From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
It’s only taken these so-called experts two decades to work this out!
Britain must set up a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves to guard against the risk of blackouts under the net zero shift, according to the country’s premier science body.
The Royal Society has said 900 caverns filled with hydrogen will be needed to ensure the UK can keep the nation’s lights on during periods of low wind and sunshine.
he proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
The report is perhaps the starkest warning yet of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
It warns: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated.
“Large-scale energy storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation’s lights on. Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
The forecast is based on 37 years of weather data and the assumption that oil and gas power sources will be phased out in the coming decades. 100 TWh of backup power would be enough to power the country for weeks on end if needed but would require huge infrastructure.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, lead author of the report, said: “Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.
“The demand will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but they are volatile and will have to be complemented by large-scale supply from energy storage or other sources.”
Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.
Theoretically all of this may be technically possible, but at what cost.
Apart from the cost of storage (and the distribution network to take hydrogen to and from these salt caverns, electrolysis is a very expensive process. Moreover it wastes a lot of energy. Because of low energy efficiency, you would need 500 TWh of wind power to produce enough hydrogen to make 100 TWh of electricity.
And we now know that offshore wind is a lot more expensive than we were told.
And on top of all of that, we would need to build 100 GW of hydrogen burning power stations for the times when there is little wind.
The cheapest solution is fossil fuels. But then you wouldn’t need anything else.
I used to come up with brilliant ideas when I was 12 and had little scientific knowledge.
Yes, exactly – why is the UK’s “premier science body” making recommendations that need experts in engineering and economics?
Scientists are the last people you would want to design anything useful and affordable. All the weird, expensive and energy intensive plans for recycling, saving water, and other similar green ideas have come from scientists with tunnel vision, who recommend and implore us to do something that “will save the world” but without considering the ramifications – pollution and energy use of the new procedure, the replacement (say for plastic) being more expensive – which usually means uses more resources and is more energy intensive.
I think it is actually finally tiptoeing towards suggesting that Net Zero is infeasible and attempts to get there will cost more than any economy can afford. Compare its 100TWh estimate with those coming from National Grid, whose Future Energy scenarios are meant to be realistic ways of achieving net zero. The highest storage figure I have seen in FES is IIRC 16TWh, so we are an order of magnitude different. The Royal Society are in effect saying “your toy models are useless and misleading”.
The Royal Society have at least attempted the estimate in the proper way, by looking at over 30 years of continuous weather data to try to ensure that they don’t hide from extremes, instead of the tactic of the FES which is to use just an average year and pretend it covers extremes just because there is the odd week of Dunkelflaute during the year. Or the Grid simply invent weather data to match their modelling – a well-known technique!
I would assume that fuel cells would be the method of choice for converting hydrogen gas to electricity, though CCGT might give as good if possibly a bit better conversion efficiency. Underground storage is not completely outlandish as the US has used depleted natural gas reservoirs for string helium. The downside is that suitable reservoir geology may be hard to find in many parts of the world.
Using hydrogen as an energy storage medium presupposes that there will be large surpluses of low cost electrical energy available from renewables. IMO, the more intelligent way of going “zero carbon” generation is nuclear for base load, solar for handling daytime peaks and storage (pumped hydro, batteries, etc) to handle the late afternoon early evening peak load.
Going zero carbon is not intelligent in the first instance, so there can be nothing intelligent as it’s consequence.
If you assume nuclear energy at that level, adding any RE just makes your nuclear less cost effective. You can’t fix a good system by adding a stupid system.
The problem with using solar to handle daytime peaks is that max solar does not coincide with max demand.
Max demand for electricity occurs in the evening, as workers are getting home from work, firing up the AC and cooking dinner.
Even worse, the winter max demand occurs early in the morning, before the sun even comes up.
Mark, we’re talking about the UK here, so it’s worse than you think! Max demand occurs on winter evenings when folks get home in the dark, turn all the lights and heating on and then cook dinner.
Peak summer demand is more or less mid-day, but I’m not disagreeing with you. In the winter there is barely any solar, in summer it’s still a rare day when the 15GW of installed UK solar generates more than gas at any point, even if peak demand is under 30GW so when the peak is is irrelevant.
I’m very aware of the shift between peak insolation and peak demand. The point with a nuclear/solar combination is that a few hours of energy storage (few hundred GWH for the US) would be needed with solar/nuclear as opposed to days or weeks of energy storage (100TWH) when just relying on renewables.
The UK would be a different story, would need a higher reliance on nuclear and energy storage would be helpful to minimize load following and the problems with Xenon.
We have huge gas underground storage now, which is routinely used for methane. There is the Iona storage in Victoria, where capacity is rated at 23 PJ (6.3 TWh), and can deliver at about 6.6 GW at the moment (570 TJ/day). It’s a depleted gas field. There is another at Roma in Qld at 21 TWh. There is nothing impossible about 100 TWh.
Only that 100TWh is a gross underestimate for Net Zero UK, which is what the article is about.
The UK, and Northern Europe, have been low wind most of the summer. Since August 19 wind has been supplying less than 5GW apart from a couple of odd peaks just over (Gridwatch). During that time gas has supplied over 60TWh. Then prior to the August wind shut down the period from April/May to August there were only brief intervals where wind was the main source meaning a similar about of gas was used, or storage in this fairytale*, so we emptied the storage over a week ago.
*You can tell it’s a fairytale by this
“during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.” It’s cold windless winters that are the problem for Heat Pump Britain
Yes. Especially yest to what you say about winter. But even in summer its not viable. A cursory look at http://www.gridwatch.uk/wind makes it perfectly clear that wind is not fit for purpose in this application.
But you won’t find Nick making any reasoned and evidenced quantitave rejoinder to what you point out. Like, tell us where the 900 caves are. Tell us how you are going to seal them for hydrogen. Tell us where the hydrogen is to come from. Tell us what it will all cost and how long it will take.
No, there are some natural gas storage facilities in Australia, so thousands of miles away in the UK it must be possible to have 900 caves, and fill them with hydrogen. Must be! For the sake of the children!
There are plenty of depleted gas fields in the UK, however hydrogen is a smaller molecule than methane so likely leaking wil be a substantial issue to address.
Salt is one of the few things that doesn’t react with hydrogen. So if you’re going to store it anywhere in salt caverns does have some logic. The UK has quite a lot of these, whether enough volume with no leaks I don’t know
The company Storengy says it has developed a technology to store hydrogen and is debrining its first salt cavern at Stoblach in Cheshire.
See my reply to Michel at 9.29 am below.
https://www.storengy.co.uk
The problem with depleted natural gas fields is that it isn’t a single large chamber, it’s millions upon millions of tiny pockets, connected by narrow to microscopic channels. This will limit the rate at which hydrogen can be pumped into and out of this “storage”.
Looking at the data from the Stublach project, I think it’s going to apply even to a salt cavern. I suspect a problem is maintaining an adequate seal for a larger diameter well. Their methane storage is 4.4TWh of working gas with a maximum redelivery of 14GW (13 days). They are quoting 40GWh of working gas and 55MW (a month) for their test hydrogen cavern, which is a similar size to one of the 20 methane caverns they have. That suggests lower operating pressures too 4400/20/40/3 suggests say 180bar for methane but just 100bar for hydrogen. Maybe they will be able to ramp up pressures and well diameters later.
Also worth noting it took them 9 years to leach their 20 caverns.
The company Storengy already stores natural gas, equivalent to 4,400 GWh of energy, in salt caverns at its Stoblach site in Cheshire (This is 1000 times the energy stored in all electrical battery sites in the UK).
They have developed the technology to store hydrogen (HySecure) and are in the process of debrining their first hydrogen cavern store a process that “typically takes 3.5 years but could vary from 2 to 6.5 years”. They have 20 caverns located in salt rock 500m below ground.
The “caves” is a stupid misunderstanding by the Telegraph. The RS report was about the UK needing 900 caverns to store hydrogen. Not much chance of that happening any time soon.
https://www.storengy.co.uk
Well quite. The Cheshire sites are the main ones for salt caverns, with some over the other side of the country near Teeside and others in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately this BGS study is paywall, or by request at best.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249552366_A_review_of_onshore_UK_salt_deposits_and_their_potential_for_underground_gas_storage
The current locations are:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2019/01/181207_storage_update_website.pdf
Plus a couple of industrial hydrogen sites that are small beer.
Nothing impossible as long as you have Magical Monetary Theory at your back, enough platinum for a few hundred $1T coins, and all the spare industrial capacity they represent.
This is the sort of armchair energy planning that characterizes the climate movement. It wouldn’t be acceptable as literary criticism. As grid planning its even worse.
In Australia there is around TWh of capacity. Therefore, the argument goes, the proposal to store 100 TWh of hydrogen underground in the UK in 900 caves has nothing impossible about it.
They don’t have 900 caves, to start with. So they have to excavate them. Neither they nor you know where, or at what cost. Are there suitable geological formations in the UK to do this? Have you thought about that?
Then when excavated (and sealed for hydrogen, which is not like gas), there is no source of hydrogen to fill them. I know, we’ll use the wind in periods of low demand to make it from sea water… More idiotic fantasies with no feasibility or quantification.
Use a depleted gas field, perhaps? Are there any pilots, storing hydrogen at scale in depleted gas fields? Of course not!
This is, yet again, intellectually lazy activists advocating and endorsing unfeasible policies which they have not seriously examined, while being unaccountable for the consequences if politicians take them seriously and go ahead.
As the current UK political class seems to be doing. They are driving the country into the ground, and they are also preparing for themselves a revolt which will make ULEZ look like a tea party.
Would that be a Boston Tea Party?
https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/boston-tea-party
from http://www.lochardenergy.com.au/iona/
We do not undertake exploration drilling activities and are therefore not subject to the existing Victorian Government moratorium under the Petroleum Act 1998 (Petroleum Act) and the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 (MRSDA).
I think this is called ‘saying the quiet bit out loud’. Victoria is NOT a good place and not run by rational people.
The other quiet bit out loud is Iona stores LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas – which is of course one of those nasty ‘fossil fuels’ those sweet, lovely and trustworthy tree hugging hippy types keep telling us are going to Doom the World(tm).
So basically the fossil fuel industry to the rescue?
This is why I do not see an end to Big Oil. They did not get to being ‘Big’ without being successful in business. So do we really expect these successful businesses to be sitting in board meetings and saying ‘Well looks like oil is finished… so… might as well all go home I guess’.
Nope, I see them sitting around saying ‘Where is our next growth direction’. Big Oil is not going away. They might name change, but the idea that Big Green is going to replace them is utterly bemusing.
And all this is before we get to the discussion on how LNG behaves exactly the same way as industrial level hydrogen. I put it to you that they are utterly different. This is not like saying we know how to write short stories, so novels are the next step. This is like saying I can write poems, so I am going to form a rock band. Can you sing? Play an instrument? Own an amp? A garage to practice in? Have people who agree with you musically? Know how to book a recording studio?
What is the optimum CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?
How much “warming” will this 100 TWh prevent?
~1500ppm, maybe 2000ppm, if we follow the science instead of the IPCC.
About 9 times as many people die from the cold as from the heat each year, around 4.6 million die from cold or cool weather compared with about 500,000 dying from warm or hot weather. Breathing cold or cool air makes our blood vessels constrict causing increased heart attacks and strokes during the colder and cooler moths.
It’s not impossible. It’s stupid.
And who cares how much it costs poor people to do such a stupid wasteful thing?
Certainly not you Nick, since you HATE POOR PEOPLE.
How does on source 100 TWh of Hydrogen?
Can it be done without producing CO2 somewhere in the process?
The impossible thing about hydrogen is thinking that it will be an all-around solution.
Anyone who really cared about the environment would be pushing methane as the primary source. Easy, safe and reliable to store, and is naturally found without having to manufacture it, or convert every everything we have to support it, like would have to do with hydrogen and electricity. Natural gas powered buses are already a common site.
Virtue signaling fake environmentalists hop on the anti-carbon bandwagon without considering the whole picture or the whole environment.
How large is a methane molecule compared to H2?
A rock cavern with it’s cracks and fissures might be able to seal in methane but that doesn’t mean it can seal in H2.
And, if I’m not mistaken, H2 will more readably react with other molecules than methane. (Perhaps I’m wrong about that.)
It means lower operating pressures and lower redelivery rates through narrower well bores that are easier to seal.
As hydrogen? Divide your capacities by 3.
Thanks for reading, Nick.
So we need huge amounts of storage to cover intermittency, and that requires five times the electrical generation to make the hydrogen. Just where are we going to get five times that amount of excess generation to make it?
Pie in the sky, not forgetting hydrogen is the hardest gas to store as it seeps through material and is also extremely explosive!
Up there with battery storage will solve the problem of unreliables. Putting aside battery storage on a grid scale is technically and physically impossible, unreliables would have to generate excess electrickery to charge them in the first place. Complete lack of logical thinking.
How big an explosion would that create? Great target for terrorists…
“You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”
In underground sealed storage it would require oxygen getting in in large amounts.
The largest ever UK non-nuclear explosion ever took place about 10 miles from where I am. The crater is pretty impressive in photos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear_explosions
Impressive list. I might suggest a hydrogen storage facility for Pennsylvania Avenue.
I would prefer somewhere in Delaware while Brandon is on vacation, you know, the best chance to find him somewhere is while he is on vacation.
The fact that such a significant organisation as the Royal Society has come out with this is significant.
The coded message here is “it can’t be done”
Correct. They are the first “official” source I have seen that has attempted the calculation properly. It’s mildly gratifiying that they agree with my work first done several years ago using over 30 years of weather data. Here’s my chart showing you’d need 50TWh of H2 storage for present levels of demand, so the doubled demand they asssume implies 100TWh.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
I think actually the Royal Society is having a joke! Where is their Nullius In Verba these days? Did all the fellows agree?
I would be interested to see Sir Chris Smith’s explanation of how storing huge (but still wildly inadequate) quantities of Hydrogen in caves, is safer and cheaper than fracking for methane.
We know the “hazards” of the latter because Potato Ed Davey, now leader of the Liberal Democrats, boasts of having banned fracking. (Whilst trousering £18,000 per year for ‘advising’ a Solar “Energy” company.
He brought in a limit of 0.5 intensity for seismic effects from fracking. Compared to the normal level “of concern” of 4.0 intensity, in energy terms around 3,100 times as energetic compared to his limit.
Intensity 4.0 seismicity occurs somewhere in the UK roughly annually and may rattle a tea cup.
How many Americans die every year from fracking induced earthquakes? I’m sure our own Beloved Leaders and Sir Chris Smith, President of the Royal Society, would love to know.
Dropping a full plate of food during dinner can cause a 0.5 magnitude earthquake.
Spare a thought for all the death and destruction in Seattle when Taylor Swift fans hit 2.3 in July…
The latest CFDs have approved 3 geothermal projects that are quite likely to result in “induced seismicity” way above the Davey limit. Certainly the last one did.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/P5OE0/1/
Link got messed up:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/P5OE0/1/
This madness will surely come to an end. In the meantime we are ruled by ignorant lunatics.
History is richly fruited with bouts of collective madness which surely do come to an end. But they are horrific at the time, and prosperity is not assured just because the worst is over.
The Royal Society report is here. It is quite interesting.
Nullius in verba
Royal society has been taken over by ignorant far-left psycho-phants.
You pretend to be intelligent, so why haven’t you realised that.???
Have you lost all rational thought capability ?
He hasn’t lost it. He’s voluntarily set it aside, as one of the demands of his employers.
Fiction quite often is interesting.
Yep, the whole thing is a fact free joke.
Every “major conclusion” is basically a pipe-dream based purely on speculation and meaningless agenda driven ideology.
I quickly tried to grasp this one…
Significant thing will be the tripling of UK electricity use ‘tween now and then.
Taking as read that:
Which takes UK electricity demand to about 100GW….
…meaning that this 100TWh store will last for 42 days
Unfortunately there is A Name that nobody ever mentions…
(they don’t because they’re too lazy, ill-educated & thick but primarily because it trashes All Of Climate Science)
and that name is “Carnot”
Question: Does this (suggested) store contain Energy before or after the Hydrogen has been through a heat engine?
It really does matter because, based on most existing Heat Engines, things change by another factor of 3.
i.e. Most engines we have now that ‘make electricity’ only use 33% of the energy contained in their fuel
Sooooo: is this store 100TWh of electricity or 100TWH of Heat?
I did my calcs on the same excel sheet that I did my Boreas windfarm calcs (you saw yesterday) and guess what?
The entire 15 year production from Boreas/Vanguard does amount to, in theory, a bit over 100TWh (actually theoretically 140TWh and assuming a 15 year life)
Now it gets really crazy:
Everyone now sees Barack (Skyrocket) Obama smiling so much that the top of his head will fall off if he bends over
Hint for muppets: If you think you really really wanna try this, use Aluminium instead.
A kilo of Ally (as best I recall) contains 60kWh of nearly useable electricity (make a battery out of it) and Aluminium ‘stores’ much simpler, better, cheaper, simpler than Hydrogen ever could.
That battery would of course be ‘single use’ but all you’d do is to take the spent battery (Aluminium Oxide powder) back to the smelter that made it in the first place and ‘recharge’ it in that way.
btw: just ‘academic‘ but fun anyway, especially for any Baracks amongst our number.
Assuming (BIG Assumption because Govs always lie about it), assuming Inflation runs at 5% between now and then
It is a ‘compounding thing‘ and 5% means that prices double every 15 years.
Going to year=2050 is nearly 30 years (two doublings) so the electric will be costing £10.47 per kWh at that time)
Of course you are right Peta, it needs to be burned in a combined cycle gas turbine, which is nearly 50% efficient. But electrolysing water to extract hydrogen is also only 30% energy efficient, so the complete electricity to electricity cycle is only 15% efficient! No that is a really good battery. Your aluminium battery is possibly slightly better, maybe 20%, but in any terms all these ideas are plain stupid! I think a new scale is required to measure politicians (these people are not scientists or engineers) going from zero to 100. All the Greens are already 100% stupid, most of the rest are just too lazy to measure stupidness so perhaps get 90%. Anything over 50% shouldn’t even get a vote. There problem over!
You need to factor in who will vote to pass the proposition in law that there should be a test for being a politician.
The entire premise is wrong, because the above will never happen.
In fact, the world will still be predominantly powered by fossil fuels in 2050 and beyond. This meaningless date is simply the result of the green blob’s ongoing de-carbonization fantasy. It also assumes that the global elite and its political puppets can continue to screw the populace & keep common sense in an induced coma for the next 27 years. It will fail…eventually. It always does.
Yep. Even the IEA admitted last year that fossil fuels will still be providing just over 60% of energy needs in 2050. IEA World Energy Outlook 2022
Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.
The penny finally drops their fickle solar and wind generators require bulk storage firming and abracadabra hydrogen storage is cheaper too. It’s like this numpty. First you have to create the green hydrogen and then seal and evacuate the caves to pump the hydrogen in lest it turns into useless expensive water.
Yeah yeah I know you computer modelled all that in an alternative universe too-
How scientists are modelling an ‘alternative universe’ to understand climate change’s impact on extreme weather (msn.com)
The Royal Society….
I note Neil Oliver has quit The Royal Society of Edinburgh
Top man
So long as they build the first one directly under the Houses of Parliament, ideally before the 5th of November, I’m okay with it.
I’m a Yank and even I got that one.
Of course, its old white male colonialist history so it has no value in understanding the world of today and how such history has shaped the society we live in. Indigenous knowledge is all we need to know; all cultures are equally valuable.
100 TWH x 3600 seconds per hour / (4.184 x 10^16 joules per megaton) = 86 megatons of one of the most deadly explosive, easily ignited, dangerously leak prone gasses known to man sitting in caves under the cities of Britain.
What could possibly go wrong?
Exactly. Humans have been fiddling around with atomic number 1 for many, many decades. Perhaps the climate eco-zealots could try praying to Helios for some tips on how to harness H.
Lots of research is being done to supplement natural gas with hydrogen. Interesting times.
Please stop calling them caves. The RS report said 900 caverns were needed. It was the stupid Telegraph that translated this as “caves”
For reference the oil equivalent is a cube 200 meters on a side.
Intentionally explosive material, black power, TNT, many others, consists of an explosive part plus an oxidizer part. Hydrogen is an explosive part but it has to be mixed with adequate oxidizer part to actually explode.
Just so. Seeps around bad cement, hydrogen embrittlement of any tubulars not up to the task, fires, sure. Hydrogen atoms, being small can flow thru permeable media more easily than nat gas. But even with bunker busters, no chance of sudden explosions….
This is a bit of an exaggeration. It does not help the climate-realist cause, to become alarmists.
I made a presentation to UK M.Ps recently, and I said the UK needs 19,000 gwh to backup 50% of the grid for 10 days — just 1/5 of what they are claiming in this article. But even my calculation will be difficult to fulfil.
Note: I hope they are not simply piggy backing this Telegraph article on the presentation I made. A version of this is available on the Tom Nelson Youtube channel, called ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
My calculations are as follows:
Electrical energy in use 40 gw on average.
Total UK energy usage is 5x this, at 200 gw
Electricity more efficient so total energy capacity required 160 gw
Only 50% needs backup (nuclear, bio, etc remaining) = 80 gw
Energy required for 10 days 19,000 gwh
If we were the back this up with pumped water the costings are as follows.
Dinorwig and Coire Glas stations cost £1.7 billion
They could hold 30 gwh each.
So we require 600 of these power stations (yes 600)
At a cost of £1,000 billion. (politicians have no idea of costs)
And where on earth would the UK put 600 pumped water power stations? We don’t have the hills available. This was recognised 15 years ago by Prof McKay (government science advisor) who said we should flood Welsh Valleys and Scottish Glens, for pumped storage. I think the Welsh and Scots might have something to say about that.
See his report to government, called ‘Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air’.
As to backing up the grid with hydrogen, I think that is a non-starter. Hydrogen production and compression (or liquefaction) is very energy intensive, making this very inefficient. Plus hydrogen can escape from anything, so how can they contain it? Hydrogen can leak through steel cylinders, let alone rock formations.
While pumped water storage might return 90% of your energy, hydrogen will only return 30%. Which means you have to triple your generation, to charge up the hydrogen ‘battery’. That is three times the renewable (wind) power. But wind is already tripled, because of its very low 30% capacity factor. Thus you need 9x the nameplate energy, to make wind work as a complete contained system.
So if you want 1 gw of wind electricity, you need to build 9 gw of wind turbines, plus fifteen 30 gwh pumped storage systems, And then rebuild those wind turbines after 25 years, because they do not last very long. This is all very expensive and energy intensive. (Remember these construction costs are based upon fossil fuels. If we built these systems on renewables, the costs would triple.)
My estimate for maintaining 40 gw of UK energy capacity, using 60% wind power, is that this 60% of wind energy would cost £2,800 million. (ie: 100 Hornsea-3 wind farms, plus 600 Coire Glas pumped storage systems.) And we still have to build the other 40% (nuclear, bio, whatever).
The UK energy policy is a complete fantasy. That is why I called my talk to MPs ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
Ralph Ellis
This was my related talk on the Tom Nelson channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmdjUYYNeSI
Ralph
Ralph,
The engineers in China, Russia, India, etc., have figured this out decades ago, as did this energy systems analyst.
They decided, it was a no-brainer to stick with low-cost fossil fuel for rapid economic growth
They formed BRICS+6 (includes two nuclear super powers), soon BRICS+12, to control more than 50% of all the fossil fuel on earth.
The near-zero, real-growth, rules-based West, flooded with millions of poor, unskilled refugees, is busy hanging itself with ESG and net-zero 2050 (whatever the hell that means), based on out-of-this-world expensive wind, solar and batteries systems
I think that the Royal Society estimate is about right for doubled demand. It certainly matched mine of 50TWh for current demand.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
Thanks for this information, I must ask my MP if he attended. In general, MPs seem incapable of thinking beyond whatever briefing notes they get from government or party HQ.
My comment was deleted somehow.
This article is a bit of an exaggeration.
I made a presentation to UK M.Ps recently, and I said the UK needs 19,000 gwh to backup 50% of the grid for 10 days — just 1/5 of what they are claiming in this article. But even my calculation will be difficult to fulfil.
Note: I hope they are not simply piggy backing this Telegraph article on the presentation I made. A version of this is available on the Tom Nelson Youtube channel, called ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
My calculations are as follows:
Electrical energy in use 40 gw on average.
Total UK energy usage is 5x this, at 200 gw
Electricity more efficient so total energy capacity required 160 gw
Only 50% needs backup (nuclear, bio, etc remaining) = 80 gw
Energy required for 10 days 19,000 gwh
If we were the back this up with pumped water the costings are as follows.
Dinorwig and Coire Glas stations cost £1.7 billion
They could hold 30 gwh each.
So we require 600 of these power stations (yes 600)
At a cost of £1,000 billion. (politicians have no idea of costs)
And where on earth would the UK put 600 pumped water power stations? We don’t have the hills available. This was recognised 15 years ago by Prof McKay (government science advisor) who said we should flood Welsh Valleys and Scottish Glens, for pumped storage. I think the Welsh and Scots might have something to say about that.
See his report to government, called ‘Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air’.
As to backing up the grid with hydrogen, I think that is a non-starter. Hydrogen production and compression (or liquefaction) is very energy intensive, making this very inefficient. Plus hydrogen can escape from anything, so how can they contain it? Hydrogen can leak through steel cylinders, let alone rock formations.
While pumped water storage might return 90% of your energy, hydrogen will only return 30%. Which means you have to triple your generation, to charge up the hydrogen ‘battery’. That is three times the renewable (wind) power. But wind is already tripled, because of its very low 30% capacity factor. Thus you need 9x the nameplate energy, to make wind work as a complete contained system.
So if you want 1 gw of wind electricity, you need to build 9 gw of wind turbines, plus fifteen 30 gwh pumped storage systems, And then rebuild those wind turbines after 25 years, because they do not last very long. This is all very expensive and energy intensive. (Remember these construction costs are based upon fossil fuels. If we built these systems on renewables, the costs would triple.)
My estimate for maintaining 40 gw of UK energy capacity, using 60% wind power, is that this 60% of wind energy would cost £2,800 million. (ie: 100 Hornsea-3 wind farms, plus 600 Coire Glas pumped storage systems.) And we still have to build the other 40% (nuclear, bio, whatever).
The UK energy policy is a complete fantasy. That is why I called my talk to MPs ‘Climate and Energy Misinformation’.
Ralph Ellis
In light of the recent article regarding the indigenous knowledge courses provided by the Democrat administration in the USA, maybe we need a more ‘nuanced’ approach to this energy issue.
This quote from Hamlet, seems suddenly very prescient.
“To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…
If you dream it then it is….apparently.
I see, we build these caverns I suppose as hydrogen leak proof spaces? Using natural caverns is ridiculous, they would hold nothing because the tiniest cracks would leak. I wonder what idiot in the RS said this because they should be thrown out immediately, its reputation is already low.
Not to favor the hydrogen idea but is it not the case that many caverns of the type envisioned here are already used extensively for storing gases of various sorts? CH4 molecules may be larger than H2 molecules but the basic concept is the same.
In other word, the idea fails on the production and utilization sides, not so much on the storage part.
Here is from the report:
The cost of providing an electricity system of
the kind envisaged in this report should be
analysed in detail. 200 GW of wind and solar
capacity and 100 TWh of storage capacity will
be needed, assuming 570 TWh/year demand
(these capacities are approximately proportional
to demand but would obviously be reduced if
substantial nuclear capacity is available). The
required investments would be of the order:
• £210 billion for wind and solar capacity (mixed
as assumed in this report), according to BEIS’s
2020 estimates of the costs and capacity
factors, assuming commissioning in 2040;
• £100 billion for storage; and
• £100 billion between now and 2050 to
enlarge and strengthen the transmission grid,
according to National Grid 101 .
UK net debt is now about 2.5 trillion, and is close to 100% of GDP. The idea of spending 500 million or so on this stuff is crazy.
Then you have the idea of installing 200GW of wind and solar. Right now wind is 28GW, and about 15GW of solar. No way is this going to happen. Vattenfall walked from the Norfolk project, and there were no bids at the lastest wind auction. Maybe budget another couple of hundred billion in these estimates to get the wind built?
And, of course, costs will inevitably rise, as they have on all large public projects in the UK. Take HS2 as an example. Or Crossrail.
Yes, indeed, both costs and feasibility should be examined in detail. Will they be? No. No more than they were for the costs and feasibility of the 2008 Climate Change Act, and May’s amendment to it.
The political class in the UK is lost in a mist of virtue signalling and wishful thinking and has lost touch with scientific and engineering reality. And its determined not to think too specifically about anything, just show up and vote for it and parrot the latest Guardian nonsense about the climate emergency and global heating. And the Met Office puts out health warnings whenever there are a couple of hours when the temperature somewhere reaches 80F.
The only thing that may save the country is a mass revolt against EVs and heat pumps. Which is starting to seem more likely by the day. Not that it will save the politicians, who may find themselves staring in dismay at the exit polls one of these days, as they did when the Brexit poll results started to come in.
And at this moment the entire wind fleet of generators is producing a fraction of power roughly 0.3GW from the 28GW capacity. It has been like this for the past week.
At the present rate of energy production, there would not be enough years available in the projected lifetime of humanity to create the hydrogen storage volume from Green energy electrolysis.
In fact the rate of gas dissipating into the substrata of the caves would exceed the production rate of spare green electrical energy available.
The BEIS estimates of cost and capacity factors are pure fantasy, debunked by the failed AR5 CFD auction and real world performance of wind farms.
What most people don’t realize: Hydrogen gas or H2 is the smallest molecule there is. It diffuses even through steel (which ends up making it brittle). It has been calculated that shipping hydrogen from North America to Europe with a modern purpose built tanker leads to about one third of losses due to diffusion. And the talk here is about caves with porous rock! As many people say: the best storage for hydrogen is to use it, chemically altered as a hydrocarbon, at best as a liquid hydrocarbon, e.g. gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel etc… Hydrogen gas technology is wishful thinking, mainly based on ignorance of the ensuing physical realities (storage, production etc…).
In what form would the hydrogen be stored, liquid or gas or in a compound? The U.K. is surrounded by hydrogen as a hydroxide. If it’s going to be stored as liquid or gas, that’s an explosion waiting to happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fauld_explosion
If only there were a way to stabilize hydrogen for storage and re-use of the energy.
Oh wait. Hydrocarbons!
Is there any of that stuff available naturally so we don’t even have to synthesize it?
What we should be building is lunatic asylums to store all the Climate Loons where they cannot harm the public.
“…proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
While I am still interested in local or regional hydrogen storage as an idea, being threatened by “bouts of mild weather” (in the UK!) doesn’t fill me with confidence.
“Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”. True, provided you don’t start counting the cost until after you have created the salt caverns and created and stored all the hydrogen and put in place all the infrastructure for using it. Well, you might have to ignore a few other costs too, and maybe you might have to be a bit creative finding costs for other energy sources, but you can definitely end up with hydrogen being the cheapest. ……. But there’s still one teensy weensy little problem: If you don’t install any wind turbines or hydrogen caverns at all, and if you use only coal, gas and/or nuclear from the start, your electricity price will be lower still.
Just declaring that something is the cheapest option, is not proof that the something is economical.
The Stublach caverns cost about £500m to build and equip to store 4.4TWh of methane. So that’s ~£113m per TWh for methane. It seems that hydrogen has to be stored at lower pressure – say 100 bar vs 180bar, so you need 1.8 times as much storage for that, and multiply by 3 for the lower energy density of hydrogen, which is a bit over £600m per TWh. £60bn for the storage is certainly cheaper than batteries – if you can find the sites. Then you have to be able to deliver the hydrogen to them, and take it away for use which is a whole other ball of wax.
The real killer is the cost of the hydrogen and the low round trip efficiency of the whole enterprise. Of course, there will be a deadweight of cushion gas that must be supplied as hydrogen as well – perhaps 50TWh. Storage use is at best really an annual seasonal cycle, which increases the costs. Some storage is actually needed to be held in reserve on top of cushion gas against a really tough year or two. Capacity utilisation of plants becomes a serious issue: you should not make hydrogen by electrolysis at the same time as you are burning it in CCGT, because that is just like burning £50 notes – you will use more energy to produce less hydrogen than you burn, so you would do better not to make the hydrogen and save on the gas burn. So you can only operate when tehre is a surplus to demand. Those surpluses are going to be very variable, depending on how strong the wind is blowing, so the electrolysis capacity is going to suffer from lower rates of utilisation the more you build.
See this chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZM72/1/
Oh, the humanity!
Who remembers that radio broadcast?
Another dumb idea from the climate loons.
The only reason they propose 100 TWh of HYDROGEN storage, is because the world has not the materials to have that storage in grid-scale battery systems.
The storage would be used in case of a lack of wind and solar.
In the UK, the SaudiArabia of wind and bureaucratic bull sh.t, a lack of wind in summer is the usual case, and 60 TWh active likely would not be enough by 2050.
Are they talking about ACTIVE storage? That would be about 60 TWh.
In California, the dysfunctional, LaLa land state, one kg of highly compressed hydrogen gas in a hydrogen car is equivalent to using about one gallon of gasoline in a high-efficiency gasoline car, but it would cost about $10 to $12, if low-cost fossil fuel electricity, at 6 c/kWh, is used for hydrolysis.
If Biden-fantasy Offshore Wind, the electricity cost to the utility would be about $15 c/kWh, plus 2 c/kWh for grid expansion/augmentation and 2 c/kWh for counter/balancing, plus 1 to 2 c/kWh for curtailments, all foisted onto hapless ratepayers and taxpayers. Good grief!
That pressurized tank would need to be made of materials not subject embrittlement, even after 10 years, and not explode, if in an accident. OMG
Addition to comment
THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY WILL BE HIGHLY UNLIKELY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hydrogen-economy
US/UK 56,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
There are two studies in the Lancet medical journal about mortality and temperature worldwide. One study in 2015 found that 20 times as many people die from cold weather as from hot weather each year.
The other study in 2021 found that approximately 4.6 million people die from cold weather each year compared to about 500,000 people that die from hot weather each year.
The earth is still in a 2.6 million year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation(4th ice age), in a warmer interglacial period between cold glacial periods. It is so cold that on most of the earth humans couldn’t live without lots of technology in the form of warm clothes, warm houses, warm transportation and warm workplaces.
Why do the environmentalist want to keep 4.6 million people dying from this cold environment the earth is in? Why are politicians and the media doing the same? I guess they are probably unaware of the great number of deaths cold weather causes. The cold air when breathed causes or blood vessels to constrict causing increased strokes and heart attacks in the winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
The Royal Society has become a breakfast club for science fiction writers.
IMO the UK is like a starving person ignoring perfectly good food that’s right out in front of them. All while desperately searching for something marginally edible….
The perfectly good “food” is nuclear energy. It takes a while to prepare before it can be “consumed”, but once prepared, it will deliver lots of energy and will last a long time.
But nope, it seems that the PTB in the UK will continue to scrounge around for energy sources that can’t stave off eventual starvation.
And as for hydrogen – where are they going to get this cheap and easily obtainable gas to fill all these caves?
In the UK we built nearly 17GW of nukes, and have closed all but 5.8GW. The last UK designed reactor was connected in 1988 and is due to close in 2028. The only younger one is a US design due to close in 2035.
Been there, eaten the loaf, forgot to plant next years crop…
SMR, factory built and placed at old coal plant locations, COULD provide the electrical baseload within 10 years IF the government was behind instead of obstructing the progress.
https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/
In the US it is NuScale
https://www.nuscalepower.com/en
The US built over 50 aircraft carriers in a little over 3 years in the 40s, while also manufacturing tens of thousands of tanks and planes and etc. in addition to providing Russa with a massive portion of the steel they used to build their tanks.
Completely replacing ALL baseload electrical generation with SMR factor built capacity by 2050 is easily doable, both in the US and in the UK.
2 years to build the factories and foundries and at the same time recreate the North American infrastructure to provide the raw materials to those locations.
Simultaneously begin prepping the sites and building the most time intensive parts of the plants, especially the containment tanks, etc.
Site properly sized units (for NuScale 4 6 or 12 reactor installations) at existing coal plant sites to utilize existing electrical infrastructure which also already have the rail lines to deliver the reactor vessels to site.
Co-locate industries that can use the excess steam and/or electricity. Ex, Coal gasification if economically feasible since coal delivery systems already are in place and usually natural gas and or oil pipelines are in place.
The only question I have is do we have enough Uranium enriched as ONLY 5%, to provide the heat source? Hillary DID sell much of the US uranium industry to Russia when she was Secretary of State.
“SMR, factory built and placed at old coal plant locations, COULD provide the electrical baseload within 10 years IF the government was behind instead of obstructing the progress.”
As you say. France built 56 reactors between ’74 and ’89. We would need maybe 40 of RR’s offering. RR are the only company undergoing UK type approval at the moment, but the Govt want to hold a beauty contest to see if they should choose another company. Left hand, right hand.
And here in the UK we have the world’s largest stock of plutonium apparently (140t), but we closed the MOX plant that could convert it into fuel for reactors in 2011. So we may choose to just bury it instead.
Are you forgetting something, such as the 20 years of litigation by “environmental” groups?
As per the times of true monarchies, the environmental (any) law suits are only allowed IF allowed by the government (crown).
If congress removes all the “justifications” for the suits such as ending the endangered species act, EPA enabling legislation, etc. etc. and adds loser pays to frivolous suits requiring lawyers to be equally responsible as the “plaintiff” then there will be no more such problems.
It is amazing how many “other things” have to be added to wind and solar in order to make this allegedly cheap source of power even marginally workable.
Tandem Computers solved the backup problem my using 16 identical machines for both production and backup. In this fashion 1 backup machine could back up 15 production machines.
The problem comes when your backup doesn’t match production you need 15 backups for 15 production machines, making the solution uneconomical.
Greenies used to handwave away renewables intermittency with claims of battery back up. Well, greenies, the Royal Society says
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
A source gives the cost of a basic Tesla battery at £5,220, So doing it this way would cost 1,200,000,000 x £5,220 = £6,264,000,000,000,
Perhaps Elon could give us a bulk order discount, greenies.
The idea that V2G will keep the lights on is made a complete mockery by the need for 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries just for the UK.
If storing gaseous hydrogen in caves was a good idea, then nature would have already done this, since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Since there are no hydrogen storing caves to be found anywhere in the world, it’s a silly idea because it wont work.
Start up all fossil fuel and nuclear plants, build new fossil fuel and nuclear plants and we won’t need caves full of hydrogen, we won’t need wind or solar energy, we won’t need massive new transmission lines and most important we will have abundant, affordable, reliable energy with almost no threat of blackouts. There fixed it for you, quit being so damn stupid.
As has been the case of ‘global warming’ morphing several times to become ‘global boiling’, the supposed benefits of ruinables has changed from ‘the lowest cost electricity generation’ to “They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation“ (my bold).
I expect the Oz Minister for (lack of) energy, Blackout Bowen, to start using this revised term in the near future
Nature long ago gave us the best way to store and transport hydrogen safely, just combine it with carbon. Those amazingly usable and plentiful hydrocarbons. When I see reference to hydrogen I see idiots that likely cannot even tie their own shoelaces.
Hydrogen caves? That German zeppelin that caught fire & exploded in New Jersey back in 1937 was filled with hydrogen.
Stop letting all those illegals invade your nation to cut back on the amount of electricity needed or is that too much common sense?