I don't know whether you've released any new material on UK 100% renewable options, but you may be interested in these. Apologies if you've already seen them. I'd be interested in your comments.
If you click on "Chris B's Thoughts" in any post it'll take you to my complete output.
It doesn't give me great confidence in the two files you linked when the only instances of "reliability" I could find relate to the unreliability of the French nuclear fleet in 2022. Even less confidence when I find they are using Lazard LCOEs with their known short-comings. Less again when they are counting on significant amounts of wave energy by 2050 - but apparently that's an HMGov assumption despite about six decades of failure getting wave energy mechanisms to work but not be corroded to heck or battered to pieces within a year or two.
Like HMGov, DESNZ, CCC etc. the starting point for this LUT team seems to be 'we must do this by 2050' and the fancy & opaque modelling spits out huge amounts of numbers as to how the model thinks this can / might be achieved. With the associated costs. Which I'm always impressed by considering quite a lot of the necessary technology doesn't even exist yet.
Thanks Chris. And something that none of them include is a materials schedule. What do we need? How much do we need? When do we need it? Where will we get it from?
I don’t know if you’ve read FES2023 yet, but National Grid ESO have now got to
"… this leads to a significant hydrogen storage requirement of 10.9 TWh, which is equivalent to two thirds of the UK’s natural gas storage capacity at the end of 2022. All these highlight the importance of hydrogen storage as we decarbonise the grid and move towards net zero in 2050. "
Yes I read it... well, tried to, found little substance. I was going to write a post on the latest Future Energy Scenario but found other things to write about that interested me more.
On LinkedIn / Watt Logic, Kathryn Porter wrote about her disappointment with FES2023 and I tended to agree.
The new section on Dunkelflaute in FES2023 is interesting. They chose 1985 as their "model" year. Not a lot of wind generation "evidence" available from that year :-).
I love this analysis. Could you repeat it if the requirement is 80% and 60% renewable energy? I imagine it gets exponentially harder to achieve the goal as we approach 100%. At the moment we have what 40% renewable electricity, and very little storage. It would make a really interesting graph, storage needed on the Y-axis and percentage of renewable energy on the X-axis.
You'll see in some of my later substack posts, I've been grappling with questions such as yours, as well as what even is "Net Zero".
Supply has to satisfy demand 60/24/365. There are so many 'moving parts' in the grid, with sun going zero to huge and back again every day [see my latest, https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/solar-power-a-growing-problem], wind varying enormously, all the +/- interconnector power flows, etc.
So, far from there being a single solution of storage required vs % renewables, I think there's a myriad possible... how many dimensions do you want your interesting graph to be plotted in?
Thanks for the response. In the first instance I was thinking about that you could ignore interconnects and so excess renewable goes to storage, or is lost as curtailment. So just a 2D graph. What I’m imagining is that storage requirements will increase moderately, up to a point, and then they will increase massively after that. We reached 40% renewables with very little storage after all. But is it a lot of work to get to say 60%? Basically From your excellent analysis we know that 100% is very hard but I’d love to get a feel for when storage requirements really becomes a burden.
The thing is, this system has many 'moving parts', each of which affects the others. And we cannot get a solution for balancing this system 'on average' because it has to be balanced 60/24/365.
The trade-off currently is curtailment & costs thereof when there is surplus renewables and neither capacity nor demand to consume it. So currently & ideally (ignoring its astronomical cost for the mo) we would have lots of storage for every time we have surplus wind + solar. This is more and more true the higher the further penetration of wind + solar go, but curtailment costs just for wind in 2020 were "almost £300 million" according to Drax. Onwards and ever upwards (go curtailment costs).
And when there is shortfall of renewable power we just burn more gas to keep the lights on... I'm convinced the data shows this will still be true with much higher *capacity* of renewables, but just less so.
Except, for frequency stability I understand that NatGrid ESO *has* to keep a certain amount of rotating machines rotating, which sometimes means paying them to not generate not much while (handsomely) paying interconnector parties to take surplus power.
Hi Chris, your facts and observations I find are the reality of where we are in the UK in respect of Renewables – Government and “Greens” should take note!
Hi Chris, just read through your "thesis" excellent, it encompasses all my thoughts and so much more. Please keep up the rhetoric, it needs to get through to the UK Government and so many "Green" organisations, that don't fully understand the consequences of their narrative. Tony
Hi Chris. Just spotted this work re Germany that parallels yours so you might find it interesting: https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1505466943343677443. They estimate German storage need of 36 TWh, making your estimate of GB storage need of 13TWh (13 million MWh) look conservative.
The tweets summarise it well. Qualitatively they come to the same conclusions as me, but their estimate of energy storage needed for Germany (bigger energy user) was based on the worst 'dunkelflaute' period for Germany from the last 35 years - actually 1996-7.
Excellent work, Chris! I had a look at the daily averages of wind power in 2020. The max was about 13.5GW, the minimum was about 0.1GW. If you order them from lowest to highest, the result is a straight line with equal amounts below and above the average of about 6 GW. The maximum demand of the UK grid is about 45GW in early evening, where solar is zero. Assuming no coal, oil or gas and also assuming that nuclear goes to near zero this decade, then we will need something like seven times more wind power for the average to be equal to our maximum demand and then the batteries you mention to even out the highs and lows. In addition, we are due to increase demand massively over the next 30 years. The government's white paper lady year stated it would double, though this required heroic assumptions on energy saving and a massive new hydrogen industry, started from scratch without the use of electricity. In reality, we will probably need 100 to 130GW or more so, without nuclear, we will 20 times more wind power. Only half our wind power comes from off-shore turbines and these are the only ones the government is committed to growing, so make that 40 times more turbines. And, of course, all the current ones will need replacing by then - it goes on and on .....
I wonder if there is an analogy with DB versus DC (no pun intended) pensions? By trying to deliver an almost "guaranteed" pension, DB schemes incur massive costs as a result of "excessive" prudence. Perhaps a move to DC (in the pension sense) power supply would greatly reduce the requirement for storage to cover intermittent supply from renewables? Essentially, if power demand could be made somewhat contingent on power supply, you wouldn't need as much storage as you would if power demand was fixed. Could industry/business, for example, greatly reduce it's power demand if power supply is low?
Demand management. The latest buzzword seems to be "packetization" with a "z".
Search LinkedIn or YouTube.
It seems to require the user to give control of their energy to a central 'packetizer'.
In times of energy plenty, no worries.
In times of shortage, your request goes to the central 'packetizer' and computer says 'no'.
Maybe you have special requirements for power, and maybe the central 'packetizer' has been programmed with that info and you get priority.
Bearing in mind this would likely be a Govt. IT project, and how well they have historically done with those (cough, NHS IT system, cough!) how keen would you be to forge ahead on that path?
Interesting read Chris (as was the previous post). However I disagree with the opening sentence of the summary
"To decarbonise our electricity grid for current demand and recent (2020 and 2021) actual generation patterns, UK plc needs several times current wind generation (onshore + offshore), plus immense electrical storage capacity."
We do not need to do this to decarbonise it is one of the options we may choose.
The other obvious option is nuclear - and I don't understand why you limit mention of this here to fusion? Fission could also provide carbon free energy and is a known technology.
Ignoring nuclear due to long timescales (as is often done) doesn't seem logical since there would also be very long timescales to install the extra wind generation and more importantly the associated storage.
From your modelling is it possible to calculate how much storage would be required for an energy system made up solely of nuclear and storage?
I've often thought this number would be useful so we could compare the cost of 100% renewables plus a lot of storage to 100% nuclear and presumably a much much smaller amount of storage?
My main objective with the substack posts was to highlight in clear terms just how immense the task of decarbonisation will be. And to show using real data that demands for us to just do more and more of what we've been doing are doomed to fail (assuming that one of our objectives is to keep the lights on).
Nuclear fission is 'known' technology to the extent that other countries have retained nuclear engineering expertise whereas the UK has largely lost it. As we have been seeing very recently, increased focus on energy security may close off some sources of expertise just as the world is possibly jolted into considering more nuclear. Scarce resources in demand, higher prices and more delays. On top of the UK's glacial planning and approval processes.
You can already see from Chart 20A-1 and Chart 21A-1 in my first post how 'close' we are at times to having sufficient renewable power. Within 5,000 MW. Build another 5,000 MW of nuclear baseload and those spiky charts are shifted upwards so the peaks go positive. If that additional nuclear baseload is 10,000 MW there's quite a lot of excess renewable power that would have to be curtailed without massive storage. And so on.
Because I'm pretty certain that nuclear cannot follow the rate of change of wind-sourced renewable power, only CCGT or battery storage can do that.
If you kept going with more nuclear you'd get to the point - at around 25,000 to 30,000 MW extra - then you'd cover even the deepest dips in renewable generation but would be curtailing a high proportion of 'free' wind energy.
I know that you said we cannot predict demand next week never mind 2050, but the next stage in this analysis is surely to include ball-park estimates of demand from heat pumps and EV charging.
Heat pump demand is complicated by the amount of insulation that can be envisaged, but there are two extremes, i.e (a) insulation stays as it is, and (b) every property is retrofitted to "A" standard. The truth will be something in between these extremes.
McKinsey published their analysis 10 Feb '22 (link below) which includes a graphic stated to be from the 6th carbon budget, Committee on Climate Change 2020 showing a 56% increase in electrical power demand from 2020 through 2035.
Their crystal ball is probably higher-quality and certainly more expensive than mine, so I won't argue with that number. Their assumptions regarding levels of insulation as well as technology / efficiency of alternative heating devices will be embedded within their analysis.
Using the National Grid ESO scenarios in their Future Energy Scenarios documents suggest that by 2050 GB demand will have about doubled - maybe a bit more.
It's entirely possible, but even extrapolating out to 2030-2035 feels a stretch to me. Who knows what will have happened by 2050?
Hopefully by then we'll have affordable long-duration electrical energy storage at grid scale. That should allow the shutdown of backup fossil generation and consequent savings. Maybe then the cost of power would actually come down and stimulate even more use of electricity...
David Braunholtz: hydrogen energy storage has poor efficiency. 70% electrolysis efficiency and 60% fuel cell efficiency = 42% efficiency, and I've not included gas compression/transport and electricity transmission losses.
Compressed air storage is said to be competitive, and could have 70%+ efficiency if compression heat is stored and used to warm up the decompressing air. In fact net zero supporters say no-one would consider battery storage on such a scale; compressed air is the way to go.
I don't see David Braunholtz suggesting hydrogen? But anyway I agree it is very inefficient. It astonishes me that HM Gov. has a "Hydrogen Strategy" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-hydrogen-strategy without first having any overall energy policy that I can discern. If it *does* have an energy policy tucked away somewhere I think it anyway needs to be completely revisited in light of the Ukraine invasion by Russia. It appears Putin has been emboldened by Western dependence on Russian gas and oil (I'm especially looking at you, Germany) - as well as clear signs of Western weakness (the chaotic American abandonment of Afghanistan; Biden saying an 'incursion' would be ok, etc. etc.) National security of energy supply has got to get a LOT more attention from HM Gov.
Have you worked the numbers for compressed air storage? I haven't. Please let me know if you have specific knowledge of suitable cavern storage at sufficient scale. But it's novel technology at such a scale, whereas pumped hydro is at least fully proven over decades. It's just extremely expensive, very destructive to the natural environment unless extreme measures are taken to mitigate the effects *and* NIMBYs can be persuaded to accept it, and it takes at least a decade to construct.
As you say, future offshore / taller wind turbines likely will have smaller 'lulls' ? I did also wonder if the data excluded renewable sources that had been turned off due to lack of capacity / storage? - but wouldn't expect this to change big picture much, as likely in winter.
But I suspect putting in more (ever cheaper) solar WOULD make a big difference - as it is most productive in the summer, ie exactly when wind generation falls.
It would I think be helpful (& not difficult) to look at the economics eg put in cost of extra wind , and solar, & extra storage (various options of which li-ion is one of the most expensive, including 'hydrogen' (or ammonia etc) generation for later use in electricity generation), & play with the balances to get an idea of what may be sensible.
My understanding is that ever taller & bigger wind generators are proposed because they poke up into more consistently windy air, as well as there being economies of scale. However, when a weather system with still air settles over the UK it covers a wide area around the UK - so I think those taller generators would still be in the same lull.
In my first substack https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/uk-plc-power-decarbonisation?utm_source=url I ran a scenario with double the solar generation, it hardly helped. UK solar peaks in the summer, and is almost zero in winter when we need power for heat. In California / Middle East / Australia etc. it makes perfect sense because their air conditioning peak loads match peak solar.
I don't think it would be easy to model solutions, especially with the limited technology options we currently have. We would have to make too many assumptions about how tech options would develop, whether better tech options would appear, whether the costs of options would go down or up as demand increased and potentially resources depleted, and so on. What I am hoping by raising the questions I am raising is that we don't end up with another "Dieselgate" policy error.
On the solar, from memory, my reading was that doubling solar reduced storage requirement from about 23 million MWH to 16 - because although peak demand is higher in winter, demand net of wind (or wind x 2 or 3) is actually largest in spring & summer (this is when demand exceeds supply in your scenarios). So if you try putting in solar x3 or x4 (which will likely cost no more than the installation of the current amount of solar cost, given PV price trends) you may find the storage requirement disappears entirely?
Re alternatives for long-term storage, the electricity -storage - electricity efficiency is not particularly important, as at times of excess generation the cost of electricity going in will be effectively zero. What is important is the capital cost of sufficient capacity to generate & store (& use, when required) enough eg ammonia, or compressed air, to cover the peak-trough in the cumulative graph.
Thanks for the update Chris. Re your estimate of likely costs for a renewables-dominated fully decarbonised GB grid there's been an interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a chart posted by Carbon Brief showing dramatic falls in costs (measured as LCOE) of renewables. Various commenters objected, on the grounds that ultimately it is total system costs - e.g. including all costs of storage / grid strengthening or any other system changes driven by particular generation technologies, and then agreeing how those "extra" costs should be apportioned between generation technologies to understand their "real" costs.
I note on Carbon Brief's About Us page they say "We specialise in clear, data-driven articles and graphics to help improve the understanding of climate change, both in terms of the science and the policy response."
I have posted in their 'contact us' form a link to my substack with a comment that, regardless of the cost of a gross MW solar PV or a gross MW of wind generation, energy storage is the only thing that will keep the lights on.
I posted a similar comment in the LinkedIn article you pointed me to.
Thanks for your interesting & informative follow-up to Part 1.
Some observations from a quick read:
1. Wind lost - Just over a week ago the Renewable Energy foundation blog had a post “Constraint Payments to Wind Power in 2020 and 2021”:
“Large volumes of wind energy are being discarded in Scotland in order to preserve grid stability, with a fleet average of over 13% of generation constrained off in the years 2015 to 2021, inclusive, with a high of 19% of generation in 2020. Some wind farms have been discarding between 20% and 50% of their output, while being rewarded with generous constraint payments from the electricity consumer for doing so.”
Harvesting 50% of their subsidies to NOT generate!
2. Prof MacKay considered lulls in wind & mentions an Irish lull lasting 5 full days in 2007
Britain experienced a month-long 'lull' July last year during which our fleet of wind farms generated at an average Capacity Factor for the month of only 10%.
3. “ Gridwatch™ ... It has recorded power flows every 5 minutes across UK plc for the last ten years.”
Leo Smith's Gridwatch's data source is Elexon, and covers Britain rather than the UK. Leo's "Download" interface makes accessing Elexon's data much, much easier! ;-)
4. Interconnectors: In 2015 the EU called for all member states to achieve "By 2020 each Member State should have in place electricity interconnection capacity of at least 10% of installed electricity production."
That 10% of *installed capacity* would include Britain’s solar fleet generating at just 10% Capacity Factor.
The EU document listed numerous benefits. It forgot to mention that Germany, with its high proportion of highly variable wind capacity, subsequently destabilises some of its neighbors' grids by dumping its excess on to them.
2. Yes, I included a screen-grab of Prof. MacKay's paragraphs on intermittency, did they not show up adequately / legibly?
The reason I did the analysis for two whole years was I did not want to cherry-pick data on one or other 'side'. I was aware of some lulls being noticed in '21, but what did the whole year look like?
3. Ok. MontyDog who co-invented Gridwatch did not say I'd got things seriously wrong.
4. I think the whole of Europe is going to eventually discover just how ineffective wishful thinking and declaring targets is for keeping the lights on.
In view of very recent events it is a shame the EU did not instead mandate NATO recommended levels of defence spending across the bloc.
"I included a screen-grab of Prof. MacKay's paragraphs on intermittency, did they not show up adequately / legibly?"
Yes it was legible; but as mentioned, Prof MacKay's example was of relatively short lulls, one in Ireland 15 years ago, and others of just 2-3 days durations. (I can't remember how he defined a 'lull'.)
July 2021 however was recent, and an entire month that averaged ~10%CF.
If blackouts are to be 'prevented' via storage, my gut feeling is that an entire month at 10% CF is far more challenging than a few days at (say) 5% CF.
I don't know whether you've released any new material on UK 100% renewable options, but you may be interested in these. Apologies if you've already seen them. I'd be interested in your comments.
https://100percentrenewableuk.org/wp-content/uploads/100_percent_RE_UK_Results_R2_final2.pdf
https://100percentrenewableuk.org/wp-content/uploads/100-RE-23-Dec-.pdf
Toby
Hello Toby, thank you for your links - I've taken a look at them, comments below.
Coincidentally I posted my latest analysis today:
https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/intermittency-aka-diminishing-returns
If you click on "Chris B's Thoughts" in any post it'll take you to my complete output.
It doesn't give me great confidence in the two files you linked when the only instances of "reliability" I could find relate to the unreliability of the French nuclear fleet in 2022. Even less confidence when I find they are using Lazard LCOEs with their known short-comings. Less again when they are counting on significant amounts of wave energy by 2050 - but apparently that's an HMGov assumption despite about six decades of failure getting wave energy mechanisms to work but not be corroded to heck or battered to pieces within a year or two.
Like HMGov, DESNZ, CCC etc. the starting point for this LUT team seems to be 'we must do this by 2050' and the fancy & opaque modelling spits out huge amounts of numbers as to how the model thinks this can / might be achieved. With the associated costs. Which I'm always impressed by considering quite a lot of the necessary technology doesn't even exist yet.
So yeah, nah as the Aussies say.
Thanks Chris. And something that none of them include is a materials schedule. What do we need? How much do we need? When do we need it? Where will we get it from?
I don’t know if you’ve read FES2023 yet, but National Grid ESO have now got to
"… this leads to a significant hydrogen storage requirement of 10.9 TWh, which is equivalent to two thirds of the UK’s natural gas storage capacity at the end of 2022. All these highlight the importance of hydrogen storage as we decarbonise the grid and move towards net zero in 2050. "
They’re getting closer to your numbers.
Regards
Toby
Hi Toby, thank you.
Yes I read it... well, tried to, found little substance. I was going to write a post on the latest Future Energy Scenario but found other things to write about that interested me more.
On LinkedIn / Watt Logic, Kathryn Porter wrote about her disappointment with FES2023 and I tended to agree.
I just downloaded this: https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/271416/download - the doc is dated 21Nov2022.
Skimming through I saw
"• If blackouts occur over the coming winter, people may be less enthused by the idea of demand management and demand driven tariff prices."
No sh*t, Sherlock!
All the best.
The new section on Dunkelflaute in FES2023 is interesting. They chose 1985 as their "model" year. Not a lot of wind generation "evidence" available from that year :-).
Cheers
I love this analysis. Could you repeat it if the requirement is 80% and 60% renewable energy? I imagine it gets exponentially harder to achieve the goal as we approach 100%. At the moment we have what 40% renewable electricity, and very little storage. It would make a really interesting graph, storage needed on the Y-axis and percentage of renewable energy on the X-axis.
Thank you, Alastair.
You'll see in some of my later substack posts, I've been grappling with questions such as yours, as well as what even is "Net Zero".
Supply has to satisfy demand 60/24/365. There are so many 'moving parts' in the grid, with sun going zero to huge and back again every day [see my latest, https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/solar-power-a-growing-problem], wind varying enormously, all the +/- interconnector power flows, etc.
So, far from there being a single solution of storage required vs % renewables, I think there's a myriad possible... how many dimensions do you want your interesting graph to be plotted in?
Thanks for the response. In the first instance I was thinking about that you could ignore interconnects and so excess renewable goes to storage, or is lost as curtailment. So just a 2D graph. What I’m imagining is that storage requirements will increase moderately, up to a point, and then they will increase massively after that. We reached 40% renewables with very little storage after all. But is it a lot of work to get to say 60%? Basically From your excellent analysis we know that 100% is very hard but I’d love to get a feel for when storage requirements really becomes a burden.
Hello again Alastair,
The thing is, this system has many 'moving parts', each of which affects the others. And we cannot get a solution for balancing this system 'on average' because it has to be balanced 60/24/365.
The trade-off currently is curtailment & costs thereof when there is surplus renewables and neither capacity nor demand to consume it. So currently & ideally (ignoring its astronomical cost for the mo) we would have lots of storage for every time we have surplus wind + solar. This is more and more true the higher the further penetration of wind + solar go, but curtailment costs just for wind in 2020 were "almost £300 million" according to Drax. Onwards and ever upwards (go curtailment costs).
And when there is shortfall of renewable power we just burn more gas to keep the lights on... I'm convinced the data shows this will still be true with much higher *capacity* of renewables, but just less so.
Except, for frequency stability I understand that NatGrid ESO *has* to keep a certain amount of rotating machines rotating, which sometimes means paying them to not generate not much while (handsomely) paying interconnector parties to take surplus power.
Hi Chris, your facts and observations I find are the reality of where we are in the UK in respect of Renewables – Government and “Greens” should take note!
Hi Chris, just read through your "thesis" excellent, it encompasses all my thoughts and so much more. Please keep up the rhetoric, it needs to get through to the UK Government and so many "Green" organisations, that don't fully understand the consequences of their narrative. Tony
Hi Chris. Just spotted this work re Germany that parallels yours so you might find it interesting: https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1505466943343677443. They estimate German storage need of 36 TWh, making your estimate of GB storage need of 13TWh (13 million MWh) look conservative.
Hello Nick,
Thank you again for the pointer.
I've read the Ruhnau & Qvist report, as well as Staffan Qvist's tweet thread
https://twitter.com/QvistStaffan/status/1427625795355349004
The tweets summarise it well. Qualitatively they come to the same conclusions as me, but their estimate of energy storage needed for Germany (bigger energy user) was based on the worst 'dunkelflaute' period for Germany from the last 35 years - actually 1996-7.
Very interesting!
Good day Nick,
Many thanks for the link, I'll investigate.
Excellent work, Chris! I had a look at the daily averages of wind power in 2020. The max was about 13.5GW, the minimum was about 0.1GW. If you order them from lowest to highest, the result is a straight line with equal amounts below and above the average of about 6 GW. The maximum demand of the UK grid is about 45GW in early evening, where solar is zero. Assuming no coal, oil or gas and also assuming that nuclear goes to near zero this decade, then we will need something like seven times more wind power for the average to be equal to our maximum demand and then the batteries you mention to even out the highs and lows. In addition, we are due to increase demand massively over the next 30 years. The government's white paper lady year stated it would double, though this required heroic assumptions on energy saving and a massive new hydrogen industry, started from scratch without the use of electricity. In reality, we will probably need 100 to 130GW or more so, without nuclear, we will 20 times more wind power. Only half our wind power comes from off-shore turbines and these are the only ones the government is committed to growing, so make that 40 times more turbines. And, of course, all the current ones will need replacing by then - it goes on and on .....
I wonder if there is an analogy with DB versus DC (no pun intended) pensions? By trying to deliver an almost "guaranteed" pension, DB schemes incur massive costs as a result of "excessive" prudence. Perhaps a move to DC (in the pension sense) power supply would greatly reduce the requirement for storage to cover intermittent supply from renewables? Essentially, if power demand could be made somewhat contingent on power supply, you wouldn't need as much storage as you would if power demand was fixed. Could industry/business, for example, greatly reduce it's power demand if power supply is low?
Demand management. The latest buzzword seems to be "packetization" with a "z".
Search LinkedIn or YouTube.
It seems to require the user to give control of their energy to a central 'packetizer'.
In times of energy plenty, no worries.
In times of shortage, your request goes to the central 'packetizer' and computer says 'no'.
Maybe you have special requirements for power, and maybe the central 'packetizer' has been programmed with that info and you get priority.
Bearing in mind this would likely be a Govt. IT project, and how well they have historically done with those (cough, NHS IT system, cough!) how keen would you be to forge ahead on that path?
No problem! We can all buy standby diesel generators and, if you don't have space - lots of candles.
Interesting read Chris (as was the previous post). However I disagree with the opening sentence of the summary
"To decarbonise our electricity grid for current demand and recent (2020 and 2021) actual generation patterns, UK plc needs several times current wind generation (onshore + offshore), plus immense electrical storage capacity."
We do not need to do this to decarbonise it is one of the options we may choose.
The other obvious option is nuclear - and I don't understand why you limit mention of this here to fusion? Fission could also provide carbon free energy and is a known technology.
Ignoring nuclear due to long timescales (as is often done) doesn't seem logical since there would also be very long timescales to install the extra wind generation and more importantly the associated storage.
From your modelling is it possible to calculate how much storage would be required for an energy system made up solely of nuclear and storage?
I've often thought this number would be useful so we could compare the cost of 100% renewables plus a lot of storage to 100% nuclear and presumably a much much smaller amount of storage?
Thank you for your comments, Crispo.
My main objective with the substack posts was to highlight in clear terms just how immense the task of decarbonisation will be. And to show using real data that demands for us to just do more and more of what we've been doing are doomed to fail (assuming that one of our objectives is to keep the lights on).
Nuclear fission is 'known' technology to the extent that other countries have retained nuclear engineering expertise whereas the UK has largely lost it. As we have been seeing very recently, increased focus on energy security may close off some sources of expertise just as the world is possibly jolted into considering more nuclear. Scarce resources in demand, higher prices and more delays. On top of the UK's glacial planning and approval processes.
You can already see from Chart 20A-1 and Chart 21A-1 in my first post how 'close' we are at times to having sufficient renewable power. Within 5,000 MW. Build another 5,000 MW of nuclear baseload and those spiky charts are shifted upwards so the peaks go positive. If that additional nuclear baseload is 10,000 MW there's quite a lot of excess renewable power that would have to be curtailed without massive storage. And so on.
Because I'm pretty certain that nuclear cannot follow the rate of change of wind-sourced renewable power, only CCGT or battery storage can do that.
If you kept going with more nuclear you'd get to the point - at around 25,000 to 30,000 MW extra - then you'd cover even the deepest dips in renewable generation but would be curtailing a high proportion of 'free' wind energy.
I know that you said we cannot predict demand next week never mind 2050, but the next stage in this analysis is surely to include ball-park estimates of demand from heat pumps and EV charging.
Heat pump demand is complicated by the amount of insulation that can be envisaged, but there are two extremes, i.e (a) insulation stays as it is, and (b) every property is retrofitted to "A" standard. The truth will be something in between these extremes.
Hello again KB.
McKinsey published their analysis 10 Feb '22 (link below) which includes a graphic stated to be from the 6th carbon budget, Committee on Climate Change 2020 showing a 56% increase in electrical power demand from 2020 through 2035.
Their crystal ball is probably higher-quality and certainly more expensive than mine, so I won't argue with that number. Their assumptions regarding levels of insulation as well as technology / efficiency of alternative heating devices will be embedded within their analysis.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/facing-the-future-net-zero-and-the-uk-electricity-sector
Using the National Grid ESO scenarios in their Future Energy Scenarios documents suggest that by 2050 GB demand will have about doubled - maybe a bit more.
Hello Toby, thank you for your comment.
It's entirely possible, but even extrapolating out to 2030-2035 feels a stretch to me. Who knows what will have happened by 2050?
Hopefully by then we'll have affordable long-duration electrical energy storage at grid scale. That should allow the shutdown of backup fossil generation and consequent savings. Maybe then the cost of power would actually come down and stimulate even more use of electricity...
In case you missed it …
https://www.cleaningup.live/ep122-sir-chris-llewellyn-smith-solving-for-storage/
I read the transcript, which does seem to have an error or two but seems to have some realistic numbers.
Well, maybe ....
... unfortunately National Grid ESO think we only need a few hundred GWh of storage capacity, so I'm not holding my breath.
David Braunholtz: hydrogen energy storage has poor efficiency. 70% electrolysis efficiency and 60% fuel cell efficiency = 42% efficiency, and I've not included gas compression/transport and electricity transmission losses.
Compressed air storage is said to be competitive, and could have 70%+ efficiency if compression heat is stored and used to warm up the decompressing air. In fact net zero supporters say no-one would consider battery storage on such a scale; compressed air is the way to go.
Hello KB, thank you for your comments.
I don't see David Braunholtz suggesting hydrogen? But anyway I agree it is very inefficient. It astonishes me that HM Gov. has a "Hydrogen Strategy" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-hydrogen-strategy without first having any overall energy policy that I can discern. If it *does* have an energy policy tucked away somewhere I think it anyway needs to be completely revisited in light of the Ukraine invasion by Russia. It appears Putin has been emboldened by Western dependence on Russian gas and oil (I'm especially looking at you, Germany) - as well as clear signs of Western weakness (the chaotic American abandonment of Afghanistan; Biden saying an 'incursion' would be ok, etc. etc.) National security of energy supply has got to get a LOT more attention from HM Gov.
Have you worked the numbers for compressed air storage? I haven't. Please let me know if you have specific knowledge of suitable cavern storage at sufficient scale. But it's novel technology at such a scale, whereas pumped hydro is at least fully proven over decades. It's just extremely expensive, very destructive to the natural environment unless extreme measures are taken to mitigate the effects *and* NIMBYs can be persuaded to accept it, and it takes at least a decade to construct.
As you say, future offshore / taller wind turbines likely will have smaller 'lulls' ? I did also wonder if the data excluded renewable sources that had been turned off due to lack of capacity / storage? - but wouldn't expect this to change big picture much, as likely in winter.
But I suspect putting in more (ever cheaper) solar WOULD make a big difference - as it is most productive in the summer, ie exactly when wind generation falls.
It would I think be helpful (& not difficult) to look at the economics eg put in cost of extra wind , and solar, & extra storage (various options of which li-ion is one of the most expensive, including 'hydrogen' (or ammonia etc) generation for later use in electricity generation), & play with the balances to get an idea of what may be sensible.
Thank you for your comments David,
My understanding is that ever taller & bigger wind generators are proposed because they poke up into more consistently windy air, as well as there being economies of scale. However, when a weather system with still air settles over the UK it covers a wide area around the UK - so I think those taller generators would still be in the same lull.
In my first substack https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/uk-plc-power-decarbonisation?utm_source=url I ran a scenario with double the solar generation, it hardly helped. UK solar peaks in the summer, and is almost zero in winter when we need power for heat. In California / Middle East / Australia etc. it makes perfect sense because their air conditioning peak loads match peak solar.
I don't think it would be easy to model solutions, especially with the limited technology options we currently have. We would have to make too many assumptions about how tech options would develop, whether better tech options would appear, whether the costs of options would go down or up as demand increased and potentially resources depleted, and so on. What I am hoping by raising the questions I am raising is that we don't end up with another "Dieselgate" policy error.
On the solar, from memory, my reading was that doubling solar reduced storage requirement from about 23 million MWH to 16 - because although peak demand is higher in winter, demand net of wind (or wind x 2 or 3) is actually largest in spring & summer (this is when demand exceeds supply in your scenarios). So if you try putting in solar x3 or x4 (which will likely cost no more than the installation of the current amount of solar cost, given PV price trends) you may find the storage requirement disappears entirely?
Re alternatives for long-term storage, the electricity -storage - electricity efficiency is not particularly important, as at times of excess generation the cost of electricity going in will be effectively zero. What is important is the capital cost of sufficient capacity to generate & store (& use, when required) enough eg ammonia, or compressed air, to cover the peak-trough in the cumulative graph.
Thanks for the update Chris. Re your estimate of likely costs for a renewables-dominated fully decarbonised GB grid there's been an interesting conversation on LinkedIn around a chart posted by Carbon Brief showing dramatic falls in costs (measured as LCOE) of renewables. Various commenters objected, on the grounds that ultimately it is total system costs - e.g. including all costs of storage / grid strengthening or any other system changes driven by particular generation technologies, and then agreeing how those "extra" costs should be apportioned between generation technologies to understand their "real" costs.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6899813516484636672/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6899813516484636672%2C6900023207567392768%29
This debate really matters, since the Carbon Brief chart of LCOE has been amplified by government.
https://twitter.com/KwasiKwarteng/status/1493924347781779460
Thank you Nick.
I note on Carbon Brief's About Us page they say "We specialise in clear, data-driven articles and graphics to help improve the understanding of climate change, both in terms of the science and the policy response."
I have posted in their 'contact us' form a link to my substack with a comment that, regardless of the cost of a gross MW solar PV or a gross MW of wind generation, energy storage is the only thing that will keep the lights on.
I posted a similar comment in the LinkedIn article you pointed me to.
Hopefully there will be a response.
@carbonbrief @SimonEvans @JanRosenow
Hi Chris.
Thanks for your interesting & informative follow-up to Part 1.
Some observations from a quick read:
1. Wind lost - Just over a week ago the Renewable Energy foundation blog had a post “Constraint Payments to Wind Power in 2020 and 2021”:
“Large volumes of wind energy are being discarded in Scotland in order to preserve grid stability, with a fleet average of over 13% of generation constrained off in the years 2015 to 2021, inclusive, with a high of 19% of generation in 2020. Some wind farms have been discarding between 20% and 50% of their output, while being rewarded with generous constraint payments from the electricity consumer for doing so.”
Harvesting 50% of their subsidies to NOT generate!
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog
2. Prof MacKay considered lulls in wind & mentions an Irish lull lasting 5 full days in 2007
Britain experienced a month-long 'lull' July last year during which our fleet of wind farms generated at an average Capacity Factor for the month of only 10%.
https://twitter.com/UK_WindEnergy/status/1421778320975450113
3. “ Gridwatch™ ... It has recorded power flows every 5 minutes across UK plc for the last ten years.”
Leo Smith's Gridwatch's data source is Elexon, and covers Britain rather than the UK. Leo's "Download" interface makes accessing Elexon's data much, much easier! ;-)
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype/current
4. Interconnectors: In 2015 the EU called for all member states to achieve "By 2020 each Member State should have in place electricity interconnection capacity of at least 10% of installed electricity production."
That 10% of *installed capacity* would include Britain’s solar fleet generating at just 10% Capacity Factor.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_15_4486
The EU document listed numerous benefits. It forgot to mention that Germany, with its high proportion of highly variable wind capacity, subsequently destabilises some of its neighbors' grids by dumping its excess on to them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-central-europe-germanys-renewable-revolution-causes-friction-1487241180
Thank you Ron.
1. I linked to CityAM's https://www.cityam.com/wind-farms-paid-to-halve-electricity-output-to-prevent-energy-grid-being-overwhelmed/
2. Yes, I included a screen-grab of Prof. MacKay's paragraphs on intermittency, did they not show up adequately / legibly?
The reason I did the analysis for two whole years was I did not want to cherry-pick data on one or other 'side'. I was aware of some lulls being noticed in '21, but what did the whole year look like?
3. Ok. MontyDog who co-invented Gridwatch did not say I'd got things seriously wrong.
4. I think the whole of Europe is going to eventually discover just how ineffective wishful thinking and declaring targets is for keeping the lights on.
In view of very recent events it is a shame the EU did not instead mandate NATO recommended levels of defence spending across the bloc.
Hi Chris;
Thanks, Chris.
"I included a screen-grab of Prof. MacKay's paragraphs on intermittency, did they not show up adequately / legibly?"
Yes it was legible; but as mentioned, Prof MacKay's example was of relatively short lulls, one in Ireland 15 years ago, and others of just 2-3 days durations. (I can't remember how he defined a 'lull'.)
July 2021 however was recent, and an entire month that averaged ~10%CF.
If blackouts are to be 'prevented' via storage, my gut feeling is that an entire month at 10% CF is far more challenging than a few days at (say) 5% CF.
Hello Ron,
The actual numbers from my Excel calcs are:
average demand 2020, MW 28,450
2020 storage req, MWh 9,500,000
h storage 334
d storage 13.9
average demand 2021, MW 29,697
2021 storage req, MWh 13,000,000
h storage 438
d storage 18.2