted slightly, it crashed the water temp amazingly fast. The evacuated tubes I picked up for free can boil water on a sunny day so my system temp is not going to be much over 100C with a bit of pressure and some glycol added. I've even seeing a non-water based coolant that goes much hotter before boiling (Youtube: Projectfarm) and has a very low freeze point as well. If all I need propane for is the range, that's no big deal.
Hot salt isn't best charged photovoltaically - you could but it seems a bad idea - but by focussing sunshine on a tower.
So not great for Scotland.
Then it returns heat through the night which makes steam for your turbine, or hot water for your heat pumps.
Flow batteries OTOH look interesting.
"Hot salt isn't best charged photovoltaically - you could but it seems a bad idea - but by focussing sunshine on a tower."
The massive solar installations at the California-Nevada border turned out to be a big disappointment. The mirror field looks like a lake so it attracts birds that get incinerated. They aren't able to turn a profit with the system and handling molten salt is expensive to maintain. The last I heard, it's going to be torn down.
In theory, great. In the real world, not so great.
Vandium flow batteries look good at first glance because more long term storage just means bigger tanks. On second glance you see how expensive the vanadium electrolyte is. This means that they are only considered for short term storage and hence compete with lithium batteries.
"Very few locations are practical and they never have the capacity for long term storage."
Then they shouldn't be considered where long term storage is needed. There's still a lot of applications for short term storage. As the sun sets and people are getting home from work, demand will peak until those people wind down their day and start heading to sleep. A system that can store up excess energy to feed it back in during those periods is useful.
Everyone jump to the down arrow, but a reality check.
The budget for the project is £750 million. Which means it will really cost £1.5 billion before all is said and done.
Don't for a minute believe that it won't be the rate-payers that pick that up somewhere.
The UK already has some of the highest electric costs on the planet and the impoverishment of the country will do absolutely nothing for CO2 levels.
Those levels will be determined by China and India.
Electricity prices
UK (From 1 Apr) - 27.03 p/kWh
China - 6.00 p/kWh
China - 6.00 p/kWh
US - 12.20 p/kWh
Iceland - 14.47
Japan - 15.75 p/kWh
Australia - 19.50 p/kWh
Datacenters and factories run on electricity. Wouldn't expect many of those coming to the UK anytime soon.
Let the downvoting begin, but as an old colleague of mine used to tell me: "Reality causes stress".
"Zenobē claims Blackhillock will somehow save folks more than £170 million over the next 15 years on their bills compared to the price of electricity generated by natural gas and will mean 2.6 million tons of CO2 won’t be emitted over the same period."
I wonder too, how this will save money. Majority of our fuel prices are based on gas and subsidies to Nuclear. Not the actual cost of production. I am with a provider who claims to sell 100% renewable electricity yet my prices are the same as everyone elses and are based on the fossil fuel costs not renewables.
So when will this nervana of low cost energy sources translate to low cost energy if we choose 100% renewables?
"So when will this nervana of low cost energy sources translate to low cost energy if we choose 100% renewables?"
I'd love to see a comprehensive breakdown of costs. Many times, fuel can be a very small component. I'd agree that if renewable is the same price as fossil (unsubsidized), it's better to have renewable sources. Importing bits of trees to burn in the UK isn't renewable on my chart. Tidal has a zero cost of fuel, but the battering those installations take makes them expensive to maintain. Wind turbines often use blades that wear out and can't be recycled so they're just as bad as many other choices in that regard.
Hang on - This is just one company And they can already provide Electricity to the whole of Scotland for 1 hour? And they can improve that figure by thirty percent within one year? Surely with half a dozen companies working for a couple of years and with improving technology, we will be able to power Scotland for hundreds of days at a time, Should that need ever arise where there is no wind and no daylight anywhere within reachable distance of a copper wire.
