Sky Fall For The Battery Con Trick
By Paul Homewood
Sky News have fallen for the old battery storage trick again!
Sky News has been given exclusive access to Europe’s biggest transmission grid-linked battery which takes in the uneven power from wind turbines and smoothing it out for local homes and businesses.
It looks like a self-storage park: rows of shipping containers in a patch of Merseyside waste ground. But appearances can be deceptive as this is the first step in saving billions of pounds off bills and millions of tonnes of carbon. It’s a mega-battery.
Let’s take a step back. One of the great advantages of fossil fuels, and one we take largely for granted, is they are so easy to store. Piles of coal, drums of oil, tanks of gas. They just sit there waiting for a deliberate spark.
Renewables are different: you can’t hold the wind or bottle the sun. As the proportion of green power on our grid grows so does this inconvenient truth.
The variable and uncontrollable nature of solar and wind is not a new discovery, but it is only now that we are coming close to an affordable solution: massive banks of lithium-ion batteries similar to those in a laptop, phone and only affordable now thanks to their use in electric cars.
Sky News has been given exclusive access to Europe’s biggest transmission grid-linked battery just after switch-on. It covers an area of around two football pitches in nearly one hundred containers and can store as much electricity as 1,500 electric cars, taking in the uneven power from wind turbines and smoothing it out for local homes and businesses. If you didn’t do this, lights would dim, or wires could melt. Most of that job today is done by either firing up mini generators – so called gas-peakers – to fill the power troughs or turning turbines off to prevent surges.
James Basden, co-founder and director of Zenobe, says their batteries will cut carbon emissions.
"Battery storage sites like this are enabling more wind power to come on, but also it’s shutting down the gas generators that are currently operating and as a result we save huge amounts of CO2."
Image: Zenobe’s grid-linked battery
But they should also cut bills too. When wind farms must turn off, they are paid to do this, paid to not generate. This is known as "curtailment" and the total cost is over half a billion pounds per year and rising as we have more renewables in the energy mix.
Zenobe and other big battery developers say if we can store it, we can use it and not pay to waste it.
"This is pushing power back onto the grid in a very consistent and predictable way… So sites like this are going to reduce the amount of curtailment. This site itself will save somewhere between 50 and £100m to consumers over the next 15 years."
The claims are absurd and this battery park will make next to no difference to how the grid operates, but will earn plenty of money paid out of our energy bills.
For a start, it will not stop curtailment of wind power, as claimed, as this is always due to lack of transmission capacity, not excess supply.
But more importantly, the amount of energy it can store is infinitesimally small. They mention the equivalent of 1500 electric cars; at, say, 50 KWh each, that works out at 75 MWh.
On a typical winter day, the UK consumes about 1 TWh, which equal 1 MILLION MWh. And that equals 694 MWh per minute.
So Liverpool’s new battery would be able to keep us going for about 7 seconds!
Somehow I don’t think this battery park, or a thousand of them, will be of much help when the wind stops blowing.
Look at it another way.
A 1000 MW offshore wind farm would typically produce about 9600 MWh a day. If every wind farm was obliged to provide and pay for enough battery storage to cover two weeks of no output, it would need 134,400 MWh – or 1792 Liverpool battery parks.
So what is this battery park for?
The most it can do is to provide a tiny amount of help in managing frequency fluctuations, for which the National Grid will pay handsomely. In the past this would not have been necessary, because of the inertia provided by spinning generators.
But the main business case is to buy power in when it is cheap, and sell it when it is dear.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Everyone realises that when those who push puff-pieces about battery storage AND fail to mention the battery’s storage capacity, there’s something fishy going on.
Neither Sky nor its owners admit how little energy the Capenhurst 100 MW battery will store.
https://www.zenobe.com/case-studies/capenhurst/
Thanks to Google, we can discover it’s only 107MWh of energy storage.
https://renewablesnow.com/news/zenobe-lands-more-funds-to-start-building-100-mw-battery-in-uk-745296/
Dinorwig & Cruachan pumped hydro schemes store 9,100 & 10,000MWh respectively.
Recently reopened Rough natural gas storage stores 9,350,000MWh at its reduced capacity.
“Renewables are different: you can’t hold the wind or bottle the sun. As the proportion of green power on our grid grows so does this inconvenient truth.”
And renewables don’t transport anything, but they require transportation to be delivered and installed….fossil fuels.
It would provide plenty of energy if it caught fire…..
Yes, 107 MWh (Joe Public) is about equivalent to 71 tons of TNT plus the toxic gases of course.
https://www.favershameye.co.uk/post/project-fortress-previously-known-as-cleve-hill
Thanks for the link, N.S.
It seems that ‘lessons are not learned’ in Merseyside. From your link: “In September 2020 a much smaller (20 MW as compared to Cleve Hill’s 700 MW) BESS in Liverpool suffered a battery fire which took firefighters over 11 hours to extinguish. Roads around the area had to be closed off and residents nearby were warned to keep their windows closed due to smoke from the incident. The results of an investigation into the causes of the fire are not publicly available.”
And pollution!
What is it in Hiroshima bombs?
Why is Nagasaki always forgotten? I wanna hear it for Nagasaki…Hiroshima is so overdone!
How many Wales/Whales is it the size of ???
The Hiroshima bomb was a classic cannon barrel model where two sub-critical masses of U235 were slammed together in a cannon barrel that has both ends closed. In effect, a gunpowder event (firing the cannon) produced a super-critical mass that reacts as it did in Hiroshima.
It is mind-boggling the amount of energy released within millionths of a second in such an event. E=MC^2 where C is 186,000 and C^2 is 34,596,000,000 which is a very big number. The “E” is even bigger then, as multiplied by the mass which is simply how much stuff there is to react. The Hiroshima bomb was tame compared to what exists today.
Amazingly, classic nuclear weapons only convert a percentage of the energy actually available in the materials. The rest remains as matter because it’s blown apart and scattered before it can undergo conversion.
The work being done with fusion reactors holds the true key to cheap energy. All this hoopla about wind and solar (along with the CO2 narrative) is a complete fraud as well as being a non-starter from an economic stand point. Making helium out of hydrogen seems so attractive.
Strictly my take on things.
Oh why are so many people so stupid?
We have ‘educated’ them.
Many are; others would rather not even contemplate that their ‘government’ does not have their best interest at heart, and simply go about their lives with their heads in the sand.
Con men have always existed it’s just that now they are encouraged by government for a variety of reasons: what they think is virtue-signalling; sociopathic greed; obeisance, threatened or bought, to the NWO.
Realistically just charged from the grid to game the spot price market. A diesel generator would be cheaper and more honest.
The main purpose of this battery is as an experiment in the provision of reactive power – MVArs in the jargon of grids. In fact, it has a contract with National Grid:
Zenobē won a nine year contract to deliver 40MVar of reactive power services in May 2020. This is the first time a battery has delivered this type of service anywhere in the world.
Zenobē’s specialist high voltage engineering team worked with our supply chain partners to optimise not only the absorption of reactive power but also active power services that run concurrently. This innovative design, which included a direct connection onto the 275Kv bay, has enabled the stacking of multiple active power, capacity and voltage services to deliver the lowest cost to the consumer and to make a significant reduction in carbon emissions.
Wind farms tend to look to the grid like reactive loads, which means that their voltage and current are out of phase. This leads to “phantom power” which only goes to heat up the transmission line rather than deliver real power to customers. It also leads to out of phase voltages which result in voltage control problems. Adjusting the reactive power balance restores normal operation. It’s really the design of the inverter circuitry that allows the corrective MVAr to be provided, rather than the battery itself. Ordinary generators are capable of providing some reactive power, but now often this is provided additionally by devices known as STATCOMs.
https://electricalworkbook.com/statcom/
Really this is a STATCOM with a battery attached.
So it’s solving some of the technical problems renewables cause? Interesting stuff.
In other words, a huge waste of our money since we end up paying for it. For other green white elephants though, the Australian Snowy 2.0 hydro plant takes some beating as Jo Nova shows.
“So it’s solving some of the technical problems renewables cause?”
Exsctly!
Statcoms, Static VAR compensators (SVC) , Unified Power Flow Controllers (UPFC), Static Synchronous Series Compensators, Synchronous Condensers and even spinning up redundant old turbines in half derelict power plants, all of this stuff and more is now having to be brought into service just to make up for the deficiencies of renewables. And bear in mind none of these are storage devices they are to make up for deficiencies that previously came “free” with large spinning generators.
To get a feel of just how important reactive power is have read of this NY Times analysis of a major blackout.
The Horndale “big battery” in South Australia does just that reactive power, and very profitably. I don’t know the amount but the battery complex is claimed to 160MWh so (at 20% discharge per hour) might be comparable.
The other use is storing electricity from the attached wind farm when the selling price is low and releasing it when the price is higher.
The State grid controller has installed several synchronous condensers eg. Robertstown, basically large rotating masses. That may make Hornsdale less profitable.
https://www.electranet.com.au/what-we-do/projects/power-system-strength/
“The Horndale “big battery” in South Australia does just that ….”
Or not, as the case may be.
Australian Energy Regulator 22nd Sept 2021: “Hornsdale in court for inability to provide contingency services as offered”
https://www.aer.gov.au/news-release/hornsdale-in-court-for-inability-to-provide-contingency-services-as-offered
Australian Energy Regulator 28th June Sept 2022: “Hornsdale Power Reserve penalised $900,000 for inability to provide contingency services as offered”
https://www.aer.gov.au/news-release/hornsdale-power-reserve-penalised-900000-for-inability-to-provide-contingency-services-as-offered
I could never find much evidence of correlation between the Hornsdale wind farm and battery.
https://nemlog.com.au/show/unitprice/20230209/20230215/?id11=CURTAILMENT.DISPATCHREGIONSUM1&k1=HDW,HPR&k11=sa&k2=sa
Some correlation with prices, and the rest is presumably FCAS motivated.
The Hornsdale battery in South Australia is co-located with the wind farm, but it has frequency / contingency contracts with the South Australian government for some of its capacity to cover an outage event on the SA-VIC transmission line, and most of the balance it offers to the market operator for frequency control services, because they largely offer better revenue than storage. The battery re-charges and discharges to and from the grid, not the wind farm.
Did anyone notice that Germany’s onshore and offshore wind farms manage just over 1GW from noon this afternoon? Not bad for nearly 60GW installed.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE
Thanks, Ben.
[Click Globe icon top right on the Fraunhofer page for translation into English]
I am very concerned about the current proliferation of large Battery Energy Storage Sites, (BESS) close to conurbations in the UK. These BESSs are an unintended consequence of the rush to use intermittent power generation, to balance the short-term instabilities of wind and solar power. They should not be located near conurbations until their safety has been established by real experience.
Where these batteries are needed they ought to be at the power generating end of the grid, as it makes no difference to the grid at which end the stabilisation occurs. Note that the wind generators in particular are located in remote sites which are ideal for the high intensity chemical plants which batteries really are. Offshore windmills, of course, have the best imaginable water source for fire control.
If large battery modules were safe, they would not have to be located at substantial distances apart (as they are on BESSs) and there would be no concern about putting them in cities. The evidence from the small number of larger battery stations that have been built worldwide is that fires and toxic chemical releases are a serious risk. The fires are very difficult to extinguish requiring very large amounts of water and the oldest of the worldwide sites is less than 5 years old .
The only justification that has been offered for building these near to conurbations is that it stabilises the conurbation power usage against blackouts. This argument fails totally on proper consideration, as location at the generating end would achieve exactly the same, but with little, or no, risk to people, as they are almost all in locations that are far from population centres
So now we’ve moved from the number of homes renewables can support to the number of cars that can support renewables. Makes a change from the number of lies required to support them.
“As the proportion of green power on our grid grows so does this inconvenient truth.”
I’m wondering whether the journalist has some unrevealed knowledge, subtely referencing a well known 2006 documentary film.
Is that £50-£100m over 15 years? So £5m/year? If so, to get to the £500m/year we spend on curtailment alone means we need 100 of these things.
I did discover that Tesla have upped their prices for Megapack grid batteries to around $500/kWh for bulk orders, so the batteries for this one would cost about £45m. The fancy electronics to provide the MVArs, plus site prep and installation costs probably take the total to £60m. That doesn’t make the savings to consumers look quite so spectacular, and there is little mention of the other profits it might make.
The savings calculation is of course very subjective. Doubtless some fancy assumptions about saving a bit of gas generation.
“Battery storage sites like this are enabling more wind power to come on, but also it’s shutting down the gas generators that are currently operating and as a result we save huge amounts of CO2.”
So, when the wind dies down, you go to battery power. For 7 seconds? Or a few hours. Then the batteries run down. Then, you switch on the gas generators . . . wait . . . you shut them down. People with gas generators are not going to wait around for nothing. They’ll take their generators elsewhere.
The notion of batteries for backup will kill actual backup. How funny is that ?!?!
You just increase the cost of the back up. I have to cover my fixed costs and depreciation each hour I get paid, so halve the hours and I double the price. Consumers avoid my variable costs but they don’t avoid the whole cost.
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
Populist press/politicians won’t allow you to collect what you would have to charge to cover your fixed cost.
Two, the asset owner wants to get maximum earnings from his equipment. Just covering fixed cost is not enough – he wants to make money.
Being backup is a crappy business model. My point is, the more “backup” they create, like batteries, the worse the business model gets for the backup. At some point, those in the backup business are going to move their assets, finding better business opportunities.
Renewable energy is enabled by other generators the renewables don’t have to pay for. The more renewables grow, the worse the business case for their backup generators. It is a house of cards.
Battery storage threatens backup generators. Battery storage solves no problem. Their cost will be added to the rate payers bills.
“But like all batteries it costs money and generates nothing.” — oldbrew, 2019
This German speaking lady has a series of videos which in this case explains to even the most stupid politicians and journalists what the facts are.
The outlook for battery operations and sources of revenues is changing. Timera have a useful article on this just out:
https://timera-energy.com/battery-investors-confront-revenue-shift-in-2023/
Batteries had been earning big money providing response to frequency changes on the grid, charging up when the frequency goes high, and discharging when it goes low on scales of seconds to minutes, in proportion to the deviation in frequency. But now so much capacity is being connected that these markets have become very competitive. However, the very volatile intra day market prices have given good opportunities to make money from charging cheap and discharging expensive.
Given that much of the cost of a battery system is in its storage duration rather than its capacity to absorb charge and redeliver, it should perhaps not be a surprise that shorter duration batteries are more profitable. At the moment probably a 2 hour duration offers the best returns. That can expect to cycle twice a day for the rush hour peaks, and nip in for a bit more if conditions are profitable. Battery economics start dropping off fast with further increases in duration because making money depends on how frequently the capacity can be cycled.
But is that even what this battery is about? From Zenobē’s website:
“Zenobē won a nine year contract to deliver 40MVar of reactive power services in May 2020. This is the first time a battery has delivered this type of service anywhere in the world.
Later, we were the first to use the revision to England’s planning regime for generation assets to build a 100MW facility which is also Europe’s largest transmission connected battery.
The Capenhurst site will ensure security of power supply for the Mersey region with a reactive power service delivered at substantially lower cost to consumers. ”
So it’s about VARs not arbitrage?
Sorry, missed your previous comment IDAU.
More from Zenobe
One key barrier is the current regime for Transmission Network Use of System charges (let’s call them transmission charges). Generators in certain areas must pay high transmission charges because they create more electricity than consumers demand, putting strain on the grid. Battery operators reduce this strain by storing the excess energy. However, because regulations define storage as a subset of generation, they have to pay the same high charges. It is of paramount importance to resolve this problem, which is disincentivising investment in storage. If we are to mitigate climate catastrophe, battery operators need regulatory support to make change real today.
a.k.a. please give us subsidies. Just the start of the begging bowl one suspects. As it is, OFGEM have actually agreed that generators will no longer be liable for TNUoS charges, which will instead simply be charged to consumers. Round 1 to distant renewables and the batteries they need to balance them. Loser: consumers.
I sent a link to this Sky story on saturday lunchtime (as a comment on the Norwich electric bikes story). Good to see it has finally made it
“Sky fall for the battery con trick.”
Not sure about this headline. How about, “Sky News plays part of shill in battery con trick – critics call the performance distinctly hammy” ?
Skyfall – Mvar battery no longer in charge of intelligence, Mr Bond
So Liverpool’s new battery would be able to keep us going for about 7 seconds!
Think of all the ‘carbon’ emissions they’ll save in 7 seconds 🤣
China will have that covered in picoseconds.
A few more details can be gleaned here
https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/zenob%C4%93s-100mw-capenhurst-battery-begins-providing-reactive-power-services-in-world-first
Tesla Megapack pricing
Our Local Councillor was boasting about their “purchase” of a battery they had put money into in another area of the county. he says it is the best investment they have ever made. I did politely point out the money was coming from all of us…twice, first in the money from our Council Tax and then in our electricity bills.
Hornsdale battery in South Australia earns about 90% of its revenue from providing frequency control contingency services, and about 10% from storing and re-selling energy. And yes, for a while its settings meant that it was not in a position to respond to frequency events as fast as it had promised under its contracts, which led to a penalty notice and fine.
Most wind and solar farms have inverters which are fully capable of operating at a power factor of unity, which means that they are not the cause of VARs. In Australia, most of them are contractually obliged by the network to spend about 10% of their output power in absorbing VARs (for nil payment), as the Zenobe battery is being paid to do.
If this battery is an efficient form of statcom in absorbing VARs, then that’s great. But I agree, all the puff about it storing energy for use by households is just blowing in the wind.
Batteries have a limited life span. What happens in 10-15 years or so when they fail? Can they be rebuilt or recycled, or will they sit in landfills like wind turbines?
‘Zenobe and other big battery developers say if we can store it, we can use it and not pay to waste it.’
Pay no attention to the man in the clown suit. As commenters above have related, there are different ways to use battery storage. I presume that Zenobe will use them in whatever way makes the most money for them. They ain’t doin’ this cos they love you.
It is refreshing to see the press enthusiastically endorse CAPITALIST PIGS.
Zenobe will have a clever arbitrage where they buy electricity cheap, and sell it high.
Apparently no duty to recharge, either. They can bide til it gets cheap again. This isn’t backup; it is exploitation.
The clever bit is getting paid twice or more for the same action. A bit like the wind farm scam where they can get curtailment payments, yet actually supply a battery and get paid for that, and then the battery resells the electricity at a profit.
It is such a good deal, it might be a government granted concession.
“Chaired by Steve Holliday, the former chief executive of National Grid, Zenobe describes itself as an international EV fleet and battery storage specialist.”
Hmmm . . . .
The man who said we would have to get used to regular power cuts IIRC.
Propaganda like this (that’s what it is) is why people believe we have grid level storage capable of providing cities with reliable power.
Agreed. It’s selling the idea that renewables are viable.
What about the noise from these battery facilities ?
There was an article I read from Australia last year, where locals complained about this and they had to shut it down.
You can get hum from transformer and inverter when charging or discharging, and cooling fans can create white noise. The studies I have seen show that at a distance of 100m or more, the noise is usually below ambient levels (35dB or so), so can’t be heard above other noise. I’ve stood next to Australia’s largest (180MWh) battery, about 200m away, and couldn’t hear a thing.