By Paul Homewood
The Telegraph falls for the battery myth again!
Amongst all of Ed Miliband’s crimes against the UK, surely the deliberate desecration of the countryside is up there amongst the worst.
Not content with building hundreds of miles of pylons, plastering the countryside with wind and solar farms and wanting to destroy farming, he now wants to industrialise it with ugly and toxic battery storage factories.
The Telegraph reports on how the 800-year old village of Willingham by Stow in the Lincolnshire Wolds has fought off one such giant battery park. But many others are in the queue:
“The emerging battery park blitz will add to that pressure on the countryside, with Miliband planning a five-fold increase in the infrastructure, meaning industrial batteries will become a landscape feature across the UK.
Hundreds of acres of farmland will likely be turned into industrial sites, but those losses will also boost the UK’s ability to keep the lights on, heat our homes and even power our cars as electricity takes over from gas.
It’s part of a green revolution that ironically destroys our greenery. But the prize – and Miliband’s ultimate dream – is a power system that will run largely on free fuels such as wind and solar.”
Sadly the Telegraph goes on to show a gross misunderstanding of what these batteries are capable of, and thus disinform its readers. The article states:
“For Tom Vernon, founder and chief executive of Statera, one of the UK’s leading battery developers, a battery-powered Britain makes huge sense.
Given the intermittent nature of renewables such as wind and solar, batteries have the potential to play a huge part in securing the net zero energy system as Britain weans itself off gas-powered generation sources.
Vernon believes that once Britain hits the Miliband target to have at least 25 gigawatts (GW) of battery capacity, there will be times, especially on cold, windless winter evenings, when batteries provide up to two-thirds of the UK’s power…..
It was Britain’s battery parks that helped save the day when, last month, one such cold, dark and windless bout of dunkelflaute stilled the nation’s turbines and threatened the UK with power shortages.”
Tom Vernon, of course, would say that – his company stands to rake in huge profits on the back of intermittent renewables. But the journalist, Jonathan Leake, clearly does not understand the difference between GW and GWH!
That 25 GW will only store enough electricity to last for an hour or two at the most. It will be absolutely useless when the wind does not blow for days and weeks on end. Even the comment about last month is not correct, because it was our full fleet of CCGT plants which kept the lights on. The real purpose of batteries is to fine tune the grid, offering instantaneous power should frequency dip, thus buying time for generators to fire up.
A good example of Leake’s misunderstanding is the example he uses of Statera’s new battery park in Manchester. Leake writes:
“An even bigger project is underway at another site. Carrington battery park in Greater Manchester will hold 680 megawatts (MW) of battery power able to support up to 2.2m homes.
“These technologies can store energy at scale – not just for hours, but across days,” says Vernon. “This capability is essential for maintaining energy security, reducing the UK’s reliance on natural gas, and ensuring we are prepared for future cold snaps and dunkelflautes as and when they occur.””
Carrington will actually store 1360 MWh, ie two hours storage. As batteries cannot be totally drained, the realistic amount of storage is less still.
The idea that plants like this will keep the grid running during dunkelflautes is dangerous nonsense.
Maybe the Telegraph should send Mr Leake on an energy training course!
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February 9, 2025 at 10:39AM
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