- 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
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You want to know more about batteries
https://youtu.be/dTYFecSg1a0
There never will be a rechargeable super battery because however much you twiddle with electrode materials, geometry etc etc you are still limited to reversible redox reactions within a narrow temperature band and the elements in the periodic system. There is only so much energy per pound that can be squeezed out by moving around valence electrons at room temperature.
A “super battery” will need some completely new physics.
Search has only started, but it is well worth seeing through, providing the references to global warming and the CO2 are ignored.
@Vukcevic: “well worth (?!?) seeing through.” ??
“Worth” is the key word. It is an economic issue. There is only so much money and it is important not to waste it following ephemera and unicorn farts.
Go into any chemistry classroom worth the name. On the wall should not only be the Periodic Table, but the table of Electrochemical Potential. That EP table has not fundamentally changed in a century. The problem is one of engineering — to make what nature allows us to use into a package that is useful, safe, and affordable. But if nature doesn’t allow more, it is not worth looking for that which isn’t there.
Thanks for your comments.
“well worth seeing through (the video link ) providing the references to global warming and the CO2 are ignored.”
@Vukcevic. … Ah ! … Yes, the documentary is well worth seeing through.
Battery technology on the grid?.. as Steve Adams posted above:
Vukcevic’s video link is a 52 minute Nova (PBS) show from Jan 2017 “Search for the Super Battery.” It is good. It looks at the problems and how big the problems really are.
Particularly the part (26:30-30:35) about Li-Ion Battery catastrophic failure and the (30:35-36:00) apparently much safer alternative (in R&D) of the solid polymer lithium metal battery from Ionic Materials. See also Motley Fool 2017.03.05 Ionic Materials
Also I liked the (43:30 – 49:30 ) “Salt Water Battery” that eschews power density needed for cars, and looks at low cost per kwhr but ability to be massively scalable and non-toxic for grid support. Choose materials with an eye toward “Crustal Abundance => low cost potential and virtually unlimited supply. “Far less energy dense than li-ion” but far easier to manufacture by the ton.
Gotta be something to do with this story..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986
The maths are just mind blowing.
They say consumers will save ‘up to £40B
Fine..
But, that is spread over all UK households (say 30M in number) and up to year 2050.
Works out at ~£40 per house per year. So what. That Is Nothing.
To get this largesse will require fitment of a Smart Meter.
These *were* due to cost £344 each, about 3 or 4 years ago when first mooted. Cost now is region of £1,200 ea. Doncha just love Government accounting?
(Householder/consumer/taxpayer pays – they are all the same people)
But, get this, the saving comes from them being allowed to switch stuff off and on in your house.
Supposedly ‘big’ things like washers, fryers, air-cons but, wait till 2040, and it’ll be the car – supposedly charging (not) up in your garage. And when the car is not charging, its intended to be discharging into the grid – as spinning reserve. Ain’t that a fact Griff?
It is just so bad, so awful and all came from the notion that cold things make warm things warmer.
Everyone ‘knows’ all about radiative GHG theory. They are sooo clever and well educated.
OK. I ask, why were these super brain-boxes, the ones who understand so much thermodynamics, why wre they told by their (Australian) Government recently not to strike up the BBQ inside their houses.
For fear of gassing themselves or burning the house down.
Why did these super intelligentsia need to be told such a thing. What am I missing here?
The car as reserve grid battery is certainly much talked about – I think only one small trial in Germany so far.
Do note ‘they’ get your consent to switch stuff off and there is likely to be payment to you for engaging in demand response.
That’s how it works now for the large commercial operations managing refrigeration, heating and aircon – there is already a few GW of power managed like this in the UK.
This is already done in Florida for large loads such as refrigerator air conditioning, pool pumps etc., voluntarily and for a reduced bill. BUT a car that is discharging rather than charging may become a brick on the interstate on the way to work or on the now 2 day with hotel stop planned 600 mile drive. As normal not fully thought through.
There’s a sucker born every minute (P. T. Barnum):
http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/6/y/4/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620×349.gx7043.png/1499765946724.jpg
Dewy-eyed ‘Pollyanna’ exuding adoration here happens to be the aptly named political leader of the state of South Australia Jay Weatherill.
Charles, I loved your headline:
I understand that in cold, still conditions, wind turbines draw electricity to keep vital components warm. I do not know the energy requirement for this purpose but I also understand it is not insignificant. Even so, I wondered if your choice of words “help power wind farms and …” wasn’t a Freudian slip?
“I do not know the energy requirement for this purpose”
It is usually in the tens of kilowatt range, can be a lot more if you need to de-ice the blades.
June 2013 WUWT had an article: Getting Energy from the Energy Store by Willis.
Down in the comments I gave the figures that equated a 100 car coal unit-train = 1 GW-day as a nice convenient measure of grid scale energy quantities. That 1 GW-day of coal could in 2013 be mined at Black Thunder in WY and delivered to a power plant in St. Louis for $30/ton. or $0.3 million per GW-Day for 10,000 tons of coal.
Back in the referenced article, I calculated it with a ClaytonPower 400Ah battery. at $60 billion.
What then is the cost of storing 1 GW-Day of electricity in the latest Tesla batteries?
Panasonc 18650 Power Density 0.254 KWhr/kg
Tesla claim Cost per KWhr: 180.00 $/KWhr
Panasonc 18650 mass per KWhr 3.94 kg/KWhr
1 GW-Day 24,000,000 KWhr/GW-day
Panasonc 18650 mass per GWDay 94,488 tons battery/GW-Day
Cost of Panasonc 18650 $4,320 million/GW-day ($4.3 billion)
So for electrical energy, 10.55 kg Li-Ion battery / kg coal (40% elec gen)
Tesla Panasonc Li-Ion 18650 are about 12,000 times more expensive than an equivalent amount of coal. While you can reuse the batteries, you cannot reuse them 12,000 times.
Furthermore, to replace that one unit train of coal, you need the equivalent of 10 unit trains to hold all the batteries to store that GWDay. Just imagine that mass of batteries parked somewhere. Now imagine one of those batteries going into thermal runaway or shorting out.
You didn’t add in the cost of a power plant to charge those batteries before use. That’s going to be over and above what you already need to supply. And, due to charging inefficiencies, why not just use the charging power to feed the grid?
Jim, you are absolutely right. To store that 1 GW-Day in a 1000 100-ton railroad hopper car of Tesla Batteries, you must FIRST generate a SURPLUS GW-Day of electrical energy — someway, somehow, at some cost of capital and operations. And the cheapest way to generate that GW-Day is — with a 100 car unit train of coal.
UK government prepares to flush yet more taxpayer money down the toilet.
‘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.”
Quite the reverse, it would create the need for extra daytime generation from another source. To store power during the day when demand is high is bonkers. Solar PV’s role in supplementing higher daytime electricity demand is strongly limited by the greatly reduced daylight and sunshine hours in winter months in the UK.
but from April to October UK’s 10GW of solar capacity gives 6 to 8 GW of power every mid day – with 2GW plus from 8.30 to 6.30 pm at minimum. That’s equivalent to a coal power station.
and in the winter the wind generation kicks in…
Here we see solar panels, wind farms, and rechargeable batteries combine into a highly effective homeopathic solution to our man-made woes.
Dilute stupidity by 10^200 and you get some mighty powerful intelligence.
“…..cutting-edge technologies over the next four years……”
The only cutting I can see is to whatever Surplus might have been achieved without this wasteful spend.
Who needs solar to recharge the batteries. Just use other batteries!
https://youtu.be/brdmnUBAS00
PS Griff (et.al.), no, this won’t really work.
But, but. in the short term, going long TSLA might make a bob or three?
Or, would Shorting it (the stock, folks, not the batteries….)?
These Green decisions are soooo hard.
the headline makes ZERO sense it says the batteries will help power the solar panels and wind????? where will the batteries get that power? and why do either solar panels or a windmill need supplemental power/
They have been working on load leveling batteries for decades. For them to be useful, they must be dirt cheap, efficient and long lasting. Pumping water uphill and regenerating electricity when running the water back down, is still the cheapest most efficient way storing energy. It is not always the most practical which is why a small percentage applications use batteries any way.
Government announced £246million fund for greener energy solutions in April.
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 …
Mr Clark made a special point of emphasising, “this is not a subsidy. No – really – it’s not. It’s an accounting device in which future wind-falls from clean energy are being invested backwards in time.
But make no mistake – wind and solar are already the cheapest of all power sources and don’t receive any subsidies. At all. In fact, they never have! Honest! Soon, electricity from these natural renewables will be too cheap to meter.”
>Soon, electricity from these natural renewables will be too cheap to meter.”< This is precisely the argument with which Otto Hahn used to advertise nuclear power. As we now know this is not true. Even if the energy from wind an sun is cheap, the distribution and administration is costly. There will not be free energy for everybody.
And what about the tens of thousands of houses that these wind farms are supposed to feed, Will they be putting a standby battery at the corner of every street?
They might at that George…
some places are considering one at every substation.
They’ll have to be something else than Li-ion then. There isn’t that much lithium and cobolt around.
‘We get 14 per cent of our electricity from intermittent sources [such as wind and solar] . . . but this intermittency does add costs.’
So he’s really admitting the fan club got it wrong with these intermittents to date and Britons are now to get the real costs of fixing them?
Decades of looking for the unobtainable – the large-scale energy storage (other than the pumped water) that is. But that looking can be profitable. For the recipients of the grants to do the looking, that form companies that eventually die. Where is: Aquion Energy? EnerVault? Ambri? LightSail Energy? Others will emerge, undoubtedly, get publicity, EPA grants and start-up money from naive new-rich, and die. Money provided by people that do not know the difference between energy and power.
We already have great energy storing Products. They are called oil, gas, coal, uranium/thorium etc. and comes fully charged with energy!