roubaixtuesday wrote:RickH wrote:You can also choose an electricity supplier who sources their electricity wholly, or mostly, from renewable sources. Ovo (60% renewable or 100% with a £5 per month supplement), Ecotricity & Octopus are three I can think of off the top of my head.
We use Bulb.
re battery storage at grid level - not remotely credible for winter coverage from everything I've seen. Gas backup is the only option I'm aware of. But by all means, start a new thread and post links, I'd love to be proved wrong.
Tell south Australia that - Elon installed a grid level battery system there, and it works very well indeed.
It's already prevented a number of large scale failures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_ReserveIt's not a "store energy for months" device, it was never intended to be.
There are various projects out there (like gravity batteries) which could be really interesting in the UK. Mine shafts are quite useful locations for storing/reclaiming energy over quite significant heights with very little build cost (since the hole already exists), there are also often rails and tunnels which allow for significant mass to be lowered (generating electricity) and stored laterally, then they can be raised when there is a power surplus, and stored laterally on the surface, ready to be lowered when power is required again.
There are at least 170 thousand such mine shafts, probably closer to 250k (estimated from the coal board).
If they have an average depth of 500m (many are significantly deeper, and are obviously the ones you start with) then that's ~125 thousand km of vertical space for storage.
A single ten ton "battery" at each would therefore store/release 2*10^13 (20 Tera) Joules. That's about 5GWh of storage (per brick at every mine). The "bricks" don't have to be anything special - fairly inert, and dense. They get put on carts top and bottom and you can therefore store quite a few at the site.
If you want to get fancy you could even stack them at the top to reduce the area used, all using the energy from the system itself.
1TWh/day is about the highest monthly usage we've seen over the last few years, so clearly this isn't the only solution, but it could easily be a part of it. Batteries provide the short term stability that renewables don't (since they don't have massive (as in many kg) generators to provide inertia to maintain grid stability), and they provide time for other solutions to be brought online, or for load to be shed in a controlled fashion (rather than by just blindly shutting off parts of the grid).
Of course if you accept that there is a place for nuclear generation (which there is) then you have a perfect combination - a constant generation from the power plant, along with erratic renewables (remember that in the UK wind/wave picks up when solar drops, tidal is pretty consistent) and a combination of chemical and gravitational batteries to maintain second by second grid stability.
The chemical batteries don't have to be all in one place either - your local substation could effectively be replaced with a high voltage UPS.