FES Scenarios Won’t Meet Energy Storage Needs

By Paul Homewood

Let’s have a look at the latest National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios, and see how they cater for the 100 TWh of energy storage recommended by the Royal Society.

I’ll focus on their Consumer Transformation scenario, which assumes mass take up of heat pumps, as opposed to mainly hydrogen heating, as this is the most likely route:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/future-energy/future-energy-scenarios/documents

Electricity generation in 2050 is projected to be 875 TWh, compared to about 300 TWh now. Peak demand will be 113 GW. Given that winter demand is higher than summer, we might assume an average of 110 GW then; allowing for plant breakdowns and maintenance, we would need to plan for at least 120 GW of firm capacity.

125 TWh is to be used for electrolysis, but nearly all of this will go to transport, leaving just 12 TWh for electricity generation. Burning this in a thermal power station would only yield about 6 TWh. Other storage is miniscule, just over 100 GWh, only enough to smooth demand for an hour or so at peak times on a day to day basis.

Storage Capacity

These are the projected capacities:

Capacity GW

Ignoring Interconnectors, there is just 62 GW of dispatchable capacity, including hydrogen. As we know, solar produces virtually nothing in winter, and if wind power is down to 10% of capacity, that would provide only 16 GW.

Even with I/Cs working flat out, we still only have 98 GW. This is however extremely unlikely, as a dunkelflaute would leave NW Europe dangerously short of wind power as well.

But this is only the tip of the problem. Assuming we have a seven day period when wind power is below 10%, which is known to be extremely common, we would need that 21 GW of hydrogen burning capacity to generate 3.5 TWh. But to produce that much electricity, these power plants would need to inout approximately twice as much hydrogen energy, as they would work at 50% efficiency. That means 7 TWh of hydrogen.

However as the top chart shows, there would only be 12 TWh of hydrogen produced during the whole year for use in electricity generation, and this is all likely to be used up just to meet the usual daily peaks and troughs of supply and demand. (In fact I suspect we will need much more, but that is a separate issue).

In reality then, we are unlikely to have enough hydrogen to keep those hydrogen generators going for even a week. And if we get 56 days of low wind power, as we did in 2018, we are truly up the creek; for a situation like that we would need at least 50 TWh of hydrogen.

Just as a double check, I have run a model of the expected generation from the capacity figures above. Hydrogen is obviously zero, as this is only converting wind power already counted. I have also excluded gas, as the expectation is this will only be used in emergency. The FES also assume that I/C s will lead to net exports, so this too is excluded.

I/C	20.95
Bio	0.21
BECCS	8.8
Nuclear	15.9
Hydrogen	21.24
CCS Gas	5.97
Solar	78.69
Offshore Wind	115.04
Onshore Wind	44.43
Other Ren	10.76

This suggests that over the year as a whole, the grid is no better than self sustaining, and that there is no spare capacity to produce the 100 TWh of storage demanded by the Royal Society.

This equates to about 140 TWh of electricity for electrolysis, and would need about 300 GW of offshore wind power, nearly three times the planned capacity.

		UF	TWH
I/C	20.95
Bio	0.21	0.85	2
BECCS	8.8	0.85	66
Nuclear	15.9	0.95	132
Hydrogen	21.24
CCS Gas	5.97
Solar	78.69	0.11	76
Offshore Wind	115.04	0.45	453
Onshore Wind	44.43	0.25	97
Other Ren	10.76	0.6	57
TOTAL			883