Re: 1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems

On 24/11/2024 18:20, john larkin wrote:

On Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:58:35 +0000, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 24/11/2024 16:44, TTman wrote:

On 24/11/2024 11:40, Martin Brown wrote:

There is a startup company in the UK called NatPower (no relation to
the real National Power PLC aka NPower) claiming to have over 25 years
of experience in BESS. They are proposing 1GW (sic) BESS in all sorts
of brown and green field UK sites. They have no track record that I
can find. Does anyone here know of any real international project(s)
that they have actually done and more importantly *delivered*?
(their own PR or its uncritical repetition in the press doesn't count)
>
Their website is very slick indeed but I suspect that beauty is only
skin deep. I am interesting in evidence of substance not PR fluff.

 You've got to have energy before you can store it!

There is plenty of energy in the form of windfarms that are quite literally paid to *not* supply electricity when the wind blows any faster than average. National grid CBA to put enough capacity into the North South interconnects and so there is a huge surplus in the North and a deficit in the South around London and the South East.
Cube law dependence of output power on windspeed means it isn't worth putting in the cables in to move the highest possible peak power levels (and that is a fair engineering compromise). However, right now they are well short of a proper solution and a lot of Scottish and offshore wind energy producers are paid to feather their blades!
https://news.sky.com/story/britons-paying-hundreds-of-millions-to-turn-off-wind-turbines-as-network-cant-handle-the-power-they-make-on-the-windiest-days-12822156
Building big BESS storage up North won't help at all. It will just alter who they pay the "don't add your electricity to the grid" money to.
The stored energy needs to be already in the South before conditions get tight since the N-S interconnectors have essentially no spare capacity left at times of peak load. That was in part what caused the spectacular fail when an insignificant little power station was struck by lightning and triggered a cascade failure across large swathes of the country in 2019. It didn't help that UK trains required an engineering reset by a specially trained operative with the right gear when power restored.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/10/uk-energy-watchdog-demands-answers-after-major-power-cut-england-wales
Problem is that land prices in the south are much higher...

About all the UK has now is coal. Its NG reserves are mostly used up.

Last coal fired power station shut down last month.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c98ye7ewwlwo
Dash for gas was how they met their CO2 reduction targets but now we are a bit screwed since gas prices are sky high and we pay top market rates for it (even though we still have active gas fields). They even did away with the bulk gas storage facility so that we were literally hand to mouth on the spot market for gas at the start of the Ukraine war.
There is some ageing nuclear still running and large scale biomass greenwashed wood burning facilities like Drax (sounds like a Bond villain).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160
--
Martin Brown