Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
450 points by stephenheron 7d ago 620 comments
Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
8 points by rayanboulares 16h ago 16 comments
UK's largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation
90 zeristor 120 9/1/2025, 9:40:47 AM nationalgrid.com ↗
https://www.ess-news.com/2024/11/05/financial-close-for-uk-p...
The battery storage was ~$200M. Pure prismatic lifepo cells are currently ~$60 per kWh in single digit quantities (would be $40M or 20% of total costs, which seems reasonable). The attached 450MW gas power plant cost ~$350M.
I find it rather remarkable how they aquired the contracts in early 2023 and the thing is already running.
CATL and BYD are both building 30 GWh per year plants or 60 GWh between them so that's enough for 100 Tilbury plants per year just from sodium batteries. And of course lithium batteries are still cranking along.
63days from start to completion. Paid itself off in 2 years. Saved consumers well over $100million/yr across the state in power bill reductions (only 1.8million people in that state and this is after the battery owners took their profit).
There's really nothing but positives from grid scale batteries. They cut out all those <0 and >100x price fluctuations on the grid and the payoff for investors is ridiculous right now.
Australia's expected to 20x it's grid connected battery capacity between 2024 and 2027. The growth in battery storage is ridiculous since the costs have come down. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
I'm pretty sure they have a matching number of positives and negatives.
Edit: The company press release is much clearer: https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation The storage is 300 MWh, but it can deliver a peak of 600 MW/h (presumably for half an hour).
The 300MW Thurrock Storage project... with a total capacity of 600MWh
> With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.
Unless they updated the original post, that all sounds correct to me. It's a 2-hour battery, rather common in the industry.
EDIT: Ah, you mean the https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation is wrong, with the fantastically outrageous statement of "delivering its full output of up to 600MWh within seconds."
Ramp-up time for grid management is important but the value is all wrong.
Journalists are some of the worst offenders.
But they will muddle bits and bytes, nanograms and milligrams, volts and amps and they barely even seem to notice that they did it.
The Guardian refuses to write the degree symbol for temperatures, for example, and have even put this error into their style guide.
https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-c
300K is too hot and I begin sweating. The Grauniad's House Style is the least of its problems.
Actually, even that doesn't make sense, you can't remove non- from non-inflammable either, that would only work if it was the 'in' removed.
Power is 300MW (300000000 Joules/second), which it can deliver for 2 hours, so capacity (energy contained in the device) is 600 MWh (or 2160000000000 Joules)
We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.
In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power
Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.
This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:
1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)
2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay
For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.
They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.
So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.
Is there some other plans you support?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...
> "If we actually paid the average price of what our electricity now costs to produce, our bills would be substantially cheaper."
> In simple terms: the price in the electricity market on any given day is dictated by the most expensive source of generation available, which in the UK would be its gas-fired power plants.
I support "roll out more renewables faster" and pricing reform. Linked article makes it clear that the UK has "one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world" and this impacts consumers and businesses.
Which does raise the question: who benefits from the current pricing arrangement, and why do they have the deciding vote?
You could change that, but it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment (in a perfect market), no?
The UK is an outlier as noted above. So no, this is not "simply how things work" in general. It's unusual.
> it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment, no?
No, see first quoted piece of text above.
My assumption also is that it's a far from perfect market - see last paragraph.
And "Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd..."
And "Why are Britain’s power prices the highest in the world?"
https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q4-2024/why-are-brita...
And "UK energy bills highest in Europe and public patience is wearing thin"
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-energy-bills-highest-in-europe...
"highest" means an outlier, doesn't it?
From your electricinsights article:
> Most markets work in this way: Saudi Arabia’s oil is cheap to produce but gets a very similar price to higher-cost oil from the North Sea. The underlying economic principle is so widespread that it’s known as the Law of One Price.
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.
This is still done. Thames Water.
It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.
Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.
Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization.
Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.
Gas is a really appealing backup option for both renewable and nuclear powered grids (at least in the absence of freely available hydropower).
But as installed power/capacity grows and batteries get cheaper, reliance on gas will hopefully decrease (and supply might get bolstered by renewable-powered synthgas within the next decades).
Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/
>The UK’s electricity market operates using a system known as “marginal pricing”. This means that all of the power plants running in each half-hour period are paid the same price, set by the final generator that has to switch on to meet demand, which is known as the “marginal” unit.
i.e. if you have 99 units of solar but have 100 demand, 1 unit of gas plant fires up to fill it then all 100 units are compensated at the gas rate even if the wind was cheap.
These are, dare I say it, the easy wins. Reusing the infrastructure from a demolished coal fired power station.
However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
I’m guessing that there are a lot of similar such sets that are being, or could be repurposed for battery storage.
https://giga-storage.com/giga-storage-rondt-financiering-van...
There are also four pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations providing a further 2.8 GW of installed electrical generating capacity, and contributing up to 4,075 GWh of peak demand electricity annually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
> Several battery storage systems are in operation in Great Britain, but full reporting is not yet available: reports include discharging but not charging. As this would lead to double counting, with power being reported both when originally generated and when discharged from battery storage systems, battery storage data is not yet shown on this site.
I guess it's some technical problem with standardisation/tracking/reporting of the charging right now.
As/if Vehicle-to-Grid becomes more widespread, where you have highly distributed battery storage, it will be interesting to see if this will be publicly tracked.
Already domestic solar production is largely invisible ( as that mostly manifests in reduced demand ).
However I assume, in terms of managing the grid day to day, that such information is going to be important. ( eg if it's a largely cloudly day then that will be manifest as a rise in domestic demand ).
Very much aimed at storing surplus from a couple of wind farms in the Moray Firth.
Presumably we'll see a lot more of these given the scale of some of the new windfarms...
Grid connected batteries are more about aiding grid stability, filling short term mismatches between loads and renewable generators, rather than raw capacity in terms of kWh.
The UK often has excess wind energy, and for Tilbury in particular that problem is set to grow as National Grid are building out massive grid capacity from the North Sea wind farms through Tilsbury
Another form of stored energy uses thermal. A large scale project to plug ~50,000 idle and abandoned oil wells in Kern County, California.
Probably worth noting that for states and utilities, consumer solar without batteries has become a liability and doesn't scale up. So effectively, all future consumer solar installations in California will likely have batteries. So there will be batteries at the consumer point, and centralized large scale battery farms like this one to address peak demand and prevent situations where blackouts may need to occur.
https://eepower.com/news/engineers-repurpose-oil-wells-as-so...
They are pure arbiters of the market. Filling up when it makes sense and delivering when it makes sense. Which sometimes means buying expensive fossil gas powered electricity to sell it even higher priced later.
But what this means is that at that ”later” the peaking plant that originally has been used did not have to start and consumers enjoy cheaper electricity.
But what they do is extend the time renewables deliver. In for example California storage has reduced fossil gas usage by 40% in recent years.
In Australia prices were reduced by over $50 a year per person in the state on average once a similar battery went online. Similar policies and market there to this case too. Details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
I get that it's easy to be pessimistic but batteries like the above not only pay themselves off in 2years (From the article above, $46million profit in one year alone on a $90million install cost!) they also cut prices on the grid from day one.
Behind the scenes prices can fluctuate between <0 and >100x baseline. These types of installations immediately smooth out the costs. As long as you have competing wholesalers/providers the price reductions will come through pretty quickly based on similar cases.
Even if they're typically the same, because CCGT is the best for on-demand generation, flattening the demand curve ought to slightly reduce that marginal cost.
I've seen the UK generation market attacked quite a lot lately, but to me it makes sense to price everything at the marginal cost, and doing so also helps encourage capital investment in generation that can have lower generation costs themselves, because the marginal cost is only slowly impacted rather than a boom and bust model.
Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.
They'll also likely reduce the balancing costs by relieving congestion.
Probably too small to notice among all the other costs and changes, like deploying more renewables and starting to pay in advance for new nuclear.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
The issue in the UK is that we moved to renewables that can't produce energy at the margin, marginal prices are still driven by gas, and we simultaneously decided to shut down large amounts of non-renewable sources of energy to satisfy the ambitions of politicians.
Result? Highest energy prices in the world, most energy-intensive industry shutting down, and massive reliance on political direction/regulators by industry (the original comment is not right, since the mid-2010s energy companies have been directed day-to-day by the state, invest in this project, don't do this anymore, etc. Our policy is made by people who wish the world was a certain way, reality doesn't matter to them).
Retail electricity is taxed in the UK.
It's the same as they are doing on immigration: They say they want to lower it but the actual policy is to keep it high. People have understood that now, which explains in big part the Conservative wipe out. Labour is now on the same path.
I guess what we can't do is step into the alternative world where there's less batteries and renewables, and complain about paying $0.6 per kwh.
The lowest mine goes is $0.3 1am-4am.
Agile prices can spike up to 100 p/kWh any time - although a typical household in Winter '22-'23 paid around 35 p/kWh average.
so that's even more than I'm paying. This seems to only make sense if you have some sort of intelligent battery system.
I'm happy to shoulder a very 40p peaks every so often as it's very often cheaper overall.
It's great! I assume I'll get hit by a price spike at some point, hasn't happened for a couple of years so far.
Average unit cost for me yesterday was 4.35p/kWh.
No comments yet
In terms of countries, it's closer to France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands than to Scotland.
It is in the UK though, so, if your model of where "Scotland" is just means vaguely "the United Kingdom somewhere" and thus also includes London then yeah, close enough.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bjorn-lomborg-solar-wind-p...
If gas costs £1 a unit and solar is 90p, solar is profitable (especially if you get paid the gas price). If gas is 50p a unit, solar isn't going to be much of an investment.
Just look at all the unnamed points in the lower left that are actually creating the trend he claims to have found.
If you graph developed nations the correlation reverses.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/more-misinforma...
As far as I can see pricing electricity on the marginal costs of gas has not been a good strategy. I think we should be charged the true cost of generation which is something like 8 times lower for renewables.
I mean, I get what they’re saying, but I’d certainly hope it is not capable of discharging 600MWh _instantaneously_!