17-06-2019, 01:04 PM
The big game changer for renewables is large scale sotrage. As a mixture of large plant or lots of smaller batteries in people's homes and cars.
It's starting to happen. Power companies such as Octopus and Ovo are starting to offer tariffs suitable for V2G (vehicle to grid) and small scale generation.
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/electri...ology.html
https://octopus.energy/blog/outgoing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
Grid scale example:
https://www.energy-storage.news/news/wor...-in-the-uk
All this is in its infancy so look out for huge expansion, a few hiccups and ultimate success.
Why is storage important? The most expensive kWh are the peak ones, not baseload. The traditional way to cover peak loads is to have spinning reserve and/or fast response generators such as open cycle gas turbines. This is expensive.
Traditional electrical energy storage is largely hydo pumped storage. Dinorwic has 1800MW capacity. But there are many competing technologies. Conventional lithium batteries (including re-use of old electric car batteries), flow batteies, compressed air and quite a few more.
Solar and wind have the additional problem of not being dispatchable. In other words you can't get power on demand. This means that you need backup plant to cover the times when it's not windy or sunny. Again this has a cost. It's quantifiable but as the amount of solar and wind grows so it becomes more expensive to provide the necessary cover. That's why we need a lot of storage.
In 20 years time electricity supply systems are going to look very different from now. Exactly how they will evolve is predicting the future, always a tricky subject.
It's starting to happen. Power companies such as Octopus and Ovo are starting to offer tariffs suitable for V2G (vehicle to grid) and small scale generation.
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/electri...ology.html
https://octopus.energy/blog/outgoing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
Grid scale example:
https://www.energy-storage.news/news/wor...-in-the-uk
All this is in its infancy so look out for huge expansion, a few hiccups and ultimate success.
Why is storage important? The most expensive kWh are the peak ones, not baseload. The traditional way to cover peak loads is to have spinning reserve and/or fast response generators such as open cycle gas turbines. This is expensive.
Traditional electrical energy storage is largely hydo pumped storage. Dinorwic has 1800MW capacity. But there are many competing technologies. Conventional lithium batteries (including re-use of old electric car batteries), flow batteies, compressed air and quite a few more.
Solar and wind have the additional problem of not being dispatchable. In other words you can't get power on demand. This means that you need backup plant to cover the times when it's not windy or sunny. Again this has a cost. It's quantifiable but as the amount of solar and wind grows so it becomes more expensive to provide the necessary cover. That's why we need a lot of storage.
In 20 years time electricity supply systems are going to look very different from now. Exactly how they will evolve is predicting the future, always a tricky subject.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
