That seems fairly obvious, but afaik the problem is not bridging four hours, it’s bridging a cloudy week without wind in winter. For that gas currently seems cheaper
Those turbines aren't great for longer periods, they're pointlessly inefficient if you don't need their ability to peak for short periods.
An open-cycle gas turbine is the "simple" configuration that draws in air through a pressurization stage, into a combustion chamber for fuel combustion, producing high-pressure hot gases that drive a turbine and generate power, with exhaust gases released into the atmosphere.
In other words, there is no recovery of heat from the exhaust, it's basically an aircraft jet engine core mounted on the ground and connected to a generator. They aren't very efficient but they are compact, relatively cheap, and quick to spin up during peak demand times.
Maybe, right now (even as battery prices keep falling), if you can wait 10 years for your plant.
They’re also a lot more expensive to operate.
Maybe there's an argument for managed forests for charcoal energy production too. That would technically be carbon neutral.
In a healthy grid with a diverse generation mix, batteries are almost certainly the perfect option for peak demand handling. The problem is that many grids are not healthy or do not have very diverse generation mixes.
You are effectively borrowing from yesterday (or last hour) to pay for today with batteries. Which is amazing, until it isn't. The Texas winter crisis comes to mind as an example where batteries would be regarded with intense derision. I think the current capacity market accreditation process is massively underrepresenting the tail risk of a black swan event. Four hours of battery storage should not be in the same room as a gas turbine when we are talking about capacity and multi-day emergencies.
Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.
https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs...
https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/thought-leadership/20...
> For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026.
> In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries.
> In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track.
(battery storage printer goes brrr)
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
That doesn't seem unrealistic.
Also you're forgetting residential electricity is maybe 1/3rd of total demand.
Well, other than destroying the planet, but hey, let's just hide those costs.
Biodiesel or biomethane looks at first glance to escape this, but it has serious other costs.
Remember, it is only needed for a few dozen hours a year. It doesn't need to scale.
Storage of hydrogen in underground caverns is demonstrated technology.
Methane is basically just hydrogen gas, but with one carbon for every 4 hydrogens. This means you can do stuff like liquefy it at higher temperatures and lower pressures, and it doesn't diffuse out of materials or otherwise destroy the materials (or seals) it's stored by.
>with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.
In a vacuum, maybe; in real life, absolutely not. Hydrogen that is stabilized by a sufficient number of associated carbon atoms can be stored in plastic containers at standard temperature and pressure; naturally, we use the fuel that has just enough carbons that, while nominally a liquid, but would really rather be a vapor.
Because that stabilizer is part of that reaction, the best one from a CO2 perspective is the one that has as little of that stabilizer as possible. Which is what methane is.
but hybrid cars are saddled with a maintenance heavy complex system that isn't used much.
nowadays we know the solution is just a bigger EV battery.
Looks like 5 year reliability: ICE > non-plugin hybrid > pure EV > plugin hybrid
But EVs seem ok 5+ years
I found this article interesting:
https://autoedgeview.com/ev-reviews/consumer-reports-ev-reli...
If your going to burn the power turning it into hydrogen then you save a shitload of that power by putting it in batteries instead.
And grids can actually be connected together via cables now. The cliche is that solar panels don't generate at night. But if you connect grids via a long cable running east to west you can actually have solar power at night. And when you connect them north to south you can have solar power on a dark winter day as well. And when you add batteries to the mix (on both sides), you can keep those charged as well and use that power regardless of what time or season it is.
And that's ignoring wind (on and offshore), hydro, nuclear, and other clean forms of power that we currently don't use at scale (geothermal, fusion, etc.). If you add all that to the mix. And cables. And lots of battery. Grid connected car batteries, balcony solar, and all the rest, you end up with a lot of capacity.
Gas power is not going to way. But we probably already have too much of it and it shows in the poor utilization of existing turbines. Ironically, adding more gas turbines to the grid only makes that poor utilization worse for owners of these plants.