Wind Power may not be as cheap in the future as people would like to think.

CSI_Yorkshire

Scot_39 said:

Never really looked into grid level capacity calcs.

But used to the concept of ratings (machines, power electronics etc - and some of the myriad variations on just the simple rating plate numbers). 

If you're interested, the latest is here:

https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Capacity Markets Document Library/Electricity Capacity Report 2022.pdf

QrizB

doodling said:

Just wait till someone costs up a 2GW / 100GWh hydrogen based energy storage facility

Lithium batteries are around £100 per kWh in bulk, so 100GWh is about £10Bn.

Hydrogen will be cheaper, or we won't bother and will just use batteries.

Your 2GW unit will be roughly half the price of HPC, 1/10 the price of HS2.

Infrastructure is expensive, we all know that. Are we meant to be shocked?

doodling

Hi,

QrizB said:

doodling said:

Just wait till someone costs up a 2GW / 100GWh hydrogen based energy storage facility

Lithium batteries are around £100 per kWh in bulk, so 100GWh is about £10Bn.

Hydrogen will be cheaper, or we won't bother and will just use batteries.

Your 2GW unit will be roughly half the price of HPC, 1/10 the price of HS2.

Infrastructure is expensive, we all know that. Are we meant to be shocked?

Umm, 100GWh is around 10% of current global lithium ion production capacity.  If you think you can buy that at £100/kWh then I think you are optimistic.  Wait till you try and buy the amount of battery capacity that we actually need (I estimate 7TWh) rather than my little demonstrator - it would, if we were mad enough to do it, consume several.yeara global lithium ion battery production (even accounting for growth in production capacity) and that won't come cheap. I agree infrastructure is expensive but I think you may be underestimating just how expensive the use of batteries would be.

I also note that you are telling me that backing up 2GW of wind power (for 50 hours, not the 240 we need) costs the same as around 1.6GW of nuclear power (half of HPC) with an unrestricted run time - wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy the nuclear and not bother with the wind turbines?  Yes, I know I'm ignoring fuel costs but that isn't where the big nuclear costs sit, and I have a factor of around 5 reserve in my argument to play with.

So far the outcome of the discussion, based on your pricing, suggests that nuclear is probably cheaper than wind backed by battteries by a factor of more than two - I'm not shocked.

QrizB

doo wedling said:

Hi,

QrizB said:

doodling said:

Just wait till someone costs up a 2GW / 100GWh hydrogen based energy storage facility

Lithium batteries are around £100 per kWh in bulk, so 100GWh is about £10Bn.

Hydrogen will be cheaper, or we won't bother and will just use batteries.

Your 2GW unit will be roughly half the price of HPC, 1/10 the price of HS2.

Infrastructure is expensive, we all know that. Are we meant to be shocked?

Umm, 100GWh is around 10% of current global lithium ion production capacity.  If you think you can buy that at £100/kWh then I think you are optimistic.

As stated in my post, I'm using lithium batteries as a price benchmark. Hydrogen should be cheaper but the tech is less mature and I don't have the numbers.

Static storage (where weight is less of a problem) is unlikely to use lithium batteries; sodium ion is more likely and world supply of sodium is essentially unlimited. That's also immature tech and difficult to price.

markin

Chrysalis said:

Yes, this was published in the news a few months back, essentially the grid hasnt kept up with investments by industry and hasnt capacity to connect it all up.

This further fuels my thoughts that the grid is being run really inefficiently, it has billions in revenue to pay for its costs currently.  It even makes a very healthy profit as well.  Which I didnt know until just now googling to confirm their revenue.

They have 4.8 billion in profit which can be used to pay for expansion before more charges could be imposed.

That was soon 'SORTED' by them asking for proof that projects were making progress or get out of the line, so to get rid of the zombie projects.

doodling

Hi,

QrizB said:

doo wedling said:

Hi,

QrizB said:

doodling said:

Just wait till someone costs up a 2GW / 100GWh hydrogen based energy storage facility

Lithium batteries are around £100 per kWh in bulk, so 100GWh is about £10Bn.

Hydrogen will be cheaper, or we won't bother and will just use batteries.

Your 2GW unit will be roughly half the price of HPC, 1/10 the price of HS2.

Infrastructure is expensive, we all know that. Are we meant to be shocked?

Umm, 100GWh is around 10% of current global lithium ion production capacity.  If you think you can buy that at £100/kWh then I think you are optimistic.

As stated in my post, I'm using lithium batteries as a price benchmark. Hydrogen should be cheaper but the tech is less mature and I don't have the numbers.

Static storage (where weight is less of a problem) is unlikely to use lithium batteries; sodium ion is more likely and world supply of sodium is essentially unlimited. That's also immature tech and difficult to price.

And that is the reason why I have a real problem with the current infatuation with wind.

Wind is excellent as part of a fossil fueled grid where it acts as a means of cutting CO2 emissions.

When wind has to stand alone (or certainly as more than (e.g.) 50% of generation capacity) then we get to the problem that it can't without relying on technology that hasn't been proven to be viable yet.

It is therefore currently impossible to say whether wind is cheap, or expensive, conpared to alternatives as we just don't know.  All the current talk of the cost of wind power is in the context of a grid with a significant fossil fuel element.

We do know that electrical energy storage is hard, and whilst there perhaps hasn't been the same Incentive for research in the past as there is now, it is a problem that has remained largely unsolved for the last 80 years.

A lot of the current movement in the industry is focused on fixing the issue by changing the question, moving from a point where electricity is available at any time at the flick of a switch to something where the costs of scarcity are made very clear to customers (and their pockets).  Whilst that approach has some benefits - the generators, grid operators and DNOs would love a fixed rather than variable demand - I think that it will prove to be a dead end for wind.  That is mainly because whilst demand based pricing solves a lot of issues, it can't fix the "what if the wind doesn't blow for 10 days one" which at this point in time is essentially impossible to fix on a grid with the amount of wind generation people are expecting.

Martyn1981

As QrizB points out, there are many forms of battery storage. Whilst some people do get concerned about the amount of lithium production in the World, it's more correct to look at the potential, which is enormous. In fact lithium costs have fallen so severely this year, that China had to rein in production to protect prices.

Focusing on lithium, is like focusing on petrol production in the late 1800's for cars, since there was no real production, just a waste product from making kerosene, and was typically thrown away. Potential lithium production is huge.

As QrizB says, other vehicular batts are already being rolled out, such as sodium ion. For stationary batts, the opportunities are even greater, since the energy to mass (Wh/kg) and volume (Wh/l) are not particularly important.

Can batts provide enough scale for intraday storage in the UK for us to reach 100% net low carbon leccy, of course they can. We'll need about 500GWh to balance things in a higher leccy demand future, and are already rolling out storage projects with 100MW's of power and starting to reach GWh scale for energy.

But just using V2G (vehicle to grid) from 1/3rd of an all BEV car fleet would provide 500GWh, and then we have commercial fleets, whose economic shift often now includes/considers potential V2G revenue from when they are parked up in the evening.

As we move to interday storage, so more like 4-10hr (than 1-4hr) we have an ever growing range of storage options, all of which have started to be rolled out in different parts of the World, such as flow batts, LAES (liquid air energy storage), compressed CO2 energy storage, PHES (pumped hydro energy storage) is somewhat limited in the UK, but there is a large project, being developed in Scotland, it will be 1.5MGW/30GWh, so bigger than Dinorwig (1.8MGW/9GWh), heat storage. This list isn't complete, it's just some examples. [Edited.]

Then we have longer time periods, I won't say seasonal storage, since the UK is rolling out RE with a strong wind bias, which fits well with our energy demand profile. So we don't need to move summer PV generation to the winter, or winter wind to the summer. But we do need to consider a week or so of poor wind generation.

Yet again, I'll point to QrizB, who has mentioned one of the long term storage potentials, which is H2. This is already happening, but of course on a smaller scale at the moment, just to make use of cheap excess RE at times. H2 storage, or CAES (compressed air energy storage) can make use of existing old gas wells, or saline aquifers.

Currently the UK consumes approx 1TWh of leccy per day on average. Obviously we will not need to replace all of that, as even poor periods will provide some PV, wind, hydro, bio-energy, etc. And we also have to consider interconnectors (I'll come back to them). But in a higher demand leccy future we may be consuming ~3TWh per day in the winter, so we'll need a proportion of that, for perhaps two weeks. The UK's potential storage for H2 and/or CAES is several 1,000's of TWhs.


Interconnectors allow us to share RE and storage between countries in Europe (and even further afield such as N. Africa). When calculations of how Europe can work together are made, the UK's role has always been one of offshore wind potential, which is simply staggering. This article is a decade old, and suggests offshore wind from UK waters has the potential for 10x to 100x our future leccy needs.

So, how are we doing with interconnectors, well we started this decade with 5GW, and are now at about 10GW, and should reach 15-16GW by mid decade. Rough target for 2030 is 20GW. For scale/reference, on average, UK demand is about 35GW.

Some may have noticed a crucial word earlier on:- "for us to reach 100% net low carbon leccy", and that's also important. The shift will be slow, with ever greater milestones along the way, and the big one for us will be 100% net, which will result when the UK's export of RE generation (mostly wind) is greater than any internal FF generation we use, or import. Whilst our consumption of FF's keeps dropping as a percentage of annual leccy generation, it will be hard to avoid the need for a significant percentage of gas generation at times, but the annual percentage will keep falling.

Even by 2030, we are looking good, hopefully we will have nearly enough RE (plus a bit of nuclear) to approach that 100% figure. Plus around 20GW of interconnectors, a Gov target of ~20GW of storage (no estimate of the energy), and ~20GW of gas generation. So the maths is looking ok, even though it may appear to be scary, and hard to comprehend.


Hope this helps, bit rambling, and barely touched the subject, to be honest. But just trying to show that there are actual answers, today, for the many concerns and fears folk have about our energy shift. But it really is promising, possible, and for MSE, cost effective.

bob2302

Martyn1981 said:

Currently the UK consumes approx 1TWh of leccy per day on average. Obviously we will not need to replace all of that, as even poor periods will provide some PV, wind, hydro, bio-energy, etc.

But presumably we also need to replace vehicle fuel and gas with either electricity or hydrogen.

Martyn1981

bob2302 said:

Martyn1981 said:

Currently the UK consumes approx 1TWh of leccy per day on average. Obviously we will not need to replace all of that, as even poor periods will provide some PV, wind, hydro, bio-energy, etc.

But presumably we also need to replace vehicle fuel and gas with either electricity or hydrogen.

Yep, absolutely, hence my guesstimate of 3TWh in the longer term, perhaps 2050.

BEV's aren't too much of an issue, perhaps a net increase of 20% (gross 30%, but a lot of energy is consumed refining and moving petrol/diesel) for the whole UK road fleet. That will be slow, possibly over 20yrs+, assuming we reach 100% BEV sales in the next decade, and around 15yrs for ICEV's to age out.

The biggie is space heating. That's going to be far bigger, and will account for most of the increase in leccy demand. Good news, is we don't need to replace the space heating (and DHW (domestic hot water)) gas kWh's 1:1, as heat pumps in the UK have a COP (coefficient of performance) of about 3.

But overall, leccy consumption will most likely rise by 100% to 150% compared to today, and will have a winter weighting due to space heating. The good news is that there aren't any scaleability issues for RE, and the grid can be improved and enlarged as needed to meet the coming changes.

In case you're interested, and on a slight digression, but as you mentioned hydrogen, it's pretty much a bust flush for space heating. It's just too hard to transport, and far, far less efficient in terms of green leccy generation, since you have boiler efficiencies of say 90%, v's that heatpump COP of about 3 (300%). This graphic explains better, but just to say, the use of offshore wind is just for comparison purposes, obviously the leccy can and will come from a mix of sources.

Martyn1981

doodling said:

So far the outcome of the discussion, based on your pricing, suggests that nuclear is probably cheaper than wind backed by battteries by a factor of more than two - I'm not shocked.

I think you may be seriously underestimating the cost of nuclear, and that's before we consider the long term storage costs for nuclear.

Just the HPC (Hinkley Point C) power station will receive in today's monies about £60bn in subsidies.

I'm basing that on wholesale prices returning to about £60/MWh, HPC's current agreed CfD (contracts for difference) strike price of £128/MWh, so that's a subsidy of approx £68/MWh.

HPC is rated at 3,200GW, with a capacity factor / load factor of 92%, and the subsidy period is 35yrs, so we get:

3,200 x 92% x 24hrs x 365days x 35yrs x £68 = £61bn

For comparison, the latest offshore wind contracts were issued at a CfD of £45.37/MWh for 15yrs. If sold at £60/MWh, then they'd repay £15/MWh back into the CfD pot.


But you don't have to take my word for it, the Gov was advised to pause nuclear deployment in 2018 by the NIC (National Infrastructure Commission), as they suggested that RE plus storage could become cheaper than nuclear. When they made that suggestion in 2018, the last CfD auction was in 2017, with offshore wind receiving strike prices of £107/MWh for 2021/22 delivery, and £74.49/MWh for 2022/23 delivery.

But the year after that advice, the 2019 offshore wind CfD's were issued with a strike price of £52.41/MWh, and last year contracts were issued at £45.37/MWh.

[Note - I've used current prices, which include index linking. Just in case anyone looks at the prices these contracts were issued at, for instance HPC at £89.90/MWh, and the last offshore wind at £37.35/MWh, as contracts are issued using a 2012 baseline, for comparison purposes.]


Another reason why you may have overestimated the cost of RE and storage, is that many people add the cost of storage, onto the cost of RE as per - RE + storage, but the majority of RE won't need storage, as it will be generated and delivered in real time, so the correct way to calculate the cost is RE + (RE + storage), and even then, it's worth considering that as RE gets cheaper, more can be deployed, so my earlier list of storage potential, should also have included 'overcapacity', as there's a balancing act between deploying more RE and/or more storage. Yes, you include more capital costs of building out additional RE infrastructure, but unlike a gas generation power station (for example), you don't incurr fuel costs.

If you want to learn more about this, then I recommend Tony Seba and Rethink X, who are specialists in disruptive technology.