lpm wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2025 3:29 pm
Ivan, you are making a huge number of unsupported statements.
The variability of wind doesn't look that big to me. Solar generates a lot in winter. Seasonal storage is not necessary until the end stage of this process. You don't seem to appreciate continent-scale interconnect.
I'm chatting on a forum, not writing an academic paper. I would say I tend to provide sources more often than most people here. But when I'm operating from memory, repeating things I have said several years ago - and I have said these things repeatedly - then you aren't going to get sources. I did quote at least one source without a link, as I have linked it many times before, though it has recently moved. So here is now a link to what is now called the
NESO Future Energy Scenarios. If there are particular points you would like demonstrating more, do say so, rather than making vague barbs.
I once did a spreadsheet calculation to calculate how much storage would be needed to smooth out wind to current levels of maximum demand, based on a dataset of hourly wind data for a few years. It came to 200 Dinorwigs, to a suitable level of accuracy. Dinorwig is 9 GWh and an output of 1.7GW. So if you turn it on full, it has about 5 hours capacity - though in practice you can't run it at full output for that long. I have read a paper suggesting that, taking into account future growth in electricity demand for EVs and heat-pumps, it was more like 500 Dinorwigs.
Of course this is based upon an assumption of energy independence. But it gives an idea of the scale of the issue. When I last gave the above comment, that Norwegian guy who hasn't been seen recently pointed out that there is a single lake in Norway where the potential energy of its water is in fact about 1000 Dinorwigs. It is a very big deep lake high up on one of those extensive high Norwegian plateaus. There is also an informal paper around that makes the Grand But Impractical Proposal to create a lake of roughly that capacity in Scotland, where a suitable glen to make a lake of that scale of water content and drop does exist, if you built the world's biggest dam across the entrance to it. Though in both cases it is difficult to use them for pumped storage because there isn't a suitable location for a large enough water store at the bottom. The Mad Scottish Proposal suggested using the sea for that purpose, and so filling the lake with sea water. In both cases the issue of moving so much water that you could generate at, say, the output of the Three Gorges Dam, 22.5GW, so precedent exists, would be an issue because of the lack of a suitable water movement channel the size of the Yangzi river to take the water away, let alone get it back.
Yes, there is winter solar if you go further south. That's why there is this other Grand Scheme under consideration, actually officially by the government, to have a huge solar farm in Morocco, together with local energy storage, and an undersea cable to Britain. We would need the energy storage to move supply to later in the day, because even in the 10-11 hours of daylight the Moroccans benefit from in the winter, most of the energy will be generated in the 4-6 hours around noon, and we would be needing it well into the evening. It would be wonderful if it happens, and at a sensible cost. But it is clearly a bit mad.
Britain has been greatly expanding its electricity interconnection to the continent. And this is a trend so hopefully we will get a lot. But then there are two issues we need to solve - sufficient capacity from far enough south with enough left over for us, and connection to get it to us.
Even if the Spanish and Italians would install enough solar, and the necessary storage to time-shift it to later in the day, in their southern zones to help with electricity demand in northern Europe, well there is a lot of northern Europe in comparison to Spain and Italy, not just Britain, who need it as much as us. And we aren't in the single European energy market any more. Even in the single European energy market, which we aren't in any more, they have not yet incorporated a suitable mechanism for import and export of renewables at sensible prices. And, as I mentioned in a recent post, the Norwegians, who are much the biggest local swing supplier of electricity from all their hydro, are starting to get antsy about it as it is pushing up local prices to be something more like prices further south.
And then there's the French, who have been very unhelpful when it comes to interconnection with countries that might export to them. France is especially poorly connected to Spain - and Belgium even - in both case the environmental card being played, which the French only do when they really don't want to do something. It is rather better connected to Italy, but that's because they are mainly an exporter to Italy. But watch if Italy starts exporting to France, you might find them antsy about further expanding connection. Similarly Germany. And huge connections from Spain and Italy to further north, and in large part via France, would be needed if this is to be of material use to us.
So interconnection will relieve this to some degree. But all of northern Europe is in kind of the same boat, so there's competition for what southern Europe can supply. So it hard to know how much Europe can and will help us, especially when things get tough.
Currently we have storage that only really operates on an hourly scale. Even Dinorwig is unusual in operating over several hours rather than only an hour or so. We don't have it even on a weekly scale and that will be needed relatively soon. Seasonal storage, I grant, is needed later. But all of these things are on such a scale we can't just roll them out in 5 years before we need them at such scale.
