100 TWh of Hydrogen Storage Needed To Avoid Blackouts
By Paul Homewood
It’s only taken these so-called experts two decades to work this out!
Britain must set up a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves to guard against the risk of blackouts under the net zero shift, according to the country’s premier science body.
The Royal Society has said 900 caverns filled with hydrogen will be needed to ensure the UK can keep the nation’s lights on during periods of low wind and sunshine.
he proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
The report is perhaps the starkest warning yet of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
It warns: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated.
“Large-scale energy storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation’s lights on. Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
The forecast is based on 37 years of weather data and the assumption that oil and gas power sources will be phased out in the coming decades. 100 TWh of backup power would be enough to power the country for weeks on end if needed but would require huge infrastructure.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, lead author of the report, said: “Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.
“The demand will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but they are volatile and will have to be complemented by large-scale supply from energy storage or other sources.”
Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.
Theoretically all of this may be technically possible, but at what cost.
Apart from the cost of storage (and the distribution network to take hydrogen to and from these salt caverns, electrolysis is a very expensive process. Moreover it wastes a lot of energy. Because of low energy efficiency, you would need 500 TWh of wind power to produce enough hydrogen to make 100 TWh of electricity.
And we now know that offshore wind is a lot more expensive than we were told.
And on top of all of that, we would need to build 100 GW of hydrogen burning power stations for the times when there is little wind.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
‘he proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet’
What’s the business model?
A trillion pounds of investment at double-out zero rate of return.
Meanwhile the rest of the world will continue to burn coal and oil.
And we won’t even produce out own fracking gas.
And these lunatics claim to be scientists. Hydrogen because of its small molecule is almost impossible to contain and transport. And is highly reactive resulting in the gas not being found naturally. The Royal Society has been royally politicised and now simply has almost zero credibility.
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
But surely to get all this hydrogen we need to use gas coal and oil since there are not sufficient renewables – therefore CO2 must go up = a good thing anyway .
I would not like a house near any of those caves – ludicrous crazy bampots.
And not a house near any of the pipelines that carry the hydrogen to or from the caves. Many space launches were delayed due to hydrogen leaks, hydrogen is difficult to contain.
A tacit admission that renewables aren’t cheap
“The demand will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of LOW CARBON electricity generation,”
“Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.”
If Energy, in the form of ‘nuclear, hydro and other sources’ are ‘more expensive than hydrogen storage’, woe betide anyone suggesting to use nuclear, hydro and other sources’ to produce Hydrogen (with a capital H).
And is Hydrogen Storage a type of Energy? And if it isn’t, how can their prices be compared? The storage costs per unit Energy will be dependent on the number of times the storage is used, and this needs to be added to all the other costs incurred.
It points to more incompetence being added to the accumulating pile, financed by taxpayers’ contributions. But we are saving the Planet!
An issue that is carefully avoided in the media is the effect of hydrogen in the atmosphere. Hydrogen rises rapidly to the stratosphere where it reacts photochemically with ozone. Increased hydrogen means reduced ozone with dire consequences. So, apart from economic madness it is technically wrong.
It also removes atmospheric hydroxyl radicals which would otherwise have broken down atmospheric methane to CO2+H2O. I believe the IPCC have just increased its GWP (a truly daft notion anyway) from just over 6 up to 11. Nobody shouted that out in the media either.
Read part of the report and despaired. Quote from Sir Peter Bruce (VP Royal Society) “An electricity system with significant wind and solar generation is likely to offer the lowest cost electricity but it is essential to have large-scale energy stores that can be accessed quickly to ensure Great Britain’s energy security and sovereignty.”
Are all these academics as thick as two shortuns? How can generators be termed the lowest cost and then follow up with but you need to pay for all this storage as well because it isn’t reliable?
They really have taken over the asylum
Plus many.
Harry, the wife and I have been struck down in bed since last Monday with our second bout of Covid. Just starting to come to now. Weird thing is, it appears I have been regularly posting all week but I really can’t remember doing most (if any) of them.
Hope they were coherent because the wife says I haven’t been!
Are you covid jabbed if you dont mind me asking ?
Follow the FLCCC protocol Mr Sanders and you will be right as rain within a day.
To Charles Allen, no problem – had the initial 2 jabs early on (I’m 67) the booster (3rd) in late 2021, got first dose of Covid New Years day 2022. Booster jab (4th) Sept 2022. (I would (modestly) claim to be very physically fit – a keen cyclist and former county level hockey player.)
And then got this second and much more severe dose last weekend. I was actually due for a booster this coming week but was going to decline it anyway even before I got this dose. They clearly have done bugger all good for me and my wife (56 – I was a bit of a cradle snatcher) who followed almost the exact same course and went down with it both times as well.
TPTB might have engineered another bioweapon but the jab did not prevent catching covid or transmitting it . My brother has about the same as you but now has heart fibrillation and his wife got leg clot , lost much eyesight and can no longer drive. They tried to hide over 1000 side effects of injury and death for 75 years – a judge forced Pfizer to release .
Dr peter McCullough has protocols for injury . So do thousands of others
I have only had a tetanus jab and polio sugar cube in my life .
The Covid pandemic was declared at an end by the consensus Science when paradoxically everyone had caught the disease.
Even more paradoxically there is actually evidence that having all your boosters doesn’t help one jot.
Additionally If you have managed to decline the offer of a vax till now the current offer one be just one single jab.
All in the name of Science.
There has been discussion here ad nauseum about how impractical the production and distribution of hydrogen is but suppose, just for a moment, that some kind of compromise could be reached whereby dedicated large consumers could be connected to a green hydrogen partial grid that would significantly save on uasage of hydrocarbons. The co-produced oxygen would be potentially more valuable than the hydrogen. If collected to “tonnage oxygen” standards it could be used to oxy-combust the disposal of difficult wastes (I’m thinking plastics or even crematoria) from which the exhaust gases, having no nitrogen diluent, could be easily scrubbed of CO2 which would then go to underground disposal (CCS). Come on Cat – what about it?
How many salt caverns are there in the UK right now?
Our existing onshore cavern storage:
Click to access 181207_storage_update_website.pdf
The article pointed out that 100TWh about 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries, which rather makes a mockery of the idea that our cars will power the grid. I suppose I can feel mildly gratified that they have confirmed my own work, which suggested that we would need 50TWh of hydrogen storage if we went that route to meet current levels of demand, so double would be the 100TWh. I see they did a reasonably proper job of making the estimate by using (like me) over 30 years of weather data to try to capture the awkward extremes – not something that any of the regular advisors to the CCC, National Grid or DESNZ do. They did not comment on the feasibility of so much storage, but it is doubtful whether we have sufficient salt formations dotted around the country. Nor do they comment on cost of the whole scheme, starting with the cost of making the hydrogen in the first place.
Still, the important thing is putting down a marker on the size of storage required. It’s a grenade in the fantasy scenarios from National Grid.
My calculation over a year in a chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
Seriously IDAU there is a job desperately waiting for you as Energy Secretary in a sensible government. Fancy joining the Reclaim Party?
https://www.reclaimparty.co.uk/manifesto
If the imbecile politicians actually wanted to avoid blackouts, they wouldn’t have destroyed all the coal power plants and stopped fracking for gas.
What kind of lunatic asylum is running this country’s infrastructure. Pretty soon we’ll need huge caverns to store captured CO2, and far bigger ones to store H2 (did they say whether it be liquid or gas?).
Anyway, if you’re not suffocated when ond of them leaks, you’ll be blown to kingdom come by the other.
Sigh.
Do you think the RS had a little footnote saying “Actually chaps, we’re joking”? Can’t see any other explanation. Unless it’s a deep anti alarmist ploy? Where’s the hydrogen coming from?
I actually thought of James Bond telling Q, “You must be joking.”
Caverns filled with hydrogen? Nice way to blow up mountains!
Cor, strike a light…
Potholers light a fag and boom !
Maybe we could store the hydrogen in floating “cigar’ shaped containers. I’m sure I’ve seen this done before maybe in the 1920’s…… oh, no sorry that was something else.
Oo, I know, large diesel generators,only trying to help.
This puts me in mind of an accident where a CO2 pipeline was ruptured due to a landslide. The danger was that the CO2 was rolling towards a small town nearby and, if not detected could’ve suffocated the residents. The CO2 was in liquid form and was the type of thing that would be stored in caves etc under carbon storage schemes. It’s not in this report but I read somewhere that there had been another leak somewhere where cattle had died.
https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2022/09/11/here-minute-details-2020-mississippi-co-2-pipeline-leak-rupture-denbury-gulf-coast/8015510001/
These accidents would be very ray one imagines but, if they happen at night and go undetected, lots of people could die in there sleep as CO2 is odourless and colourless. You would never see it coming.
In that linked article, this was written:
The developers say their pipelines would exceed federal safety requirements and that the Satartia incident was an anomaly brought about by unique factors.
I would guess that every pipeline has many sets of unique, unsuspected, factors.
The cattle died in the Limnic Eruption of Lake Nyos. Approx 1,700 people died as well as 3,000 cattle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
It is also believed that the sudden unexplained disappearance of shipping and/or aircraft in some tropical waters is the sudden release of pockets of CO2. Ships don’t float on CO2. Cue Barry Manilow and Bermuda Triangle.
Mad Unnecessary
The Royal Society seems to have gone down the nick recently.
Pity.
At midday yesterday, coal was supplying 3 times the energy being supplied by windmills. Silence across the legacy media. The interconnectors from France and Norway kept our grid from collapsing. Germany will be competing for interconnector power as their imports are now at record levels following their moronic decision to close their nuclear.
Viking Link to Denmark (and thence Germany) is close to start up. Construction on NeuConnect direct to Germany has started. Both are 1.4GW.
Not all hydrogen is the same, something the Royal Society seems to have overlooked. Hydrogen has two spin isomers – parallel aligned neutron spin Orthohydrogen as opposed to anti-parallel aligned parahydrogen. The latter has a lower energetic state than ortho. There is normally, at STP, an equilibrium state of about 75% ortho to 25% para.
Problems start kicking in if you start significant compression/decompression – https://tinyurl.com/Joule-thomson – and/or significant cooling.
There can be sudden spontaneous conversion from ortho to para releasing energy. Storing hydrogen in cylinders or pressurised tanks at relatively small scale is usually safe enough (though you should see the size of the handling and HSE regulations for hydrogen storage which are scarily large) but at anything approaching these scales is exceptionally dangerous – just ask NASA.
I glibly suggested in an earlier post that the lunatics had taken over the asylum at the Royal Society. However, anyone who has ever actually worked with hydrogen at any scale would instantly say this was a truly insane scheme.
I would welcome Thinking Scientist’s views on this one given his extensive petro chemical industry experience where hydrogen is regularly used in refining.
p.s.I am opting now to use url shortening to save space. However if you don’t trust such links then don’t open them!
Not a good idea. Post the full link. Nobody will click on anything if they cannot see where it is going,
>>.I am opting now to use url shortening to save space.
“100 TWh of Hydrogen Storage Needed ….”
Hydrogen has the lowest volumetric calorific value of any gas.
It is only 30% that of natural gas at the same pressure, so would need 3.33x as much storage volume as natural gas to store the same quantity of energy (at the same pressure.)
Rough is our biggest single gas storage facility, and currently that is operating at a pressure enabling it to hold 16.83TWh of energy in the form of Nat Gas.
It’d hold just 5.049TWh via hydrogen.
https://www.centrica.com/media-centre/news/2023/centrica-bolsters-uk-s-energy-security-by-doubling-rough-storage-capacity/
Since you couldn’t just pump hydrogen into a salt cavern and then pump it out when needed, It would presumably be in “hydrogen-tight” containers (not easy to make and maintain on a huge scale). As the hydrogen is pumped in, they would expand, and as it is pumped out, they would contract. But some hydrogen would inevitably leak into the air in the cavern outside the containers, producing a highly-inflammable mixture which would ignite at the slightest spark. Don’t live above one of these caverns.
Not a lot of people know that (!) Hydrogen has an unusual characteristic (shared only with Helium and Neon) that instead of cooling down on expansion, in the way refrigerant gases do, it actually heats up. It is a small effect but concentrates at the throttling point which is exactly where most leaks occur. So it is “hot” hydrogen that is likely to leak and much more likely to explode exactly at the most damaging point. This is highlighted in all the handling and HSE docs but presumably the RS didn’t want to consider “Inconvenient Truths”
You really wouldn’t want them in charge of Ordnance.
This is cloud cookoo stuff perhaps trotted out to demonstrate what madness any of this is and give us a reality check before we go beyond the point of no return.
Indeed, sunbeams from cucumbers makes more sense. I hope you are right that it’s meant as a warning (like, one hopes, the CU group assessing all the things to be sacrificed to achieve NZ) but Nursey for one believes in ‘Global Boiling’. I suspect that both RS and CU are true believers in the cult.
There is a nice German word for scientists whose understanding is limited to the details of their subject: “Fachidiot”. Something like “expert idiot”, but here is no good translation.
Making the tiny molecule is costly, then keeping it in is doubly hard……
Here is a video of Professor Llewely-Smith explaining this RS report to the Capricorn Investment Group :
His costs are based upon wind energy costing £35.00/MWhr !
There are quite a few exotic BEIS assumptions in the report. They have the round trip efficiency for H2 storage at 41%. I am waiting on access to their detailed annexes to dig around the details. Pric8ng 8s based on crazy assumptions.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. It does not help the climate-realist cause, to become alarmists.
I made a presentation to UK M.Ps recently, and I said the UK needs 19,000 gwh to backup 50% of the grid for 10 days — just 1/5 of what they are claiming in this article. But even my calculation will be difficult to fulfil.
Note: I hope they are not simply piggy backing this Telegraph article on the presentation I made. A version of this is available on the Tom Nelson Youtube channel, called ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
My calculations are as follows:
Electrical energy in use 40 gw on average.
Total UK energy usage is 5x this, at 200 gw
Electricity more efficient so total energy capacity required 160 gw
Only 50% needs backup (nuclear, bio, etc remaining) = 80 gw
Energy required for 10 days 19,000 gwh
If we were the back this up with pumped water the costings are as follows.
Dinorwig and Coire Glas stations cost £1.7 billion
They could hold 30 gwh each.
So we require 600 of these power stations (yes 600)
At a cost of £1,000 billion. (politicians have no idea of costs)
And where on earth would the UK put 600 pumped water power stations? We don’t have the hills available. This was recognised 15 years ago by Prof McKay (government science advisor) who said we should flood Welsh Valleys and Scottish Glens, for pumped storage. I think the Welsh and Scots might have something to say about that.
See his report to government, called ‘Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air’.
As to backing up the grid with hydrogen, I think that is a non-starter. Hydrogen production and compression (or liquefaction) is very energy intensive, making this very inefficient. Plus hydrogen can escape from anything, so how can they contain it? Hydrogen can leak through steel cylinders, let alone rock formations.
While pumped water storage might return 90% of your energy, hydrogen will only return 30%. Which means you have to triple your generation, to charge up the hydrogen ‘battery’. That is three times the renewable (wind) power. But wind is already tripled, because of its very low 30% capacity factor. Thus you need 9x the nameplate energy, to make wind work as a complete contained system.
So if you want 1 gw of wind electricity, you need to build 9 gw of wind turbines, plus fifteen 30 gwh pumped storage systems, And then rebuild those wind turbines after 25 years, because they do not last very long. This is all very expensive and energy intensive. (Remember these construction costs are based upon fossil fuels. If we built these systems on renewables, the costs would triple.)
My estimate for maintaining 40 gw of UK energy capacity, using 60% wind power, is that this 60% of wind energy would cost £2,800 million. (ie: 100 Hornsea-3 wind farms, plus 600 Coire Glas pumped storage systems.) And we still have to build the other 40% (nuclear, bio, whatever).
The UK energy policy is a complete fantasy. That is why I called my talk to MPs ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
Ralph Ellis
This is my talk on the Tom Nelson Channel.
Ralph
Thank you for your excellent contribution. And why was this not headline material in the MSM? I guess I know the answer to that; it didn’t fit the approved narrative.
With respect to Ralph, I think it is a complete guess that 10 days of back-up power is sufficient and furthermore that it gives is too low a figure. For instance, it is also necessary to include the extra storage and power capacity required to be able to re-fill the back-up storage in time and sufficiently for the next time the renewables fail to match demand.
I have made this calculation myself by downloading the demand, wind and solar data from gridwatch, which records this data every 5 minutes, into an Excel file.
I have not yet done this for 2050 but I have make the calculation for Labour’s proposal to decarbonise the electricity by 2030 by quadrupling offshore wind, doubling onshore wind and trebling solar based upon the Gridwatch data for 2022 :
I calculate that for this 2030 proposal where the average power demand is 36 GW and maximum 56GW we will require :
Hydrogen storage : 19 TWhrs = 600K tonnes (taking a generating efficiency of 40%)
Battery : 10 TWhrs
I have also made some costings, but these were before the offshore wind industry requested a two and a half times price increase to supply for AR5!
If anyone is interested in seeing the calculations please email me at jbxcagwnz@gmail.com
In the end such calculations need to be over many years of data to make sure that there really would be sufficient in store to cover the changes in storage over each year, and they have to be at reasonable resolution – which I think the Royal Society finally did. It is useful to compare calculations made at say 5 minute resolution from Leo’s gridwatch data, gradually increasing the averaging period to 30 minute settlement periods, hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. The differences lead to some rule of thumb estimates on adjustment factors if you only have access to less detailed data.
Also, it’s a good idea to run calculations for different capacity combinations and different levels of surplus capacity to see the trade offs with storage required.
The impracticalties of the whole net zero nonsense are very often omitted in even AGW sceptics’ utterances.
1) The UK’s output of greenhouse gases in negligible
2)More than 70 % of the man-made CO2 on Earth comes from nations East of Suez who correctly and very sensibly ignore the received Western opinion favouring decolonisation.
3) There’s no proof of the CO2-climate hypotheses, nor evidence favouring influencing the climate by decarbonisation.
4) the UN compliant nations are thereby ruining themselves.
The whole effort to avert dangerous climate change is mad.
The present received opinions completely invalid.
Now hear this, crazed politicos!
John, thanks for the reply.
.
>>it is also necessary to include the extra storage and power
>>required to be able to re-fill the back-up storage in time
Indeed, but how far does one go, before the whole thing becomes an absolute nonsense. It is a fantasy already, without thinking of recharging the ‘battery’ within a fortnight. One major difference I have, is that I am only backing up 60% of the grid. One hopes we will be sensible enough to have 10% bio and 30% nuclear running as base-load. Although I blanche at the thought of chopping down 26 million tonnes of trees a year, and wasting 15% of the energy on processing and transport of those tree-pellets.
.
>>I have made this calculation … wind and solar data from
>>gridwatch, every 5 minutes, into an Excel file.
Interesting, I will take a look. Any rough conclusions from your study? What is the longest renewable outage, and how deep was it? (ie: 70% wind reduction for 6 days with NO solar, as happened in Dec 2021.)
.
>>by quadrupling offshore wind, and trebling solar
I tripled wind. And I disregarded solar because it does not generate in the winter at all. The Drax generation page (like gridwatch) shows no solar in the winter, so solar is worse than useless. Prof McKay (government science advisor) recognised this back in 2010, and recommended placing solar in the Sahara. Apart from the political instability there, my estimate for the HVDC transmission line was £3,600 billion.
Ralph
PS : I forgot to add that I allowed 10 GW for nuclear, biomass & hydro and needed to increase Labour’s renewable proposal by 40% in order to obtain dispatchable (always available) power.
“I think it is a complete guess that 10 days of back-up power is sufficient”
Storage is finite; outages are unbounded.
IDAU is absolutely correct that storage calculations need to be over many years of data to guarantee sufficient storage. I don’t have this data but I’m hoping my relatively simple calculation based upon the demand/wind/solar power profile for just one year, 2022, does give an indication of the ball park figure. I would be surprised if I was out by an order of magnitude! I will read the RS’s report and also look to checking out the results using the power profile for different years.
BTW, running calculations for different capacity combinations and different levels of surplus capacity to see the trade offs with storage required can only be done with accurate figures for costs. If the RS’ costs for wind power in the report are the same as those Professor Llewellyn-Smith quoted in the Capricorn video, £35.00/MWhr, then this will need updating.
The NGESO FES 2023 “Energy Supply & Demand” charts for 2050 do not show any grid-scale storage. The “Key Statistics” shows storage from 62 GWhrs (Falling Short) to 197 GWhrs (Leading The Way). So even the maximum storage in the Key Statistics is 1/500th of the 100 TWhrs calaculated by the RS.
It is therefore clear that by 2050 we will not have dispatchable power and are expected to live with intermittent power, which by then, through the electrification of everything, is intended to cover not only our existing electrical power requirements but also all our heating, transport, industry and agriculture needs.
Well I can only refer back to Andy Dawson’s use of nuclear and pumped hydro.
https://euanmearns.com/decarbonising-uk-power-generation-the-nuclear-option/
Forget hydrogen – simply double up the above. France managed to construct and commision 57 reactors in just 15 years under the Messmer Plan. Andy’s scheme needs a bit of updating (don’t knowif he reads this, perhaps he might) but 100GW of reactors in the next 27 years could be acheived, along with some extra PSH and of course some Breeder molten salt units to burn waste and provide peaking output to reduce PSH requiement. If hydrogen is required for specific purposes then have dedicated nuclear plants continuously running High temperature electrolysis for greater efficiency – or even go for nuclear thermolysis.
Fannying about trying to balance annual variations from intermittant sources is just plain mad.
Willis put it very succinctly on WUWT a couple of years ago.
We can Either
build 100GW of wind power (and rebuild every 15- 20 years) plus 100GW nuclear power to back up whenever wind dropped (These would have to ramp up and down rapidly, increasing cost and reducing efficiency and life = extra expense).
OR
Forget the windmills, build 100GW of simple (cheaper) reactors to proved steady base-load for 50 years or more.
Hmmm. Difficult choice.
Here is an interesting tidbit, regards this paper.
They plan to construct 850 caverns in salt strata to store 1,220 gwh (e) of hydrogen gas. The concern is leakage, but Panfilov says that the saturated water strata above act as a natural barrier to hydrogen.
He estimates only 2% of leakage over the lifetime of the storage. Unfortunately, he does not clarify what ‘lifetime’ means.
Underground and pipeline hydrogen storage
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301254520_Underground_and_pipeline_hydrogen_storage
Ralph
Interesting paper. 2% leakage relative to throughput could become quite serious over time, even though this storage would be primarily seasonal. Other factors include the choice of cushion gas and the need for separation again on redelivery, though H2 in the reject gas could easily be chemically purged.
I noted an expectation of H2S formation at the bottom of a cavern. That of course implies H2SO4 on solution in water – and H2S is corrosive anyway.
Still, the operational smaller scale H2 caverns have a long history of operation and coping with these problems.
Here is another tidbit.
The paper indicates 100 twh of hydrogen storage is required, but a little note at the bottom says ’thermal energy’. Ah, so to convert this into electrical energy, we need to divide by about two, so this is only 50 twh of electrical energy. And this is simply not enough to power the nation during wind and solar outages.
50 twh represents 13 days of UK energy demand. but the paper is indicating that some complete years have a 50 twh shortfall. Thus this backup system is supposed to plug the usual daily and weekly gaps in energy supply, and then plug the 50 twh annual gap too.
That cannot be done with 50 twh of backup energy.
Ralph
I’m waiting for the Royal Society to get back to me: the link to the annexes to their report doesn’t work. That’s where we can get a better idea of exactly what they did.
The main report is here:
Click to access Large-scale-electricity-storage-report.pdf
The annexes were supposed to be here:
https://royalsociety.org/energy-storage/
The main body of the report talks about a flexible amount of storage reflecting different assumptions about the amount of (over) capacity installed. Whilst they show nice curves for estimating the solar/wind mix they don;t really cover the excess capacity/storage tradeoff.
I haven’t read the RS report but if they’re using the 2023 NGESO FES for 2050 for demand then the 50 TWhrs of electrical storage is between 3.5% to 4.2% of the total yearly demand (1167 LTW – 1447 ST). My UK 2030 calculation gives a figure of 2.4%, so not so very different considering the all the variables and assumptions. Perhaps 2022 was a windy year?
John…
The RS give all-electric annual consumption as 570 twh.
My calculation for all-electric consumption is 1,280 twh
Present electricity is 320 twh, but only represents 20% of total energy. We would need to increase generation by 3 or 4 to cover total energy demand. I multiplied by 4, giving 1280 twh.
Ralph
Please see my chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
It shows the storage of actual H2 and its potential to generate power as separate lines. That is more useful for comparison with the other example on the chart, which is pumped storage (or batteries if you must, at similar round trip efficiency).
Note that H2 requires much more wind capacity because of the electrolyser losses. Also note that this is an optimistic view, because you will never build capacity that only gets used once in a blue moon when it’s windy and sunny and demand is low – that’s completely uneconomic. See this chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZM72/1/
To John Brown, IDAU, Ralf Elliss et alia regarding the storage volumes required. If nuclear is included in the calculations has any allowance been given for offline refuelling and servicing. A PWR is usually offline for at least one month every 18 months. The EPRs coming at HPC (and possibly SZC) are 1,620MW each reactor. Traditionally shutdowns would be programmed for summer months when demand was lower but this shift to intermittent supplies and the need to lay down storage whenever possible may make such substantial generation loss a problem.
The nuclear summer scheduling as done in Europe is obviously a moveable feast. In the US, it is done in the shoulder demand seasons of spring and fall. There is some interplay with the amount of solar you include relative to wind: solar can usually offset a summer nuclear dip (though it might have struggled this year).
Uhhh . . . riddle me this, Batman. If you have a coal plant, can you use hydrogen for anything? What about a gas turbine?
All this happy horseshit assumes there are generators who can use hydrogen as a fuel for their generators.