Manchester plans world’s largest battery to tackle intermittent wind energy
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
Back to normal for the Telegraph, with this cheerleading article for battery power:
Blueprints for the world’s largest battery on the site of an old coal-fired power station in Manchester, storing enough energy for 36,000 homes for a week, have won approval from planning officials.
Carlton Power, an independent energy company, will need to raise £750m for the plant and is “advanced talks” to raise the funds, it said. It will then need to pick a supplier.
Battery plants are seen as a way to smooth out power demand as more electricity comes from intermittent sources like wind and solar.
Batteries can charge on windy or sunny days cheaply, or even for free, and then deploy that power when needed. The plant is expected to offer the equivalent of 2,080 megawatts – a decent sized power station – for an hour.
Planning permission was granted by Trafford Council. Carlton has also won approval for a green hydrogen project in the area.
Councillor Tom Ross, the leader of Trafford Council, said: “The Trafford battery energy storage scheme, alongside the Trafford Green Hydrogen scheme, places Trafford and Greater Manchester at the forefront of the UK’s energy transition. The two schemes will help address our climate crisis – one of Trafford Council’s corporate priorities – and will support our region’s plan to reach a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2038.”
It will be built at the Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park in Greater Manchester, which will also host the world’s first commercial liquid air storage system, being built by Highview Power, another energy storage firm, using its cryobattery technology.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/24/manchester-plans-worlds-largest-battery-wind-energy/
The reporter clearly does not understand just how puny this storage will be in terms of our overall energy mix.
It will store about 2 GWh. But daily electricity consumption is likely to be around 2000 GWh by 2035. And we would need many weeks of storage to cover for low winds in winter.
What the storage plant will do is make a decent profit by buying power at low prices during time of surplus, and selling it back at high prices when supplies are tight because of the intermittency of wind power.
And guess who will end up paying for those profits?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
More useful to get that coal power plant running again
“The plant is expected to offer the equivalent of 2,080 megawatts – a decent sized power station – for an hour.”
Or build a mini-nuke there, and have a ‘decent-sized power station’ permanently.
I have some experience of large scale power battery installations.
The economics of such installations are open to question and can only exist with huge ongoing subsidy, also my experience is that getting the system to work at times of supply difficulties is problematic as instability in the grid often precludes connection to the grid.
Plus the batteries need constant maintenance and regular life cycle replacement.
Of course none of these minor details will be of any interest to virtue signalling politicians
The problem is these things were developed from technology that were intended to be stand alone when the grid had failed.
Nobody ever envisaged supplying power to the grid when parallel connected to the grid. The power electronics to create AC from DC are susceptible to any instability so are protected from failure by sophisticated protection that isolates the batteries installations in such an event.
Devonblueboy
Nor to the Daily Telegraph hacks and their bosses.
But we won’t forget.
Very much so Cookers. I recently was dfiscussing this very problem regarding reactive power levels with a NG manager. I kid you not, he did not know what reactive power was and thought VAR was football terminology.
I retired 10 years ago, got asked back and spent a highly paid few weeks walking around in disbelief.
Got fed up with reinventing the wheel, and the lack of any knowledge or experience in the people given the task, so now look after the wife.
0n the technical subject of ROCOF relays etc I gave up as only a few of those involved had any idea what the issue was, and those who did know left with me.
Seeing that it’s Manchester, surely they would be better off storing the rainfall and generating hydroelectric power.
What would be the situation with fire? Is it as vulnerable as smaller lithium ion batteries and would it burn as fiercely?
Large battery power installations require fire separation and environmental control (cooling) as when they are discharging full power the heat generated is quite substantial but is of known parameters.
If these control measures are in place then fire risk is fairly low.
cookers52, there have already been fires at the largest battery installations, so not such a low risk.
I find it interesting that they appear to have gone for just a one hour duration, i.e. 2GW/2GWh. When I have looked at battery economics on the basis of energy arbitrage I have found that longer durations are hard to justify economically. To make a good margin you need to be able to dump the output in the evening rush hour peak when prices are most often higher. The peak pricing period needs to be longer to justify a longer duration battery.
Perhaps the BBC at Salford Keys on the other side of the canal ordered it to keep their lights on.
So is that £750 million the total cost ? Or is it more than that ?
At what price will they be selling the stored electricity ?
No, that’s the cost for PR.
For an hour……. Is that supposed to be a joke or something?
The world’s largest of anything that only functions as intended for an hour before being depleted?
And it’s free? How did it get there without costing anything? What kind of battery runs forever without any need for further attention once it’s built?
Yes it is a joke but only because it could never be operated flat out for an hour. Running like that the unit would be knackered in a couple of months. Most of the time it will functioning as a “smoothing capacitor”. It will never be allowed to go below about a 30% full charge and will rarely be at full capacity anyway.
The thing is, at present, when there is excess wind power the operators are paid to “not supply” to the grid, they can still , however, sell their generation to a storage system and get paid twice for the same generation. Nice work if you can get it and it would appear they can courtesy of you and me.
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I see that it says the plant will provide 2.08 Mw for an hour. How useful will that be seeing that we have had 5 days with minimal power from wind last week. See gridwatch templar.
At the same time they will need to built a whole raft of new wind turbines to recharge the flat batteries, as once the wind starts blowing after a wind drought the existing turbines cannot supply the grid at the same time as recharging the batteries. This factor never seems to be taken into account when discussing battery storage. Who will pay for the extra turbines?
I also see that wind generation is still being quoted as the cheapest electricity by politicians and the MSM.
No such thing as *extra* turbines. No number of them is ever going to be sufficient.
May need third party and fire insurance? Presumably theft not an issue.
The thieves are already running the plant.
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2021, Big battery blaze……… Tesla Megapack fire in Australia blamed on undetected coolant leak
‘Battery plants are seen as a way to smooth out power demand’
Ol’ Howard doesn’t understand the difference between supply and demand.
Paul is correct. The business plan is to arbitrage gross variability in energy supply pricing. Dumbasses in the media think these things are for backup, like philanthropic entrepreneurs are going to drop £750m just to give some nice backup to the people who are being screwed. The media helps in wrecking energy supplies by claiming schemes like this are there to backup the mess they support.
Wow, it’s a snip at only three quarters of a billion and to stand as a mausoleum celebrating the folly of green tech, and chucking greenbacks down the bog. The idiots who pay for it – you and me, never asked.
Better hope it doesn’t catch fire…..
I would much prefer the council to fix the potholes in the road and collect rubbish weekly rather than take on the responsibility of saving the planet.
Even better is outside Europe where the rubbish gets collected every day seven days a week and no messing about with half a dozen and more different rubbish bins.
>>collect rubbish weekly
But it’s so much easier to pontificate and virtue signal about irrelevant issue than to do the job they are paid to do.
I wonder if in time the Trafford Low Carbon Energy Park will become a museum to human stupidity – a modern day folly as it were.
It would keep the grid going for 4 minutes (assuming 30 GW required). It is just a peaker, charging up at night at low cost and supplying in the evening peak at high cost. No grants or subsidies needed!
There are a fair number of councils regretting investing in a solar panel scam, councillors are not normally the brightest bulbs in the box, but they seem personally to do OK on things green.
There is good reason for concern about the current proliferation of large Battery Energy Storage Sites, (BESS) close to conurbations in the UK. I requested guidance from the HSE on this: they had none. These BESSs are an unintended consequence of the rush to use intermittent power generation like wind and solar, needed to balance the short-term instabilities of wind and solar power, but should not be located near conurbations.
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 these BESSs and there would be no concern about putting them in cities. The precautionary principal should be applied where real safety doubts exist. The proponents of BESS say that the spacing is in accordance with a code: however, given the newness of the technology there are no well-proven design codes to ensure safe separation distances between modules.
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. It must also be noted that the oldest of the worldwide factories is less than 5 years old (TESLA battery based in Victoria, Australia) and it has been beset with fire problems.
It would seem a reasonable proposition that battery plant location ought to be on remote sites until their safety has been adequately proven, as is the case with most potentially hazardous plants.
Jack, firstly I am personally very anti batteries and as Nigel Sherratt will highlight we are both fairly near a proposed “Project Fortress” incredibly dangerous battery pack.
However may I correct you on one point you make as ” as it makes no difference to the grid at which end the stabilisation occurs. ”
It really is very critical to have grid stabilisation in the correct place. “Real” power needs “Reactive” power to work and the latter is a problem over distance.
This should explain
https://www.drax.com/power-generation/silent-force-moves-electricity/
Reactive power is a feature of AC and does not exist in DC which batteries store. Rreactive power control requires either sophisticated additional electronics and even spinning up a generator to act as a Synchronous Condenser .
It is actually questionable how much of some wind turbines real power generation actually makes it anywhere!
Your statements about “active” and “real” power are so far from reality as to defy description. The first line in the DRAX article you cited is false. The term both of you are searching for is TRUE Power, measured in WATTS. The term ACTIVE power does not exist in engineering, and is likely something “made up” by DRAX in an attempt to dumb-down the concepts for ‘distribution’ to the masses. All reactive power, whether ‘inductive’ or ‘capcitive’ reactances, are necessary and unavoidable losses in the generation and distribution of alternating current, that can be mitigated and controlled by good design–but never eliminated. The lack of reactive power (aka inertia, spinning reserve, et al)in DC sources like wind and solar are serious shortfalls requiring complex, EXPENSIVE solutions. Your post is dangerously uninformed and misleading–par for the course in the Green Energy scam that is currently all the rage.
To BillyDick – you seem to have misread my comment to a staggering degree.
You state “Your statements about “active” and “real” power are so far from reality as to defy description.” Nowhere have I ever used the term “active” – what meds are you on to claim that I did?
You also claim that Drax are telling lies. Good luck sustaining that claim.
I think you should take a lie down.
Read a little more carefully next time: The term “active” was used in your much beloved DRAX article, which is, like I said, dumbed-down PR fodder for the consumer.
Again to Billy Dick, do yourself a favour, go to google (or your search engine of choice) and put in two words, the first is “Active” and the second is “Power” and then click enter. Oh and then read what comes up. Then search “Dunning Kruger Effect” The latter isn’t an engineering term but it sums you up brilliantly.
Have a nice day.
You know not, that of which you speak. Just because some search engine gives you a result proves nothing. The term is true power, and I stand by my comment. The main point of my post is the woefully inadequate, misleading, description of reactive power that I commented on.
“You know not, that of which you speak” You are a robot and I claim my £5. Either that or you are as thick as two short planks.
Your choice.
2.08 GWh for 36,000 homes for a week is a desperate lie (344 Watts/home!). 22 MWh/year/home allowing for heat and EV is more like it (2510 Watts/home). So out by factor of 7.3. Par for the course although less ambitious than our local solar subsidy farm scammers who claimed Cleve Hill (now Project Fortress) would power 100,000 homes (11,000 is more like it, when panels are new and not too hot). BESS scammers are utterly shameless, profiting from the very instability that unreliables produce. BESS, hydrogen and liquid air explosions stopped play at Old Trafford soon now doubt (“Aggers, do stop it!”).
A Giant MegaBattery–Green Nirvana. One question; where is all this surplus energy gonna come from when the windmills and solar cannot even provide base-load energy demands? Will they charge it up from fossil fueled plants, and if so why not just ditch the MegaBattery idea and reopen shuttered fossil plants? One last point: When this ginormous LI-ion battery catches fire–they inevitably do–who is gonna extinguish the inferno? Oh, those pesky laws of thermodynamics. You cannot put a price on a good time.
The only effective way of storing significant quantities of electrical energy is pumped storage hydro. Dinorwig can theoretically store over 9GWh and deliver at 1.8GW for nigh on 6 hours (though it would never be allowed to do that as at least half is held back for emergency “Black Start”)
Even this monster makes most of its operating profit from short term Grid Balancing services and daily arbitrage is not a large part of its income. But even this is defined only as STOR (Short Term Operaating Reserve) and is not considered capable of back up for renewables intermittency.
If your set aim is to avoid burning fossil fuels in the generation of electricity then the only possible option is this one below…..good luck selling this to the Green Party.
http://euanmearns.com/decarbonising-uk-power-generation-the-nuclear-option/
The author of the above – Andy Dawson – has (IIRC ) provided articles for the GWPF and certainly knows what he is talking about.
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If this big battery at Manchester is anything like the one in South Australia, it will at first be championed as an alternative source of supply for when the wind is not blowing, until it is relegated to the status of a network support device which helps prevent outages from transient faults, by which time people will have forgotten its original purpose and that a raft of cheaper devices already existed, and they can say “See, it works,” even though it’s not being used for its original purpose.
Really interesting technical info being discussed here but what would be of more interest to me is who, exactly, are the technical experts advising Trafford Council and did they discuss it all along the lines that are being discussed here? Also, it seems that there over 200,000 households in Manchester city and more than a million in Greater Manchester. Which are the 36,000 households that will be supplied by this site (and who will decide that?) and how will the power be delivered to them but not others?
Further to my last – and why aren’t the Telegraph and other media asking questions along those lines instead of just accepting handouts?
Storage is a lie. It is propaganda to get people to believe that electricity from renewables is viable. It’s OBVIOUSLY not.
When people point out renewables’ intermittency, they act as if that were fixable with storage. Storage won’t work as a matter of scale. Any attempt at grid-level storage will fail by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.
The Telegraph and other media push storage stories, not because it is viable, but because it is necessary to prop up their original lie, that renewables are viable.
Because modern media profit models do not allow for costs related to fact checking. Further, monies from governments, Leftist “non-profits” and insane billionaires are factored into their coverage. Always follow the money.
Electric car causes death and major fires on a ship in the North Sea today.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/one-dead-several-injured-fire-075712580.html
How big a Fire would the Manchester battery cause if there was a problem?
Here are more accidents that will happen https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hands-off-eyes-ford-deploys-090521789.html
Has the UK government gone completely mad?
Ray, I agree that there is an issue of reactive power control on the grid, but the battery farms (BESSs) are being proposed for back-up to the intermittent generation white elephants, and my point was that BESS ought to be part of the power generation system (i.e. at the generator end), not the transformed user system. They should in all sensibility, have been part of the windmill supplier’s responsibility, and if the foolish contracts had included supply-reliability they would have been.
Also, regarding storage, there are two long term operational CAES systems working and this technology could be easily applied in the UK using the many large caverns and simple gas turbines. The traditional problems with pumped storage are lack of suitable sites and capital cost.