Sky Thinks Battery Storage Can Replace CCGTs
By Paul Homewood
h/t idau
This is yet another piece of grossly misreporting by Sky News, this time on battery storage:
Th claim is made that the National Grid is firing up gas generation when wind power drops, instead of using battery storage. The claim is made by a guy from Gresham House New Energy, who just so happen to be an Asset Management Fund which invests in energy storage! No conflict of interest there then.
The Sky reporter simply falls for this hokum without any challenge.
As any energy expert could have told Sky, battery storage is far too tiny to make even a dent in generation, never mind replace wind power for days on end. According to the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios published earlier this year, we have 2.8 GW of battery storage, “with 1-hour discharge duration”.
Wind power generates 195 GWh per day on average, which means that all of the UK’s battery storage put together could keep the grid going for about 20 minutes if the wind stopped blowing.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/future-energy/future-energy-scenarios/documents
Put it another way. A typical 100 MW wind farm would need four times the UK’s current amount of battery storage, in order to maintain supply of power to the grid for two weeks.
This is why battery storage is only used for balancing the grid for short periods, to meet spikes in demand and short term fluctuations in generation.
The Sky report goes on to interview Jeremy Hunt about the massive grid upgrades needed. Naively they fail to press him on how much this will all cost, and who will pay the bill.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The inadequacy of storage is all fully explained in Prof Sir David MacKay’s book ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’.
Yes, but why should Sky take the trouble to inform themselves when they are not being challenged frequently? Is anyone among Paul’s readership taking issue with Sky in the same way as Paul has been doing in such detail?
Here’s helping Sky along, with an intermediate step:
“… we have 2.8 GW of battery storage, ‘with 1-hour discharge duration’.
Wind power generates 195 GWh”
2.8 GW for ONE hour equals 2.8 GWh
So, now they are in the same units, we can do some Arithmetic.
Do you remember how to do that?
And we mustn’t forget to have fully charged the battery beforehand: did you do that, when you had enough spare wind?
The batteries are usually part of the scam, charged from the grid ready to sell back at peak prices.
I’m very surprised that Britain’s combined battery storage would last as long as 20 minutes!
Orde, I’m only NOT surprised that the pillocks in SKY could even do the sums. They are foolishly supporting those who would see us fail. I wonder what SKY is in Chinese….(couldn’t help myself…looked it up: Tiānkōng)
MacKay never did solve the (hydro) storage problem. He suggested flooding the Scottish Glens and Welsh Valleys, for low velocity pumped hydro. But I think the Scots and Welsh might have something to say about that.
So his five plans for renewables were missing one vital (and very expensive) component – energy storage systems.
R
Batteries and Hydrogen are both dead ends but that won’t stop us wasting a huge amount of money on finding this out.
The IEA has just published its ‘Global Hydrogen Review 2023’
176 pages if you can stomach it 🙂
I have no doubt that Sky will have been appropriately remunerated for this piece of undeclared advertising by the energy storage confidence tricksters.
Typo alert, Paul:
“Put it another way. A typical 100 MW wind farm would need four times the UK’s current amount of energy storage, in order to maintain supply of power to the grid for two weeks.”
Stop STOP STOP this nonsense! It’s like food growing on trees! Maannnn! do these folk EVER THINK, HOW batteries are made / get charged up? Where does THAT power come form to fill them? Oh, I see, either it also grows on trees or from the supermarket shelves. Uhh.
I honestly believe most reporters think the batteries are like the batteries they buy at the shops, fully charged and ready to go.
Cheer up saighdear, at least the evenings are drawing out now!
https://www.farmersalmanac.com/earliest-sunset#:~:text=We%20explain.,at%2040°%20North%20latitude).
Jings Ray, ye’re a spot o’ light in th’ days o’ darkness. Those weather forecaster jist hinae a clue! Dreich doesnae begin to address what it’s like. Sunrise 9am sunset before 3.30pm ( close to high hills) and heavy cloud cover all day – some rain …. was all that forecast? 1.6 , aye ‘s’waht it says ( Wan an 6 tenths mph.) There’s more life in a box o’ Irish matches. Ach well, tomorrow will be 1 minute + 51 sec SHORTER … dunno if we’ll get the Brisket joint cooked in time. “Cookie” shows me : 270 minutes to cook it WTF 4-1/2 hrs ? why can’t they just say that ? Hmm, too late for Dinner tonight then? Must be something wrong there, surely ? It’s no the whole Stirk gaun in the oven.
Isn’t most of that battery storage in gas-fired power stations in the form of mechanical batteries (spinning reserve) aka flywheels?
No-oh ! it is stored ( Like most power ) in the form of Hydrocarbons – be honest about it ! 😉
Quite right siagh. It was on this site some years ago where I first came across the very true claim that a lump of coal, charged up millions of years ago, is one of the best batteries out there. And wherever it is found is always fully charged!
Issues often missed:
(1) Wind and solar backup must be able to cover the worst weather for solar and wind energy likely to happen in future decades. Probably based on the past 50 years of weather data for each electric utility’s region, assuming such data were available. The worst weather would likely include at least breakfast hours or dinner hours of a weekday, with little wind. Battery storage might be needed for a bad week or two weeks with low wind speeds.
(2) A gas power plant will need to be on spinning reserve to have a fast start when local wind condition require backup immediately. That is like a car engine idling, and wastes natural gas.
(3) A gas power plant should last 45 years. Battery backup, depending on the frequency of charging and discharging, might last only 15 years. VERY expensive batteries if 45 years requires two or three sets of batteriues.
(4) Wind and solar require 100% backup to avoid a blackout. Natural gas is the cheapest backup. But with 100% natural gas backup, the wind and sun become redundant because natural gas alone can power a grid without any backup.
https://honestclimatescience.blogspot.com/
You miss the point that all gas power will be closed down by 2035. In which case the backup cannot be gas.
The alternatives are pumped hydro and hydrogen caverns. But they have underestimated the cost of these systems by an order of magnitude.
The Royal Society estimated £100 billion for hydrogen storage, but I make the cost more like £1,250 billion. They forgot that hydrogen storage is only 30% efficient, so you need more wind turbines, to power up the hydrogen storage. And we will need the storage system refilled within about 2 weeks.
They also forget that wind turbines need to be replaced after 25 years, so for comparison with a 50-year nuclear power station, their costs need to be doubled.
Large Scale Hydrogen Storage
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/
R
Ralf,
there is no possibility of shutting down gas, I don’t understand how the National Grid can claim that? It is not back up, except for the tiny amount of open cycle gas generators that are switched on as needed and are both small in output and infrequently used.
Closed cycle gas generators are the backbone of the U.K. grid providing balancing of supply and demand which renewables (and nuclear as we run it) cannot do.
If anyone knows how the National Grid is going to balance the grid without gas (And provide inertia, etc) without gas generation please let me know, as I believe it is impossible in the time frame.
Nuclear, I believe, could do it but as we have had CCGT running at near 20 gigwatts or so lately that’s a lot of nuclear stations, especially as you factor in the availabilty figure which drops dramatically for generators carrying out balancing duty.
Ian – you don’t know how dangerous these people are.
They do indeed intend to get rid of gas generation – even before sufficient backup storage stations have been built. This is why we need to oppose them.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/04/uk-electricity-generation-boris-johnson-conservative-conference-gas
R
“But they have underestimated the cost of these systems by an order of magnitude.”
They also make the absurd assumption that they will have money. As you approach Net Zero, you approach zero economy. All their decadent plans will collapse. There simply won’t be any money for “hydrogen caverns.”
To Iain Reid, just be careful with your terminology. A CCGT power plant is a “Combined Cycle Gas Turbine” – a gas turbine with a steam generator running off the exhaust gas heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant
A “Closed Cycle Gas Turbine” is a completely different beast as briefly described here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-cycle_gas_turbine
Precisely! If wind and solar needs gas backup – and it needs to be equivalent – tgen there is no point whatsoever for wind and solar in the first place. It would be cheaper, I assume, (but not in overall terms, of course) to develop efficient CCS which, as much as I hate the damn thing, is markedly better than thousands of wind turbines and solar farms (which are misnamed: they should be called ‘solar ex-farms’.)
The normally sound Andrew Neal in today’s Daily Mail makes some very valid points about the nonsense that is COP and NZC, but spoils it with the usual CYA rubbish about the ‘real need to lower CO2. To do so, he argues, could be done with batteries and wind!
There is another way, though it’s getting late. Climate change discussions are marred by green zealots constantly resorting to the most extreme predictions of global disaster. They scare the young but they are not backed by the science.
That said, there is a need to reduce CO2, best done by investing in the necessary technology, which means large-scale battery storage for renewable power generation and capturing and storing carbon when burning fossil fuels.
Unleashing our technology resources and expertise on a grand scale in these directions with massive public and private investment would carry public opinion and be far more palatable than the hair-shirt approach of the Cop process — especially when those keenest on hair shirts have no intention of wearing any themselves.”
Why would the public – me -support the state choosing how to best to invest my money? When has the state ever got that right? There is no shortage of money willing to invest on new technologies, but that will only happen if the investors get to choose what technologies they invest in.
With a big saigh ! of frustration, yes, I’m thinking of Pension funds and Life insurance etc etc. OHhhh! I’m Sighing all day now!
Harry,
if highly regarded journalists like Mr Neil do not do the very basic research to understand how electrcity generation works (I could probably explain the basics in ten or fiteen minutes), then what chance is there from the lesser journalists.
The media collectively have failed the public in being so ignorant and happy to publish their ignorance.
Lets look at the Cottingham Tesla Battery
Cottingham storage capacity 200 mwh
UK average electrical energy 40,000 mw
UK average when all electric (x3) 120,000 mw
So when we are all-electric,
Cottingham will power the UK for 6 seconds
The Climate Change Committee Report says:
… UK battery storage will increase by 7,000 mw by 2026
… Meaningless twaddle, as mw is not a unit of storage.
… This may mean 14,000 mwh (using Cottingham figures)
… This equates to 7 minutes power for the UK.
Note:
Fast-response batteries are required for wind-power load balancing, not storage. Otherwise, we will end up with a blackout, like South Australia. Frequency has to be maintained, as well as voltage and amperage.
The Cottingham Tesla Battery.
R
On second thoughts, that is not Cottingham.
But it does look similar (with more trees).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-63707463
R
And with frequent use, that six seconds will steadily reduce as the battery degrades.
Impressive battery idiocy in Daily Mail article about all the money saved after spending £750,000 to mitigate a £55,000 annual heating oil bill for a Tudor house (briefly £100,000 in March 2022, which becomes the deceitful comparator). Heating oil was 59p/ltr on 10 December 2021 (73p equivalent adjusted for inflation), 160p/ltr on 10 March 2022 and is 75p/ltr now. £750,000 at 6% over 20 years (optimistic for solar panels and batteries) is £64,440/year. So a really bad deal even ignoring maintenance and replacement costs. Lapped up by many of the commentators. It’s an astonishingly effective scam, you have to give them that at least.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12841065/britain-net-zero-energy-bill-eco.html
For Ffffffffffff sake! Mannnnnn ! yes I know that, YOU guys know that, so what’s wrong ?
The batteries to support 1 week in a dark windless February would need to be 14TWh capacity replaced every 8 years at £200/KWh. That’s £2.8 Trillion pounds every 8 years in CAPEX amortisation alone, if you could charge all this capacity with renewables in the first place. That’s £350 Billion every year in battery amortisation rate.
You can build a lot of nuclear power on existing grid locations, replacing old gas and nuclear, that lasts 60 years and works 24/7, at £5B per GW capacity ( £350B will pay to replace the whole 70GW grid capacity with new nuclear generation every year.
e.g. For the cost of one year’s CAPEX amortisation on the 8 year life of batteries required to support an all renewable grid for 1 week, that actually generate nothing, just add cost to the system, you can instead replace the entire UK generation capacity of 70GW on the existing grid with nuclear power that needs no storage and lasts 60 years. No new pylons, no over subsidised renewables, no subsidies, and no Carbon capture needed, if that was even a good idea, because (i)
(i) Less CO2 will reduce warming slightly, probly undetectably in reality, most of the CO2 is from India & Asia, which in measurable fact means more people will die of cold than if we do n NOT cause a deg or so warming towards Roman or Egyptian levels, and less CO2 will also reduce agricultural productivity, global greening from photosynthesis enhancement. In fact, the only effects of additional atmospheric CO2 science has measured in nature, vs. predicted wrongly in models, are positive. Far superior to global greeding for the renewables rackets, and unnecessary resource intensive electrification of what works much better and cheaper using fossil fuels, primarily gas heating and ICE vehicles.
“But like all batteries it costs money and generates nothing.” — oldbrew, 2019
Where does your 8-year lifetime for batteries come from ?
The LFP batteries can run for tens of thousands of cycles at moderate depth of discharge.
Evidence? 10,000 with careful management perhaps, typical use more like 2,000 full cycles.
Well what is “full cycles” ? Why would you do “full cycles” if you knew it was going to shorten the life of your installation?
These people will know full well how to use the cycle life versus depth of discharge relation. It will be built into the software and pricing structure.
You can get 30,000 cycles from LFP batteries, as long as the depth of discharge is small enough. That’s 80 years at 1 cycle per day.
These kind of arguments don’t do any good, unless you address the reality of the situation. One small mistake means you are laughed out of court.
Why keep a dog and bark yourself? The whole point of lithium batteries is that you can use the full capacity, otherwise you might as well buy much cheaper lead acid. If you never drive your Tesla more than 10 miles a day you’ll get more life out of the battery but that’s a very poor return on investment. Perhaps buy a second-hand Fiat Panda for £3,000 like me and spend the rest of the money on something useful.
Sky missed the real story on batteries. They have been making most of their money on providing ancillary services – responding to grid frequency excursions for a few seconds or minutes at a time – combined with some arbitrage by charging up when prices are low, and discharging into the evening peak. However, as battery capacity has expanded there is now more capacity available than the grid needs for short term ancillary services, with the result that prices have collapsed from the high levels that prevailed initially, and not all batteries get awarded ancillary contracts in the daily auctions. So they are looking for new lines of business.
Meanwhile OFGEM has been propelled into trying to do something about burgeoning balancing mechanism costs, which are now running at £4bn p.a. One angle is to get National Grid to devise ways of increasing competition by allowing smaller generators and batteries connected perhaps only at distribution voltages to participate in the Balancing Mechanism. This article from Modo Energy (Sky’s “consultant “) explains why smaller batteries have been excluded so far and why that is changing with the system going live on 12th December.
https://modoenergy.com/research/balancing-mechanism-battery-energy-storage-dispatch-increase-open-balancing-platform-quick-take
I am going to ask Elexon to enhance their information platform to encompass OBP metering on embedded batteries and generators. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have the same transparency as AEMO provide in Australia where 5 minute data on batteries are readily available.
And yet . . . journalists and ministers still think batteries are just there to save them.
Good point add up… about increasing battery capacity changing the market place. They might make money in today’s environment, but the market place is finite. Journalists and ministers think the market is infinite, but it is absolutely constrained by investors being able to make money. For all their dreams of backup, the market may already be approaching saturation, with only a teeny bit of battery . . . and it’s not for backup.
Indeed the real story Sky should be running is the FOUR BILLION extra cost of running the grid now due to constantly having to deal with wind/solar fluctuations as not enough generators are allowed to load follow anymore. The biggest part of that though is the CCGTs who now want top dollar to switch on/increase output at short notice as they aren’t called upon to run at maximum efficiency anymore. Mind you Guest shouldn’t moan too much as calling on gas at short notice jacks up the marginal price per MWh and the battery boys want that to make money on arbitrage trading. So like ancillary services have been a race to the bottom for batteries i reckon this latest change wont benefit them as much as think.
If we look at the claim that batteries could have saved 71,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the year to October we can calculate backwards assuming 400gCO2/kWh for relatively inefficient BM operation, implying 2.5MWh per tonne CO2, or 177.5GWh over 10 months, compared with wind curtailment of 3,324GWh over the same period. In practice, battery storage of wind would be limited to the capacity in Scotland where transmission constraints result in curtailment. Gas would still be needed to maintain supply in England during curtailment, but the batteries could discharge once the wind drops, saving some gas later.
It really doesn’t solve curtailment, even at current relatively limited levels.
Hi IDAU, could you possibly clarify something for me? As I understand it constraint payments are made to suppliers to not supply into the network at times of “surplus”. The constrained suppliers are, however, still allowed to sell that power outside of the network, i.e. to a suitably connected storage unit and thus get an additional payment from that “buyer”. Am I correct so far?
If so, cleverly placed storage facilities could have transmission links to the grid together with direct links to wind farms bypassing the network. Correct?
Glenartney recently linked to a Caithness proposed battery store bang alongside Mybster sub station approx here https://openinframap.org/#12.04/58.46284/-3.40481
Exactly what constitutes the transmission network in Scotland seems to include voltage levels below the England/Wales 400kV norm (often down to 132kV)
so this battery pack could theoretically be paid to charge up from local wind farms as well as paid to balance (or arbitrage supply) the transmission grid.
If I am reading this wrong please let me know but it certainly seems a somewhat opportunistic (crooked) way to operate a system.
The rules are complicated. Here is the guidance for co-located storage for a CFD generator:
Click to access Co-Location_Guidance-Low_Carbon_Contracts_Company_5.pdf
Key rules:
CfD payments are made on electricity generated by the CfD generating asset based on the applicable reference price and not energy exported from the Electricity Storage Facility.
CfD payments are calculated on the metered volumes at the point of generation and not the point of export of the generation.
Ensure at all times that any Electricity Storage Facility, where associated with the same BM Unit as that associated with the Facility, shall only store electricity generated by the Generating Unit(s) of the Facility using the Facility Generation Technology and shall not store electricity imported from any other source.
So that means that the input to the storage is effectively at the day ahead price used for reference pricing, but the restriction on use is surely an issue – for example implying no storage while generation or connection to shore is undergoing maintenance. Curtailment on the other hand would only apply to supply at the grid connection point – i.e. the sum of generation and net battery charging/discharging.
For AR6 the government have decided to disallow CFD supply to offshore oil and gas on the grounds that consumers should not be subsidising it (yet consumers are still left subisidising exports at far more egregious cost, because exports only occur during masssive surplus and low prices, whereas offshore supply would be when available, and likely would help reduce curtailment).
Click to access proposed-amendments-ar6-making-generators-directly-supplying-offshore-oil-gas-facilities-ineligible-private-network-agreement-ia.pdf
In truth, the rules are haphazard and depend on what applied when you set up – and are still very much evolving. There are lots of competing vested interests jockeying for rules that favour them, usually at consumer expense. Little of it has been properly thought through.
Thanks. I will spend tomorrow trying to get my head around it.
“Battery backup means you die an hour later.”
But, as Matt Mcgoo said on BBC news, by 2030 we will have enough battery capacity in the grid to power 18 million homes. What are you worried about?????????
What about the other 7 million?
Wait a damn second . . . where do they get 18 million? Why not all of them, just for less time? 18 million seems completely fake.
Quite!
But by 21:30 the batteries will have run out. Saves them announcing it on the news at 22:00.
Yes, but only for 3 secs – that’s not progress
After further review . . . 18 million is completely fake. Such an assertion must also include the time factor. 18 million is bogus. 18 million for half an hour could be true.
Exactly what I was getting at! Shows Matt McGoo knows nothing!
As an HV PM, I have installed a small 4MW/2MWh BESS system at 11Kv grid connection (via transformers) – when completed, this was put on a NG EFR contract purely for frequency management – the batteries (Li Ion) are constantly, dynamically charging & discharging in relation to sub second grid frequency movements – the complete system cost a small fortune, with payback estimated at 5 years – it was on a 15 year NG contract – this very localised solution has many benefits, but trying to regulate the complete grid, with storage, would be economically unviable and the required materials unsourceable – scale that up to all western grids, it just won’t work
I also wonder if the grid is infected with thousands of these sites there could be some unintended outcomes as the software all fight each other to dynamically manage changing grid condutions.
Wind & solar farms already rely on a lot of expensive, complex electrical equipment to connect to grid (inverters, STATCOMs etc) – adding storage, sufficient to power the nation, in a prolonged Dunkleflaute, is just too expensive and the materials required (Lithium etc), are unsourceable in the amounts needed to power the UK grid, never mind global grids
Then, there’s the heightened fire risk
and the toxic fumes …
We no longer have journalists. They are all activist copywriters whose job is to promote the political narrative they claim to support