As much as 500MW of additional large-scale battery storage capacity could be built in the UK in 2019, increasing its capacity by more than 70% to 1.2GW. As of June 2019, there is currently 700MW of large scale battery storage installed in the UK, with around 80MW showing as completed in the first half of 2019, although this number is likely to be higher due to a slight delay in completed projects being announced. The pipeline of projects currently stands at 11GW, and although it is unlikely that this will all be built, we currently see nearly 800MW of projects at the ‘under construction/ready to build’ stage, meaning that they are likely to be built within the next 12 months. Looking at the current pipeline, we could see up to 500MW being built in 2019.
Solar Power Portal 13th June 2019 read more »
Dave Elliott: Can grid-scale storage solve intermittency problem, asks Global Warming Policy Foundation. A briefing paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) dismisses the idea that grid-scale electricity storage can help bring about a UK renewables revolution. According to the paper’s author, Jack Ponton, an emeritus professor of engineering from the University of Edinburgh, current approaches are either technically inadequate or commercially unviable. Some have suggested that “intermittent” power from wind turbines could be balanced with batteries or pumped hydro storage but, according to the GWPF press release, Ponton says this approach is unlikely to be viable: “You need storage to deal with lulls in wind generation that can last for several days, so the amount required would be impracticably large. And because this would only be required intermittently, its capital cost could probably never be recovered”. 100% renewable scenarios have to provide flexible balancing systems for a range of renewables, to deal with their short- and long-term output variations, they do not need to have a large amount of instantly available back-up capacity to deal with sudden major nuclear plant shutdowns. Even so, although generation and storage/balancing costs are falling, there are still worries about the implementation costs of ambitious renewables programmes like this: see my next post.
Physics World 12th June 2019 read more »
