UK net zero electricity by 2030- easy to say before an election.

[GregLocock]

Miliband (UK Energy vandal) is proposing to use flywheels for energy storage to handle fluctuations in grid demand. Mechanical engineering isn't dead! State of the art systems use carbon fibre flywheels running in a vacuum, they max out at about 20 MW instantaneous, which they can supply for maybe 45 seconds.

As energy storage this is clearly nutso, but for frequency stabilisation it has a bit going for it. Incidentally South Australia's 100 MW 100 MWh battery (since expanded) makes most of its money not keeping the lights on, but by providing frequency stabilisation.

here's the western world's poster boy for flywheels

https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/docs/pr_conferences/2010/arseneaux.pdf

and here's what happened

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/beacon-powers-bankruptcy-autopsy

But the facility still operates, and presumably makes a profit.



Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[GregLocock]

Here is the official report from NESO on how to achieve 100% 'clean' power for the UK by 2030. https://www.neso.energy/document/346651/download

It is not a plan it is a wish list, relying on hydrogen and carbon capture, neither of which exist operating successfully at a useful scale anywhere in the world, and offshore wind, and ta ran ta ra, they'll still have 5% of energy over the year from conventional natural gas. "most of today’s gas plants remain on the system out to 2030 and beyond. Appropriate arrangements will need to be in place to ensure these plants remain open" So you'll be keeping them maintained and so on but not using them.

 

[GregLocock]

Oh, and it also has two of my favorite unproven technologies, compressed air storage, which has a farcically low loop efficiency, and new kid on the block, liquid air energy storage (LAES), which has a loop efficiency of 25% but if you do bad thermodynamics that can be boosted to a claimed 50%.