- The business secretary Greg Clark is expected to announce the plans this week
- The batteries will help wind and solar panel farms supply during high demand
- Government announced £246million fund for greener energy solutions in April
Speaking to the Sunday Times, he said: ‘We get 14 per cent of our electricity from intermittent sources [such as wind and solar] . . . but this intermittency does add costs.’
Chris Hewett of the Solar Trade Association told the newspaper: ‘Installing batteries alongside solar power would reduce overall costs to the electricity system and allow the country to have cheap solar at the heart of its power system.’
This comes after Mr Clark pledged a £1 billion investment called the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in April.
The cash will be poured into cutting-edge technologies over the next four years into a variety of sectors including healthcare and medicine, clean and flexible energy, robotics and artificial intelligence.
A total of £246 million was pledged towards greener energy solutions, including batteries for ‘clean and flexible energy storage’.
Read more: Giant batteries to store green energy | News | The Times & The Sunday Times
HT/Perry
How are vast amounts of lithium batteries and PV panels that have to be treated as toxic waste at end of life, clean?
They are not directly burning fossil fuels. That’s all that counts.
Fossil fuel are need to create them, quite frankly you will never create enough power out of them to make up for the fossil fuels used to create them, almost all renewable is spending two dollars of fossil fuels worth of energy to create on dollar of non fossil fuel, It quit simple it all a huge waste of money and does nothing to reduce co2 emission. It a shell game you greenies buy into. Lastly co2 emission are a moot point in climate change, they don’t do enough to really change anything. It look like the real forcing per doubling are either 0 to 2C, at 2C per doubling you cannot change the climate to make much difference, at best we would warm the climate to about were the climate temperature was 8000 years ago and it at present day rates of usage it would take about 8000 years if not longer.
Well…. I think they must research more on efficiency of solar panels, bio mimicry, supercaps and stuff, this is gonna cost more, but is more feasible.
🙂
This is not about the environment. In this case, money has no meaning. Remember: CO2 up, sperm count down. Greens only want to increase their ability to reproduce.
The problems are well understood by engineers, it is simply that the government knows better, particularly the green parts. It doesn’t stop with grid batteries, see here for discussion.
http://www.theiet.org/forums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=205&threadid=103620&startpage=1
Talk about not listening!
“batteries” do not create power, they store it. In order to charge the battery AND supply power to consumers, you would to at least double the capacity (and double the cost) of “renewable energy”…No need to do that with “Clean Coal” !!
The UK has shut down most of its coal power plants and will close all of the by 2025.
During the months April through September, coal provides hardly any power.
Despite closing coal plants and conversion of some to other fuels, primarily natural gas, coal generates more electricity in the UK (2015) than wind and solar combined.
Of course the Drax Power station (once coal fired) now converted to burning wood chips shipped in from the USA and still producing similar real emissions to coal but as seen here are considered zero carbon. What a joke.
https://www.ecowatch.com/chatham-house-biomass-study-2288764699.html
“Currently energy companies are cutting U.S. forests and producing wood pellets to export to EU markets, claiming that biomass fuel is clean and renewable. These exports are driven by generous EU renewable energy subsidies that erroneously reward all forest biomass as “carbon-neutral”—equivalent to non-polluting sources like solar and wind energy. In other words, when counting carbon pollution at a biomass power plant, EU regulators treat the discharge from the smokestack as zero carbon, even though biomass combustion releases carbon emissions at levels comparable to fossil fuels.”
But that was not the case in 2016 R Shearer when wind on its own generated more than coal…
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-wind-generated-more-electricity-coal-2016
“The UK generated more electricity from wind than from coal in the full calendar year of 2016, ….The milestone is a first for the UK and reflects a collapse in coal generation, which contributed just 9.2% of UK electricity last year, with 11.5% from wind. The coal decline saw its output fall to the lowest level since 1935.”
“But that was not the case in 2016 R Shearer when wind on its own generated more than coal…”
Carbonbrief… Oh good grief…
You get dafter and dafter, Skanky.
Why don’t you quote a really authoritative source such as “The Beano”?
Apologised to Dr. Crockford yet?
Wow, the battery holder for one of these “ZZZ” sized batteries must be huge!
..Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one that has to “plug it in” !! LOL
Having a bit of a mental block here… are the batteries to be a source of power when panels and fans are not working? Or are the batteries to help the fans and panels operate to produce power?
Can the rechargeable batteries be charged when fans and panels are producing power which is being transmitted else where? Can the batteries be charged when fans and panels are not operating? How can the batteries be charged when fans and panels are not operating?
What would Beanie and Cecil think of this?
Interesting.
Wind and solar barely reach the break even point for energy production, producing as much energy as it took to make them. Add in the energy cost of manufacturing the batteries, and the whole enterprise goes energy net-negative.
People are talking more and more about batteries saving the world, with respect to “renewable” generation, but I have not seen any updated energy balance calculations.
I wonder why?
Because it is easy to show that batteries cost more to build than all the energy they can store in a lifetime.
Take the money it costs to buy a battery. Buy electricity instead. You will be able to buy more electricity than the battery can store in its lifetime before it must be replaced. And that is before you start to pay for the electricity to charge the battery.
Come on. Solar and wind are “free”. You can’t get any cheaper than “free”. The only cost is the battery to store all that free energy, right? This is the magical thinking that lies behind the green economy knuckleheads.
Because “ye Musky Big-Battery Man” has stupefied politicians across the world. After all, if the USA is dumb enough to subsidise everything he produces, it can’t be bad, can it?
And half of the US think they have a problem with Trump.
Try this side of the pond folks, things can get worse!
Tesla powerwall 2 is warranted to hold 37800 kwh . which is equivalent to 37800/33= 1145 gallons of gasoline. At current price of gasoline that is 1145*2.50 = $ 2864 worth of gasoline. But the powerwall 2 costs 3 times that to buy, and that doesn’t include the electricity to charge it.
In other words, even the most modern battery costs more to buy than all the energy it can store in its lifetime.
Having some experience with storage batteries, I am anticipating much amusement to follow.
Imagine, these same persons who have fallen for the Emperors New Clothes…these batteries being the accessory ribbons,these same people are going to set regulations with respect to Safe Utilization of these devices.
The blind leading the blind, into electrochemical catastrophe.
So as usual Good Enough For Government, will now create a genuine environmental danger, in their efforts to solve an imaginary environmental threat.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracies marches on.
Or in old english, the parasite grows until it consumes all.
Of course the Ministeries of Truthiness and Unicorn Flatulence will spin the destruction,deaths and toxic results as, Urban Re-development.
A typically 8D 200 ah battery cost about $200 and is at best good for 2400 kWh of power. (200 ah * 12v * 1000 cycles / 1000 wh/kwh).
Which is about $84 worth of electricity at wholesale price of about 3.5¢ per kWh. As such it would be much cheaper to buy energy from the grid than to store it in a battery.
Yes but you not using fossil fuel to produce the electricty /sarc The reality is it take more energy to produce the batteries than they will every store in it life time, a net loss, it takes more CO2 producing energy to make the battery/wind/solar power station than said battery/wind/solar power station will ever be able to produce and yet the greens believe they great because the power they produce do not use fossil fuels, the greens never look behind the curtain and see what really powers these boondoggles. which is fossil fuels.
Batteries sound big.
Tesla announced that it won a contract for the “largest li-ion battery project in the world”. It will deploy a 20 MW/80 MWh Powerpack system at the Southern California Edison Mira Loma substation.
until you realize that is the same energy as 50 barrels of oil.
But ferd, you should know by now city life has nothing to do with battery life (or CO2 for that matter). It’s about monetary return on investment. Greenuption on the other hand is subsidy farming with a little help from our wonderful shmucks in government.
If you check some of them out, conflicts of interest couldn’t possibly come into it of course. Rip off consumers at large for energy, grab their assets and build battery coup city housing for later rent. Agenda21 anyone?
“A total of £246 million was pledged towards greener energy solutions, including batteries for ‘clean and flexible energy storage’.” But of course, now what’s that all About.
Err, based on these tin-pot examples to date?
http://www.solar-trade.org.uk/resource-centre/storage-case-studies
“£1 billion Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund … poured into cutting-edge technologies over the next four years including healthcare and medicine, clean and flexible energy, robotics and artificial intelligence.”
So it’s a party bag handout. One hopes those divvying out the funds will talk to actual engineering expertise (as opposed to green washed administrative wonks in institutions) and avoid throwing even more public money at idiot green pipedreams. Given we have FRS party trick clowns like King and May still floating around on diesel fumes in the background, somehow i doubt that’ll ever happen.
Funny business as usual then; more green cow patties to avoid stepping in outside the London circus tent. Roll-up, roll-up – get your Kool Aid here.
Subsidies are never needed for items the market demands. I own a significant part of a company that makes a unique bracket for industrial use. It eliminates welders in a part of the construction process. Instead of going to govt for subsidies, we have folks offering us cash for a small ownership percentage. Every mechanical or structural engineer that sees it gets very excited. I think they may get wood.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at results.
–Winston Churchill
This has to be the ultimate in fake news. Isn’t it?
And this should be chiselled into the stone lintels of the main entrance of wherever elected representatives gather to foist their silliness on their hapless citizens, in whatever language is appropriate to the region:
Government needs to recognize that where genuine understanding is limited, committed belief in the prevailing misunderstanding does not constitute genuine expertise, nor can truth be conjured by modelling ignorance with a computer.
–Walter Starck
Apologies if it is not an accurate quote.
Steve
Might be time to reconsider something like this
“Oath of allegience to kings of Castille (Spain)
We who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws, but if not, not.
J.H Elliot, “Imperial Spain”
“
heh
I can do no more than join you all in wailing and teeth gnashing.
Utter, utter, utter, utter 12-bottles-short-of-a-dozen technical & economic innumeracy.
If you took a poll of real engineers as to using batteries for this, would you get most of them to agree that this is folly? Would the green believers then bow down to that consensus as they so arrogantly demand that we should do about their climate change consensus?
For those who don’t live in the U.K. a “gregclark” is slang for congenital idiot.
A giant battery doubles as a bomb! If something or someone shorts this thing out, the deathly consequences could be large. And, there will be failures. Have they locked up all the engineers in the UK? Why is Greenpeas having all the say? You know the org has been delisted as a charity in India and Canada,
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/technology/greenpeace-loses-charitable-status-1.170262
Might I suggest also employing pixie dust and unicorn farts as a back-up power source for when the sun refuses to cooperate? Oh, and hamster wheels would be good too.
Large hamster wheels with innumerate politicians inside them. Released only after a gigawatt hour of effort for a 5 minute break.
If you are a UK taxpayer I suggest you write a letter to Greg Clark, cc Theresa May, your chosen newspaper, the BBC and one copy to your solicitor and hold the ministers personally responsible for the stupidity involved in wasting your money on something which makes no engineering or economic sense.
After a few dozen letters we should have some good publicity which will get some useful supporting responses from knowledgeable engineers / economists.
Buy solar panels and get cheap electricity while the sun shines. Play double or nothing with batteries and the electricity gets cheaper!
Marketing science has achieved the nirvana that 97% utter bulldust sells. The 3% truthy bit is just that the sun shines, part of the time.
Call me cynical, but what is to stop anyone from charging the batteries off the fossil fuel grid at night, at mandated low rates, and discharging the batteries during the cloudy days at high prices?
I think this is just another version of the diesel powered spotlights shining on Spanish solar panels at night to reap the higher mandated “green” power generation rates.