As an aside, this is exactly the kind of nonsense you get when marketing or PR firms have control over final wording. Once had someone change "uninterruptible power supply" to "non-interruptible" and then finally "interruptible" and that is how it went out in the final press release. There was some harsh language that day.
rwmj · 1h ago
I hope this wasn't for a UPS company!
nickdothutton · 50m ago
We were launching a new data centre in the UK (early 90s) and wanted to crow about how much power, battery, diesel, etc we had. I don't think the PR firm had any idea what most of the words meant.
ragebol · 43m ago
> This landmark 300MW battery storage site is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes with instantaneous power over two hours
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)
zeristor · 3h ago
There was the largest one in Scotland a few months ago.
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.
WJW · 2h ago
We had an interesting case here in the Netherlands, where at the moment the biggest problem for big battery operations is to get sufficient grid transmission capacity. One clever company bought the site of a bankrupt aluminium smelter for cents on the euro, purely because said smelter had a direct high capacity connection to the national high voltage grid. Getting the rest of the site and the machinery was just a bonus.
jacquesm · 2h ago
Yes, Aldel. I think that will pave the way for more moves like that. They have yet to install anything but the financing is there:
> However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
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.
On one of the sources of grid usage it has a placeholder for batteries but says:
> 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.
DrScientist · 2h ago
Conceptually it is no different from pumped hydro storage. - for that they simply use negative numbers for pumping and positive for release.
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...
ZeroGravitas · 2h ago
That one claims to Europe's biggest, this one is claiming to be the UKs biggest which I guess means an even larger one went live in Europe somewhere in between.
femto · 2h ago
> However I have yet to see Battery storage feature in the charts for UK energy usage yet.
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.
jacquesm · 1h ago
It will be a long time before you will. That's just not the best application right now.
adamm255 · 2h ago
Time to decouple the UK Electricity price from Gas so we can actually reap the benefits of this as a consumer.
trebligdivad · 1h ago
It effectively decouples for any period when no gas is needed; so if those batteries let you turn off the gas generators for an hour the price decouples from gas.
boredpudding · 1h ago
Does the UK not have an option for hourly-pricing? That's usually where as a consumer you can have the most gains. In the summer, with solar panels, my energy bill is negative (in The Netherlands)
0rdinal · 1h ago
Some suppliers (e.g., Octopus Energy) offer half-hourly tariffs whose rates track the day-ahead wholesale market and are published daily. Prices usually fall when supply is abundant (e.g., windy/sunny periods)
Yes, but the hourly price is still largely set by gas, because it's still a minority of the time where renewables are supplying 100% of the grid.
Kognito · 1h ago
We do, but I can’t imagine it’s hugely popular. Only a few of the smaller suppliers offer it AFAIK.
jacquesm · 2h ago
That will never happen. They'll use that excuse until the very last gas powered plant is alive and then there will immediately be some other reason why energy prices have to stay the way they are.
ZeroGravitas · 1h ago
The only sensible way to do this I've heard is to roll out more renewables faster and so burn less gas.
Is there some other plans you support?
skippyboxedhero · 1h ago
Rolling out more renewables faster will mean more reliance on gas.
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
rcxdude · 1h ago
At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).
Temporary_31337 · 1h ago
What is the chemistry and expected lifetime of the batterries?
They are saying this is for sustainable energy future but it looks like it's using natural gas (not sustainable) powered energy to charge up Lithium(?) batteries that will need to be replaced every n years (also not sustainable). Which part of this facility makes it more sustainable?
chippiewill · 1h ago
Why would they charge up with natural gas?
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
Hilift · 1h ago
A similar project in Australia used Tesla megapack batteries, which are lithium ion.
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.
Generally LFP with cycles in the at least 5000 range.
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.
tpogden · 2h ago
For comparison with a gravitational battery, Dinorwig pumped hydro in north Wales has a max power output of 1.7 GW and storage of 9.1 GWh.
ZeroGravitas · 2h ago
About 10-15 percentage points less efficient because of losses pumping the water uphill though, and slower to react (seconds vs milliseconds) which will probably force it out of the fast frequency response market which batteries have rapidly saturated.
jacquesm · 1h ago
It's pretty much tailor made for batteries and flywheels. 2 seconds is not feasible for pumped hydro, though it still is impressively fast at less than 30 seconds. It is interesting how all of these technologies have their sweet spots.
rsynnott · 42m ago
> 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.
I mean, I get what they’re saying, but I’d certainly hope it is not capable of discharging 600MWh _instantaneously_!
okasaki · 2h ago
Cool so when will this translate into cheaper energy? Why am I paying $0.4 per kwh?
rwmj · 2h ago
This project won't do anything (as you likely already know). The reason electricity is so expensive is because it's tied to gas prices, which is an entirely political decision.
ZeroGravitas · 2h ago
Batteries will reduce the number of times gas sets the marginal price, so they will have a near immediate impact on that.
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.
xnorswap · 2h ago
Isn't the price tied to the marginal price, rather than the price of gas?
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.
chippiewill · 1h ago
I agree, although I think one of the disadvantages in the UK is that the suppliers aren't paying the cost for their own volatility. A renewable supplier can add 1GW supply to the grid, but 1GW of natural gas generation capacity is still required.
Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.
justincormack · 2h ago
Yeah we still need some more renewable capacity (and transmission) before gas usage can go to zero much of the time (which will need more batteries to deal with short term fluctuations). Right now we are using around 10% gas, which is a decent amount. Prices are still going negative at night some of the time, like last night.
mytailorisrich · 2h ago
Gas prices are a political decision, too in Europe. For demand to reduce and for other sources to be more competitive prices have to be and remain high.
In the UK I believe it is policy for electricity prices to be high in general for thse reasons and to encourage lower usage.
skippyboxedhero · 1h ago
Retail energy prices are subsidised. It isn't policy to encourage lower usage, the government is paying billions to sustain retail consumption (and yes, this is whilst another part of the government is driving prices higher).
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).
HPsquared · 1h ago
We are all just paypigs, after all.
mytailorisrich · 1h ago
It is policy to encourage lower usage, like it is policy to keep prices up (both production and the grid are a shamble, not to mention climate commitments on top). Maybe the policy isn't publicly stated but actions speak louder than words. Of course this isn't popular so, at the same time, the governments takes measures to appear to try to keep prices lower. It is a political balancing act and subsidies are not incompatible with a policy of encouraging lower usage.
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.
benrutter · 2h ago
I think a big reason for net-zero policies getting bad press, is that these kind of things are difficult to quantify. Energy is largely set by gas price, so having more non-gas assets on the grid probably means you do have cheaper energy (or, at least will have much cheaper energy in the future when gas ceases to dictate the energy price)
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.
rcxdude · 49m ago
Once there's enough renewables and batteries that the UK is running off of near 100% renewables a decent fraction of the time, so the price is not being set by the gas turbines making up the margin.
blitzar · 2h ago
I'm paying £0.06 at the moment and I got paid to use electricity on the weekend thanks to the sun shining and wind blowing.
happosai · 2h ago
If you are paying for electricity in dollars, this battery won't translate to cheaper energy for you. The battery is in Scotland.
okasaki · 2h ago
I'm just translating for USD for an American audience.
gadders · 1h ago
Not really. The higher proportion of renewables a country has, the more expensive the energy. See the chart on this page:
Alternatively, the higher the cost of non-renewable energy in a country, the more attractive renewables are in that market.
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.
ZeroGravitas · 1h ago
Bjorn Lomborg is a hack propagandist and that is obviously bad science.
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.
Lio · 1h ago
Personally, I'd take Bob Ward's analysis over Bjorn Lomborg's.
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).
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)
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.
Day ahead pricing: https://agileprices.co.uk/ National grid supply/demand and energy mix: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Is there some other plans you support?
I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.
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.
I mean, I get what they’re saying, but I’d certainly hope it is not capable of discharging 600MWh _instantaneously_!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...