Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodelshady | Hacker News Reader

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Those transmission components are expected to cost the taxpayer at least £54 bn (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62085297). Transmission, of course, doesn't solve storage, which, to quote the article, "can’t really be stored or stockpiled on an industrial scale". Because it can't. Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed, as is hydro.

Do you think anyone would be building mammoth turbines in the North of Scotland without access to the Southern markets? Oh yes please, I really want to invest several billion pounds in order to serve Ullapool and Wick, that makes my capitalist bones tingle.

But "nuclear expensive", and of cause that isn't to do with the planning process at all. Not if you have a competing product to sell.

The UK has the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and approximately 10 times the CO2 footprint per kWh of France, or of France since the 1980s. If the goal of the renewable energy policy was to be a world leader, it has dramatically failed.

> Batteries are orders of magnitude less than what is needed

The Chinese are about to do to the battery market what they did to the solar panel market: they are going to make the bottom drop out.

Even with current battery price projections, the German transmission operators got applications for 240 GWh (peak output of 160 GW) of new industrial battery storage capacity, in 2024 alone [0]. Not all of those applications will result in realized batteries on the grid (they probably can't even connect that many), but as of today, the financials work out and now investors want to connect more industrial storage to the grid.

So batteries in Great Britain will grow - by orders of magnitude. And the nice thing is that a battery build-up like this takes a lot of strain out of the transmission lines. It allows local renewable production to be used to an even greater extend, and if local production falls short, the existing transmission lines don't need to deliver peak loads cross-country, but instead can charge the local batteries before and after a projected peak demand.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/energiewende-ries...

Can't find a source in English, sorry.

£54 bn over eight years is around 0.2% of the UK's GDP. A lot of money, but doesn't sound unreasonable for a major overhaul of a central price of infrastructure.

Ruling out the possibility of storing energy at industrial scale might also not age terribly well.

Especially if the energy being stored is heat. Heat is embarrassingly storable, much more cheaply per unit energy than electrical energy. Any industry that uses heat can be a target for thermal storage of renewable energy.

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