From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Yesterday, I reported that four national institutions – the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the National Infrastructure Commission, National Grid, and the Royal Society – have got their energy system modelling wrong and have thus underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
Last night, the CCC’s Chief Executive, Chris Stark put out a long Twitter thread addressing these issues. But while it’s dressed up as a rebuttal, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation.
Recall firstly that this blew up when the Sunday Telegraph reported Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith’s criticisms of the CCC’s energy system modelling: they had failed to look at the possibility of back-to-back low wind years. This meant that they underestimated the amount of hydrogen storage the system would need, and thus the costs involved.
There are 24 tweets in Stark’s thread. On number 10, we get this:
“We could certainly look further at a sequence of years. We are hoping we can do this in later work.”
Clearly then, Stark accepts Sir Christopher’s central point. He would have had to, of course, because he had already done so in correspondence with the Sunday Telegraph’s Ed Malnick, who reported in his article:
“…in response to further questions from this newspaper, the [CCC] admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data.”
And since the CCC had the underlying modelling for the 2019 Net Zero report dragged out of them under FOI, we can see in the model itself that only one year’s worth of data is analysed!
But while Stark has to accept the point, in true bureaucratic fashion, he dresses it up so that it appears to be a rebuttal:
* quote tweeting someone saying that the Royal Society’s criticisms are misleading
* calling the Sunday Telegraph piece “nasty” (it isn’t) but not linking to it
* multiple tweets describing the (incorrect) modelling that they did
* claiming to have made a strong rebuttal.
* saying “there’s nothing ‘right or wrong’ here.
* calling it a “silly story”
* etcetera.
Stark introduces a 2023 report, for which he says they looked at five different years of weather data, so he is once again accepting Llewellyn Smith’s central criticism, namely that they haven’t looked at back to back low wind years and will thus have got the costs wrong.
He also says:
“we modelled two sensitivities looking specifically at the impact of low-wind periods (‘wind droughts’) up to 30 days. An understanding of these extremes is essential to system design (although its impact on the overall net zero transition shouldn’t be exaggerated).”
This appears to betray an alarming misunderstanding of the issue. A period of a few weeks with little or no renewable generation (usually referred to as a “dunkelflaute”) is a secondary problem. Dunkelflautes are typically a couple of weeks long, but even one lasting 30 days would only reduce annual output by 10% or so. In simple terms, it would mean that we would need 10% of annual demand in the store at the start of the year.*
I use the term wind “drought” to refer to years in which wind is low over the whole year. In 2021, for example, annual wind output was down 20% or more. To get through a year like that, we’d need 20% of demand in the store. To survive back-to-back wind drought years, we’d need to store 40% of demand (and to have a commensurately larger generation fleet so that we can quickly refill it). Thus the costs will be grossly understated.
That Stark appears not to understand this, even after Llewellyn Smith has explained it to him, should be a cause for concern.
It may be, of course, that bringing dunkelflautes into the thread is just part of his efforts to obfuscate his admission of failure, but we need to be clear. So, does Chris Stark accept that back-to-back wind droughts mean more storage, more generation equipment and higher costs, or doesn’t he?
We need to know.
I don’t think the Climate Change Committee even understands how to tie their own shoelaces.!!
They are a particularly ignorant bunch of no-hopers.
I totally agree. I wrote to the them a while ago asking how many of them have ‘any’ science backgrounds or qualifications. No reply as yet!
The CCC is:
Baroness Parminter
Baroness Boycott
Baroness Bray
Lord Bruce
Lord Duncan
Lord Grantchester
Baroness jones
Lord Lilley
Lord Lucas
Lord Bishop of Oxford
Duke of Wellington
Lord Whitty
Baroness Young
Surely Lord Christopher Monckton would be a perfect fit for this Committee?
Don’t get me going about the Church being involved in politics; they can’t even keep their own flock happy. I have had, over the last few months, discussions with my local Vicar, a nice enough chap, regarding the ‘uselessness’ of the Archbishop of Canterbury. To me surprise, during our most recent discussion – he agreed!!
If you go to the webpage of the CCC it has a very different list of members and the Bishop of Oxford is not one of them.
If you go to the Environment and Climate Change Committee webpage you will find that the Bishop is a member – for the House of Lords committee.
Environment and Climate Change Committee – Membership – Committees – UK Parliament
Name Party or affiliation
The Baroness Parminter Liberal Democrat
The Baroness Boycott Crossbench
The Baroness Bray of Coln Conservative
The Rt Hon. the Lord Bruce of Bennachie Liberal Democrat
The Lord Duncan of Springbank Conservative
The Lord Grantchester Labour
The Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Labour
The Rt. Hon the Lord Lilley Conservative
The Lord Lucas Conservative
The Rt. Rev the Lord Bishop of Oxford Bishops
The Duke of Wellington Crossbench
The Rt Hon. the Lord Whitty Labour
The Baroness Young of Old Scone Labour
Never agreed with his politics but I could always respect Peter Lilley.
You may be thinking of the Environmental Audit Committee that pushes every part of government to be as green as can be.
Environmental Audit Committee – Membership – Committees – UK Parliament
This is not about the House of Lords Select Committee, but about the quango called the Climate Change Committee, formerly chaired by the infamous Lord Deben, which has enormous powers under the Climate Change Act.
Being “not very good with numbers” is something readily admitted to by many people in the House of Commons.
It has always seemed a peculiarly British thing that many people at the upper end of society actually wear poor numeracy as a badge of honour. CP Snow used to write about such class-based attitudes back in the 1950s: That hard mathematics and science stuff is best left to somewhat lower-classed employees. It’s not the kind of thing a lady or gentleman has to concern themselves with in detail.
Of course, MPs basic arithmetic seems to improve somewhat when it comes to setting their own salaries.
Then they should listen to the advice of the lower classed employees because they know what they are talking about. Anything from the upper class is just wishful thinking without facts to back it up.
Not just the upper echelons, but middle and bottom as well.
Knowledge of history, geography is sadly lacking.
I wouldn’t trust any MP to check the tyre pressures on my car
If the Lord Lilley mentioned above is, in fact, Peter Lilley, formerly MP for Hitchin and Harpenden constituency, then you shpould know that he was one of the few MPs to vote AGAINST the Climate Change Bill! So we have a spy in the camp…
“So we have a spy in the camp…”
Back in the day, when he was an MP in the Thatcher Governments, Peter Lilley was regularly lampooned as a member of the, ahem, ‘Aryan Dictator’s Party’.
It was cruel, not his fault mostly, but funny. His physical appearance and demeanour would have made him a good casting in many post-WWII movies.
Having looked at Wikipedia for your list.
Mostly Economics degrees, followed by no information. There’s one Mathematics and one Physics. With politics and philosophy, archaeology, ecology thrown into the mix
You can see the rogues’ gallery here:
https://www.theccc.org.uk/about/
Professor Piers Forster
Interim Chair
Chris Stark
Chief Executive
Professor Keith Bell
Dr Steven Fries
Professor Corinne Le Quéré FRS
Nigel Topping CMG
Professor Michael Davies
Adaptation Committee
Baroness Brown DBE FREng FRS
Chair of the Adaptation Committee
Dr Ben Caldecott
Professor Michael Davies
Professor Richard Dawson FREng
Professor Nathalie Seddon
Professor Swenja Surminski
It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
Upton Sinclair
Planning only for the occasional Dunkelflaute is the act of a true Droll-dumb
The accumulating uncertainty of Net Zero by 2050, demands traditional fossil fuel assets be maintained in a standby mode. Costs? Actual Net Zero or fantasy Net Zero (considering mining, refining, construction etc)? Energy to keep people from freezing to death or enough energy to have a vigorous fabrication culture ( James Bond driving a Fiat)? Bad ideas getting worse.
Him in the 2CV was f00king epic.
2CV were designed to drive a farmer, his wife and a tray of eggs across a ploughed field but, through a cliff-side orchard of olive trees with the g/f on board was something else…
(Don’t ask about the eggs)
I thought the spec. said they had to remain unbroken at the far side of the field. Anyway, if you’ve ever ridden in one of these magnificent beasts then you’ll understand when I say I reckon it’s the only car ever built that can turn over on to its roof without its wheels leaving the road!
Oh, and the only tool needed to maintain it is a spanner (wrench, for our US readers) of a particular metric size (though I can’t remember which).
It’s the one you can’t find, much like the 10mm socket.
The 2CV looks like the Citroën answer to the German VW Beetle
I rode in a 2 CV back in the 1980s. Whoever built it didn’t believe in shock absorbers–if you hit a bump you bounced up and down 3 times over the next 5 seconds, and a tray of eggs would become a huge omelette.
I think the bigger question is: “Do they care?”.
Good that these people aren’t designing airplanes.
What makes you think they aren’t?
“Andrew Montford: Does the Climate Change Committee understand the energy storage problem?”
Come on, Andrew. You know better than that.
“FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 (FOI) REQUEST
Thank you for your request, received on 4 February 2019.
Specifically you requested:
1 Is the £1,000 per day paid to Lord Deben, subject to Income Tax provisions, or
paid as a tax-free honorarium?
All remuneration relating to Lord Deben’s appointment is taxable and PAYE in respect of
income tax is deducted at source before payment to Lord Deben.
2 For what periods of time are these monies paid? Is it paid only when the
Committee has meetings with official Minutes?
Fees are payable for time spent in his capacity as the Chairman of the Committee on
Climate Change. This includes time spent preparing for meetings.
Etc.
https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/09022018-FOI.pdf
It’s a gravy train.
Oh dear. Here we go again, talking as if NET ZERO is electricity generation. The CCC has no credible plan for aviation, shipping , construction , agriculture, motor transportation . So all the above is irrelevant. It’s also irrelevant because it cites ‘hydrogen’ as the basis for storage. Where is this hydrogen to come from? Excess windmill electricity? Hahahaha. Storage in caves? Where? Under pressure? How tapped? How transported? Insurance risk? Hahahaha. Not in my hindenburg thank you very much. I could weep.
Hydrogen is the Houdini molecule.
It can escape from anything.
fantastic image at the top– I’m really loving the AI images- but this one is one of the best- I’ll have to use it to spread around Wokeachusetts to let them know what our state will look like when it reaches net zero nirvana 🙂
Storage system maintenance engineers will be known as ‘maze runners.’ 😁
There now seems to be a lot of resistance to these storage systems in Wokeachusetts.
hmmm… the enviros here now complain about building solar “farms” on agricultural land or in forests- they want no wind turbines on land- now they fight against storage systems- but of course they want the end of ff- not so smart
As I remember clearly because I informed the CCC at the time in 2017 in the UK the wind almost never blew for 7 months and in 2018 there was a wind drought for 2 months. In WWT recently there was an article about New York wherein it said that for New York to be green for 20 million people NYK would need 80,000 150Mwh back up battery sets therefore for the UK with 66 million people 240,000 back up sets would be needed.
What everyone on the green side appears to do is cherry pick minutaie to make what seems like a plausible solution for their chosen ideology then once the project is under way like HS2 with no way back just continue to increase the cost in the hope and expectation that muddle headed politicians will just continue with it being to scared to admit it could never work.
There is no way on this earth that you could manage constant demand based upon dynamic weather and battery storage. The cost for 80,000 150MWh batteries was estimated at $3 trillion therefore 240,000 would cost $9 trillion but current batteries can only hold charge for 7 days, so they need to be constantly recharged by wind and solar presumably whilst those same wind and solar farms have to meet current demand 24/7. Insofar as I understand batteries at best last 10 years so its $9 trillion every 10 years and if we have to mine 500,000 pounds of stuff to make one Tesla battery then how much mining needs to take place to construction 240,000 battery sets every ten years?
My guess is that the media has instilled so much fear into the minds of most people that those tasked with the myth of transition are clutching at straws to meet the demands of deluded green politicians who themselves cannot come to terms with the shear orders of magnitude of cost resources and land mass needed to transition from foss fuels. Nuclear for base load with gas and coal to respond to demand this faffing about with the idiocy of believing Co2 being the climate anti christ has gone to far. There isnt enough stuff and there isnt enough land mass available for all of the wind solar and battery farms needed to perform this miracle of abject stupidity.
Germany has spent Euros 150 billion on solar panels, if the UN/Klaus Schwab/John Kerry are right this expenditure might avert a Code Red for 1 hour. Therefore the UN IPCC would recommend that the planet spends Euros 1.2 Quadrillion on solar panels to avert Code Red for one year. However the same problem remains Euros 1.2 Quadrillion of solar panels correlates to 6 Quadrillion acres of land mass needed for the solar panels but the planet only has 16 billion acres.
Think this calculation was by Mearns?:
The world has gone nuts if anyone belives a green utopian transition is even remotely possible or economically viable. Mark Mills: The energy transition delusion: inescapable mineral realities – Bing video Net Zero means increasing mining/extraction by 7,000%.
“The world has gone nuts “
I’d say the western world has gone nuts. It’s riddled with self-loathing in parts
“,,then once the project is under way like HS2 with no way back just continue to increase the cost in the hope and expectation that muddle headed politicians will just continue with it being to scared to admit it could never work.”
The US example is the California High Speed Rail Project – “going nowhere and never to be finished”. Yet the Federal government keeps pouring money into that hole under various guises.
So when they eventually finish it- somebody should calculate the cost for the first passengers to go from point A to point B. No doubt that cost will be astronomical.
“batteries at best last 10 years so its $9 trillion every 10 years and if we have to mine 500,000 pounds of stuff to make one Tesla battery then how much mining needs to take place to construction 240,000 battery sets every ten years?”
Net Zero is an impossible dream. The problem is leadership hasn’t realized this yet and continues along the bankruptcy path.
Seems as if they want bankruptcy.
It does seem that way. It’s obvious Net Zero is destructive and not the way to go forward. It should also be obvious to “leadership”.
So UN sets itself up as global authority, pushes for net zero for all countries; said countries, inevitably, go bust trying to pay for it all. UN steps in and appoints financial audit committee to sort out the problem – all citizens get Basic Living Allowance and rations but work to pay off the national debt (which is never paid off, funnily enough) through the UN. UN then moves on to the next country.
Sounds like a nightmare or a bad dream, right?
anyway, does Stark have any ideas/suggestions/proposals for what form this ‘storage‘ will take?
For the UK pumped storage is a no-no, we haven’t the hills, mountains, lakes or space.
And enviro-whackos will go completely nutz no matter what or where you suggest.
Batteries are for Alice in Wonderland, assuming she gets herself a Time Machine
Hydrogen is even greater thermodynamic insanity, more so than the GHGE itself.
…. as is trying to store heat in (molten) salts, rocks, water or anywhere else.
The 2nd Law applies at all times, to all substances and all places
The CCC dictates and the result….
…unexpected climate lockdowns.
“A school has been forced to close six times in three months because its new £358,000 air source heat pump system keeps failing.
The “green” energy source was installed at Kingsnorth Primary in Ashford over the summer as part of a government initiative to help schools cut carbon emissions.”
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/ashford/news/school-forced-to-close-six-times-as-new-350k-heat-pump-keep-300147/
That’s an expensive dud.
The CCC is a rhetorical fantasy. Government set up the CCC, it told the CCC what government policy was and told the CCC to compile reports to justify what the government wanted to do. The CCC is a self fullfilling prophecy. China 2 new coal fired stations a week being brought online. India building 27GWs of new coal fired with 80GWs at the planning stage an but according to Lord Deben the UK has a responsibility to show the world green leadership even if we bankrupt ourselves in the process.
Lord Deben admitted that an all electric UK would need 150GWs of capacity we have right now maybe 50GWs and to show climate leadership government has ruthlessly shut down coal fired planets whilst handing out more subsidy to Drax to chop up forest and ship it across the Atlantic using fossil fuels as part of its stragey to save the planet. What is most gauling is the belief fostered by government and the media and never factually denied the belief that by mauling our Co2 emissions this will allow the UK to exert influence over its own local climate as if.
It is patently obvious that they have dug us into a huge hole or more critically a cess pit of delusion and only now beginning to realise the epic disaster that confronts them. They knew financial modelling was idiocy but really did believe you can model climate and weather when weather forecasting is mostly useless beyond 2 or 3 days. But as we know humanity is capable of believing anything which is why financial scams still happen every single day.
They obviously forget, or never knew, the first rule of holes, when you’re in one stop digging.
Alongside a whole many other Government agencies’ chief executives Chris Stark is simply unfit for purpose. These overpaid bureaucrats take their money but show zero courage to taking on the whole concept of Net Zero and its insane belief network. His reported defence is embarrassing as is that of most of the alarmist movement.
Genuine plans to guarantee achievement of energy needs in the UK in the second half of the century are conspicuous by their absence and have been since Thatcher reneged on her nuclear energy plans in favour of British natural gas.
Although they have many options in office no leader wants to be cancelled and so they are not leading at all and if they are not leading then WTF are they doing in office? Taking the money and doing sweet FA to deserve it – that is what they are doing. Many in society get prison sentences for that kind of activity.
Taking on the whole of Net Zero is not their job. They are appointed by government to tell government what government wants to hear in order for government to justify its latest scam. The belief that its only people who phone you at home to drain your bank account are corrupt mendacious and deceptively corrupt is a belief. Government is people who if the need arose would lie and cheat in whatever capacity they were in. It is falacious to believe that politicians are any less corrupt than any other human hence the word honorable to imply that they are indeed honorable if you believe that you will believe anything but as humanity is capable of believing anything it isnt Co2 that will cause a disaster it is humanities fault for believing the media and politicians. If the face is allowed to continue it will cause the mayhem that they say Co2 will cause if not extinguished.
The EU appears intent on driving Dutch French and German farmers out of business and its only when there is no food on politicians tables that they will begin to reliase the food does not come from Tesco it comes from a farm who would have guessed?
The minor little problem is that grid scale electric storage is a unicorn. We can describe one, but even the system in the Canaries did not work, even with very favorable geologic conditions. Specifying Shipstones would be little more of a fiction.
No brief for wind power here, but Mr. Montford seems to be suffering from his own conceptual error. Unless I misunderstand him, he seems unaware of the trade-off between fleet size and storage requirement. If you have a “commensurately larger generation fleet,” your storage requirement wouldn’t be “40% of [annual?] demand.”
I studied that tradeoff a few years ago by using ERCOT data. Although I, too, used only a year’s worth of those data, a longer record would reveal a similar if not identical tradeoff.
Indeed, Joe, you can make an optimizing trade-off, and I certainly need to look at what you have done and think about this independently, but over-building the system by factors of 2 to 2.8 has some terrible environmental issues connected with it if only for the reason that renewables require a huge footprint in terms of land and materials anyway.
Agreed. I was merely going by my guesses of what the lowest-cost mix might be.
Just in case you do have time to read my piece, I’ll give you a couple of caveats. One is that I’ve favored wind by greatly low-balling storage costs and ignoring charge and discharge losses. On the other hand, I’ve probably penalized wind a little by treating the production data as though they were without-curtailment values; my assumption was that very little curtailment occurred in that year, but that was just a guess.
If your threshold of pain is high enough you may also be interested in “Higher-Penetration Costs of Wind and Solar” and “Electricity-Generation Diversity.”
Do they understand the storage problem? Of course not. Yesterday I gave a talk at a nearby college; more about this at another time, but one of the illustrations I used was this.
At the current time our local utility employs about 15,000-17,000 dollars worth of capital per rate payer to deliver energy. Customers pay for this through a combination of monthly fee (around 20 bucks) and “demand charges” assigned by peak energy usage in the billing period (maybe another 20-40 bucks).
Taking my minimal estimate of battery storage needed to get through a summer, and using the Tesla megapack as an example battery, this employment of capital in the next 14 years could go north of $250,000 to $400,000 per ratepayer, unless of course, we are not serious about an energy system that behaves as well as the current one.
I think it caught peoples’ attention.
Consumer capital contribution, excellent point, Kevin.
Re hydrogen…It’s like everyone is fixated on how easy it was to make hydrogen in junior high chemistry class, which is just the “how are you going to make hydrogen” part and at this point you have quite a bit less energy stored in your upside down test tube than it took in electricity to make it….on a utility scale people forget to answer the other questions “how are you going to store it”, “where are you going to store it”, “how are you going to use it”….and I’m not talking about some tautological answer like “in tanks and in fuel cells”……start making some sketches with guesstimates of dimensions and weights and costs per pound summed over all users, figure out how big things have to be for city scale usage…it gets really expensive really fast. Then add in a safety expert….
Upside-down test tube. That is amusing.
I note that Chris Stark is leaving the CCC at the end of April 2024 to become Chief Exec of the Carbon Trust. Got to keep riding the gravy train and wreak more havoc!
£400k of gravy I saw.
It doesn’t matter how much capacity of wind power there is it is impossible to have 24/7 365 power because renewables are not controllable. There’s no way of knowing when and when not the wind will be blowing. This whole thing is absurd.
Germany is finding out the hard way they have double the capacity required and yet they have rolling blackouts. How is that? Well duh.
Batteries? What kind of batteries. Hydroelectric batteries? Has one ever been made? The cost of all this will be unsurmountable.
Getting off my soapbox now.
No, they have not.
On this, mylittlepony, you are quite correct and John W should be reminded to use the correct terminology. Germany has not had ‘rolling blackouts’ they have had ‘controlled shutdowns’ where the grid operators have kept power running to some areas, especially critical areas, but shut down nonessential energy use elsewhere.
Story Tip:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/01/26/in-pathetic-potatus-pander-wh-pulls-lng-football-just-before-winning-kick-n607590
In its infinite “wisdom”, the Biden Administration is pausing approvals for 17 LNG export terminals in the United States over concerns about the effects of these shipments on the climate.
This is at a time when Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea are cutting shipments of LNG from Qatar to Europe through the Suez canal, and gas deliveries through pipelines from Russia are cut off due to the war in Ukraine.
Somebody needs to tell “Sleazy Joe” that shivering Europeans might want to heat their homes this winter with gas from the good ol’ USA, if they can’t get it from Russia or the Middle East. The Europeans can worry about climate change next summer!
The Europeans haven’t really noticed yet because they did manage to fill their storage ahead of winter, and immediate import requirements have been low in consequence. Quite a bit (particularly into Spain) is actually still Russian LNG, especially with the Arctic route to the Far East essentially closed (at best long transit times, possibly with additional atomic icebreaker assist to cope with thicker ice than the Arc 7 ships can manage for themselves). Some Russian LNG is transshipped for China, either off Murmansk or at Zeebrugge and Montoir.
Last year the UK was importing from Peru, which is now out of the question due to the low water levels in the Panama canal. US exports from existing terminals have displaced significant volumes from Qatar, which is now a marginal source.
A cynic might draw a link between the sanctions on Russia and the shutting down of Russian oil and gas to Europe on one hand, and the lifting of the US oil and gas export moratorium and repurposing of LNG terminals to export facilities on the other. A cynic might; I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.
The LNG terminals were in place well before Russia became unmentionable, as the chart demonstrates.
QTWTAIN.
From the CCC Sixth Carbon Budget Electricity Generation Sector Summary:
For the analysis underpinning this report we used the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy’s (BEIS) Dynamic Dispatch Model (DDM). We supplemented this with additional analysis to reflect the use of evidence and analyses that were not supported by the model.
BEIS Dynamic Dispatch Model
The DDM is an electricity market model that considers electricity demand and supply in Great Britain on a half-hourly basis. The model estimates the merit order of plants, which is then matched to demand.
• The model takes into account demand profiles of different end users as well as weather patterns for sample days
Demand inputs included assumptions on flexibility provided by heat and transport (Box 1.11 in Chapter 1). We assumed that pre-heating and hot water tanks enable certain homes to shift their electricity demand four hours away from peak, while homes with storage heaters can shift their demand at all times.
Does that mean until the cold weather is over?
The use for storage in their modelling is effectively no more than intra day. They did commission the following study from Jacobs:
Jacobs (2020) Strategy for Long-Term Energy Storage in the UK.
Click to access Jacobs-Strategy-for-Long-Term-Energy-Storage-in-UK-August-2020.pdf
A future projection for the expected situation in
2030 and 2050 has been prepared by factoring
the 2018 Elexon data to reflect the predicted
generation capacities and demand projections
given for the Two Degrees and Net Zero future
energy scenarios.
Note that the FES scenarios provide total
generation demand forecasts on an annual basis
for 2030 and 2050, but not the hourly, daily,
weekly or seasonal distributions for these demand
projections. Thus, we have used the Elexon actual
generation data for 2018 as a proxy for the likely
generation variability (in percentage terms) for
future years. Clearly the demand variability in the
future will not be exactly the same as it is now,
The FES scenarios are the NGESO Future Energy Scenarios that I have debunked many a time and oft. So we have 2018 demand patterns, and 2018 wind and solar generation used as the basis for isolated 2030 and 2050 years, not a continuous run of years including difficult periods such as 2010-11 with low renewables output and cold weather increasing demand: there is NO allowance for the effects of using electricity for heating, or for the effects of charging EVs etc..
The purpose of this modeling exercise has been
to show how the provision of additional longterm
storage could not only assist in balancing
the future planned nuclear and intermittent
renewables capacity, but also reduce the
dependency on CCGT backup generation, fitted
with CCS, that would otherwise be required.
It doesn’t even pretend to address the real problem, which it fails to identify – all it is concerned to do is to show how some storage could reduce curtailment in a pretty average year.
Just to emphasize the failure to grasp the problem they say:
Analyses carried out by Jacobs for the levelized
generation cost study produced for the (DECC)
in 2015/16 showed that to provide the necessary
support for intermittent wind generation, as installed
at that time, would require the development of at
least a further 5 GW of long-term (deep) storage
with a total energy storage capacity of some 1,500
GWh overall. With the predicted acceleration in the
development of off-shore wind generation, in order
to meet the UK Government’s target of net zero
carbon emissions by 2050, this will likely require the
implementation of still further long-term energy
storage to maximize the effective firm capacity of
the total installed intermittent renewables.
1.5TWh is basically the volume of wind constraints in 2017, so it seems the study was calibrated to wind constraint payments at that time. The idea that curtailment would increase radically as renewables capacity is increased while not solving windless days simply never entered their head.
See the series of posts I made a couple of days ago under another WUWT article (direct link)
FES 2023 numbers, first for the 2022 “Start / Base year” capacities :
Total wind : ~27 GW (~13.4 GW offshore + ~13.6 GW onshore)
Solar : ~14 GW
“Unabated gas” : ~36.3 GW
For the “Leading the Way” scenario, in 2030 :
Wind : ~79 GW
Solar : ~41.4 GW
“Gas” : ~22.9 GW (22.9 / 36.3 ~= 63%)
Storage : 118 GWh (directly from the “Key Stats” tab in their spreadsheet)
Note that they have “Storage in 2030 = 29 GW” in the “ES.26: Electricity storage installed capacity (excluding Vehicle-to-Grid and Hydrogen, GW)” tab of their spreadsheet.
118 GWh / 29 GW = (just over) 4 hours.
For 2035 (twenty-thirty-five !) the “Key Stats” number is 149 GWh versus “Storage = 38.1 GW” in the ES.26 tab.
149 GWh / 38.1 GW ~= 3.9 hours.
In “Leading the Way”, the first year with “Unabated gas = 0” is 2036 (twenty-thirty-six) :
Wind : ~130.7 GW
Solar : ~62 GW
[ “Gas” : 0 GW (0 / 36.3 = 0%) ]
Storage : ~159 GWh [ 39.733 GW (from the ES.26 tab) x 4 hours … ]
I “analysed” 30-minute BM Reports (= Elexon) and ESO data from 2018 to 2023, where the OCGT contribution is negligible and the CCGT capacity for the GB grid is a roughly constant 34 GW (according to DUKES tables 5.7 and 5.8 data), so I simplified it to “CCGT = 100% of unabated gas”.
The “worst-case dunkenflaute” period I got was over 10 days in December 2021, which I calculated would require just over 1.6 TWh of “battery / storage” if the 2036 “mix” of “Wind + Solar [ + Nuffink ]” had been available instead of the amount of “Wind + Solar + CCGT + OCGT + Coal” actually generated 25 months ago.
While my 1.6 TWh is remarkably close to the 1.5 TWh you cite, the ESO “Storage” numbers are completely inadequate when compared to actual “historical” weather patterns.
For reference, a copy of my graph of the “Leading the Way” scenario from the FES 2023 documents, updated with an extra “maximum capacity for electricity to be diverted to hydrogen production” line.
The “2030 mix” and “2036 mix” numbers I chose to use are highlighted with asterisks.
Back to back wind droughts or not there is only one question to be asked. Will your proposed project be capable of providing the energy needed when it is needed? If yes start construction tomorrow, if no we are not interested take a hike.
For grid scale applications if the batteries were free battery storage for more than 4 hours would still be too expensive. The site prep, enclosures, over current protection, interconnecting switch gear, fire suppression and more costs $200/kwh, $200,000/MWH
.
A typical conventional power plant is rated at 1,000 MW, $200.000,000/MWH. $200 million x 100 hours of storage for a few days of cloudy and calm costs $20,000,000,000= $20 billion, batteries not included
.
You’re thinking, no, that’s impossible, nobody would ever spend that much, that’s a lie. Nope, the big lie is battery storage will be affordable, a breakthrough will come along, and everything will be fine. Bull Feathers, it’s a total fraud, don’t doubt it. 2024 grid scale packet price is $550/kwh.