Wind ex storage would be a grid powered by wind power with negligible amounts of storage, assuming that it will always be windy. What's hard to understand about that?
It an obscure phrase that you probably invented on the spur of the moment, and which failed to communicate what you meant.
Huh?
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/ex_2The word 'ex' is frequently used as a shorthand for 'excluding' in British English, for instance:
"The price is £1500 ex VAT" This is common British vernacular, and an internet forum where abbreviations are perfectly fine. In fact, if you type 'define:ex' into Google - or any word for which you do not know the meaning - I expect you will find the definition without issue.
The fundamentals haven't changed one iota; that's what makes the book so valuable.
Well, yes, and no -- like all publications it has only the foresight of the author at the time of publication. MacKay's work includes this diagram of the coastal areas of the UK:
Fig 70, pg 61, ch 10 "Offshore Wind". Yellow indicates up to 25m deep, purple 25~50m deep, and unhighlighted is beyond that, to save you finding that description.
If you compare that to the situation as of 2021 here:
https://www.windenergynetwork.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/A1-Map_Issue-57-WEB.pdfThen you can see that many of the 50m areas are already filled in, and even some exploration and early planning is underway in areas beyond 50m deep. This is despite MacKay's words (pg 62):
I’ll include this potential deep offshore contribution in the production
stack, with the proviso, as I said before, that wind experts reckon deep
offshore wind is prohibitively expensive.
MacKay believes such a section, if filled densely, could achieve 240GW. The probably reality is somewhere around 1/3rd of it could be filled with turbines, achieving a peak production capacity of around 80GW. Combined with existing wind gets you to my 100GW figure. Combined with going to 75m - 100m turbines, which have
already been used (
https://www.boslan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/BOSLAN_monopile_foundations.pdf, pg 7), I have very little doubt we could go well beyond MacKay's estimates.
This does not make MacKay a bad author. His work is fantastic - the heat pump section is particularly enlightening (and it's one reason I believe the mass-conversion of UK homes to heatpumps is effectively impossible). But, he wrote it with the knowledge available in 2014, and technology has moved on.
A wind farm can be commissioned in a matter of months, far quicker than any nuclear or gas power plant, but it can generate comparable power to one in good conditions.
Nonsense, unless you are using "commissioned" in a non-standard way that you haven't bothered to specify (cf "wind ex storage").
Cherry picking (e.g. "in good conditions") is a bad debating technique, suitable only for politicians and salesmen.
It is true that getting a conventional nuke operating is slower than a wind farm. The SMR approach is yet to be tested.
I think SMR will turn out to be a pipe dream, but let's see if it happens. It has my support, just like fusion, we need to approach the problem with all options. But we should spend the most effort on things that currently work and can be demonstrated to work. How many commercial SMR plants are there, compared to windfarms full of 20MW turbines?
Those are variations on a theme, and nothing fundamental.
100GW with storage is larger than we would require. Without storage we would want something around, say, 1000GW to avoid outages
No. 1TW would be far too much with current projected demands. I don't think you're appreciating what storage does to resolve the intermittency issue.
No, the UK doesn't. It has 25GW peak capacity, which is very different. In the last year
- On 2nd August it had own to 0GW (zero) output.
- 1.7% of the time it had <1% of the peak output (i.e. <250MW).
Please do your research before making statements such as those below.
Do you think that I don't appreciate wind sometimes goes to zero watts? The whole point of storage on such a scale is to make wind power viable (and solar in countries which have good insolation.)
The whole point about overbuilding the amount of wind power is that you store the excess by converting it into hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel, and then use that fuel when there's no wind. You combine that with demand management, so encouraging usage of energy when it's more readily available, and conservation when it isn't - e.g. EV chargers that run more on excess wind.
If you don't understand how that can work I don't really know what to say.
You would not need significantly more dispatchable power. You would simply maintain and replace as necessary the existing natural gas power generation equipment, which is normally enough with nuclear to support the grid under most conditions without wind.
"Normally enough" is what happens in third world countries and back in the 70s. I've experienced both those, and it sucks.
Just a phrase. The modelling uses 100 or 300 year projections with large margins to ensure there would always be capacity available in storage.
Rough may be only used at 20% currently, but it will be fully reopening soon; it's a crying shame this government has inadequately funded storage.
What's your source for "will be fully reopened" and definition of "soon"?
Arguably it isn't up to the government to fund storage: that is the company's responsibility. Whether the government allows the companies to escape their responsibility is a different question.
Error on my part. "Soon" it will be open to 50% capacity, not 100%. The current capacity including Rough is around 9 days usage in winter (I gave figures based on 10 days. It's less than the seasonal average.) But, Centrica have stated they want 100% by 2030, but want government funding to do so. I am also not a fan of the government funding private enterprise, but it's a thing this government has done repeatedly (for instance, see Hinckley C.)
I would much prefer to see more infrastructure owned by the state, and grid-level storage would be part of that. It should be owned and run by the ESO or similar organisation (ESO is becoming publicly owned soon, currently it's owned by National Grid plc.)
But hopefully Russia's actions show that is increasingly necessary to maintain energy independence which wind power and storage enables. Anyway, I said we'd need more storage, this is not the hard part. There are lots of depleted gas fields, and there will be more come the end of North Sea gas and oil. I'm sure we can figure that bit out. The difficult bit is the syngas stuff, that is the new infrastructure that needs to be built en-masse.
"I'm sure we can figure that out" is not sufficient.
Well, the good news is I'm not in charge of grid and power engineering for the UK, so you don't need to rely on me "figuring it out". There are people working in this area that know way more than both of us working this stuff out, and I am summarising research, papers and thought patterns here. This is not a formal treatise on how wind power and storage could work, just a discussion.
The other good news is this is not happening any time soon. Whilst the UK is seeing the odd day with zero fossil usage for electricity, it's very unlikely we'll see sustained zero fossil fuel usage for decades to come. National Grid is planning for around 2035 for a sustained zero carbon grid (as they say "net zero", but a little hand-wavy), but it's quite likely to still require some fossil fuel usage until about 2040 or so.
In terms of storage, the UK has comparatively little in use right now. About 9 days' gas (see above) whereas NL has around 130 days. If we use depleted gas fields, we should be able to achieve capacities similar to Europe. Note that Europe has traditionally had more storage as it has had less access to LNG, so the UK has had no need to develop much storage historically, and this was also used as justification to shut down Rough in 2017. Really, Rough is a small field in comparison to the capacity of the North Sea gas fields. For instance, one field in Scotland has been proposed to store CO2 of 360,000,000 tonnes, at a sixth of its capacity. (If that were CH4, it would be around 30 TWh if filled fully.) And that is one field in the North Sea. We certainly have no shortage of fields that could be developed for this purpose. And of course, we can use the existing European transmission network to buy and sell the synthetic gas across the continent or use LNG transports. There are also inland fields, or converted coal gas mines, available.
Syngas has no advantages (and many disadvantages) over natural gas, and is an irrelevant distraction.
I use the wrong term here, my apologies. By syngas I was referring to synthetic or substitute natural gas, produced by something like a power-to-gas process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gasFor instance, you could use the Sabatier reaction, but there are others.
It's not yet clear whether natural gas or hydrogen will win here. Natural gas is easier to use, as existing gas boilers, power plants, and industrial processes can use it, and it is easier to store and transport than hydrogen. However, it has greater losses. Current research suggests about 70% conversion efficiency could be achieved with an optimised CH4 conversion system; hydrogen may be able to achieve 80%. The conversion loss is one reason that you need to overbuild the wind power and the storage capacity, because your storage will be less efficient than using the energy directly. The really cool thing about Sabatier is it uses CO2 from the atmosphere, so processes that trap CO2, like fertiliser production via CH4 (a huge amount going into the soil carbon cycle) it is negative for carbon emissions. And even if you burn it in conventional boilers etc., it is effectively carbon neutral if fugitive emissions are kept low enough.
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