Re: energy in UK

On 16/04/2025 9:17 am, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:04:37 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 15/04/2025 01:43, Don Y wrote:

On 4/14/2025 3:58 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 13/04/2025 06:23, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 13/04/2025 4:16 am, john larkin wrote:

It is ultimately all about very clever financial engineering to load the
balance sheet with debt and pay handsome dividends to foreign owners.
>
Penny wise and pound foolish for the the UK.

 There will never be enough batteries to power even a tiny country like
the UK,  to keep people alive through a few weeks of cold, dark, still
weather.

And nobody is planning on doing that. Vanadium flow cells can store power for longer than lithium ion batteries - in vanadium flow cells you can store energy in the electrolyte, and pump if off into holding tanks, then pump it back into the battery to recover the energy.
It may be competitive with pumped water and pumped air storage.
The UK actually does have a bunch of nuclear reactor driven power plants. I don't know if there are enough of them to serve as a keep-alive backup. They've also got quite a few gas-turbine powered generators, but their massive gas storage centre got moth-balled a few years ago.

People can keep warm by snuggling around burning lithium batteries.

Not a particularly cheap source of heat. Somebody silly enough to take Trump seriously might go for it.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney