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

Chrysalis

doodling said:

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.

We should never be relying just on one source of energy, Nuclear should have a place to provide a stable baseline, then for things like wind and solar which are dependent on weather, build excessive capacity alongside massive battery storage, so the excess charges the batteries, which are used when the weather isnt right.