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 energy 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.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
December 9, 2023 at 05:27AM
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