1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems

I've seen Noddies totting up their combined years and calling that 'experience'.

It's not a straight-out lie, but it ain't the truth.

RL

This lot appear to have a bit more substance than that but absolutely no track record that I can find as their claimed company name. Their website is really very impressive and slick. Lots of warm fuzzy words.

I haven't been able to figure out who did it for them.

They are very good at placing PR puff pieces that get into the mainstream media without adequate scrutiny on quiet news days. The days of journalists fact checking outrageous claims are sadly long gone :(

It makes no sense to build large concentrated battery storage facilities. Such installations should be distributed.

Natpower seems to consist of only directors and managers. Not a good sign.

Jeroen Belleman

I think you are quite likely right but there seems to be a global league table for building ever bigger ones much like with camera megapixels...

Guess where they build the battery storage even though the provision of North South interconnectors is already borderline for peak load and there are known bottlenecks in addition.

Agreed.

So... 100MMW system in Alderley, Hampshire. My neck of the woods. No such place that I know of, nor does Google Maps. They say' will update in August 2024'....

Maybe they mean 1 gigawatt. It seems to be peaking power.

There are already long-distance DC power lines, with AC conversion on both ends. I think they use a lot of IGBTs.

Imagine firing up a 12 gigawatt 800 KV converter for the first time!

NatPower sounds mostly bogus.

Luxembourg.

Thanks for that lead TTman. That template looks much as I expected.

There possibly is somewhere or a region with that name or maybe they mean the one in Gloucestershire or even Cheshire. Who can tell?

The ones in my neck of the woods (3 of them) all 1GW are in public consultation at the moment. It is likely to get rather interesting.

The ones with the most detailed prospectus after first stage public consultation are at Teesside former steelworks site (fair enough) and South Kilvington green field site (not good). The battery modules look way too close together in the plans for my liking - any fire would have spread before the fire brigade even got there.

You've got to have energy before you can store it!

About all the UK has now is coal. Its NG reserves are mostly used up.

Snip

No, excess wind power meant I got paid for lots of my energy in the last

DC pwer lines in the UK ? Don't think so....

"Half a truth is often a great lie"

Speaking as an American, it's impossible to imagine such a fact finding feature in Western corporate media. During the Cold War our intelligence community commenced Operation Mockingbird (?mocking people while flipping them the bird?). And eventually became emboldened enough to brag about exploiting Western corporate media as a Mighty Wurlitzer.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -William J. Casey, CIA Director

Look up the phrases with your favorite search engine if you refuse to believe it.

Danke,

It is DC on the international interconnects eg. to Denmark.

Vulnerable to Russian sabotage though as are all undersea cables.

Seems almost all the UK-EU undersea interconnect cables are DC now:

I'm sure that you are right but proving it is another thing.

There will be weeks of cold and dark and still, occasionally all across europe. There aren't enough batteries to make it through those. Maybe everyone can bundle up in bed until things improve.

For reliable power, nukes make sense, as does natural gas imported from somewhere.

One can store a lot of LNG. Or uranium.

That needs high steep hills, which is OK in a few places.

I'd guess that viscous losses would make long runs, up shallow hills, impractical. After all, we wouldn't want regular pumping stations.

Google it.

Compare to Tesla, which needs 260 container sized modules at ~$1M US each:

Megapack Quantity 1

Is there a way to put them out? I think they are a bit like magnesium fires - if you can't throw it overboard, direct solid stream on surrounding surfaces to limit damage, not directly on the fire so as not to break it apart and spread it. Presumably the reason for spacing between modules, some of which have burned.

For really large fires you still need fossil fuels. I recall an NFPA brochure advertising a course in handling BLEVE events (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion) with a photo of a fireball with a silhouette of a water tower of a type normally over 30m high in the bottom 5% of the image. Caused by thermal inversion in a large LNG tank; there were several of these before industry learned how to load LNG storage tanks properly.

"Turkey day" here always reminds me of a small BLEVE from a propane tank at a turkey farm which killed 3 firefighters and 20k turkeys. Gas explosions here are so common that they only make the local news.

Lithium battery fires are not prone to exploding with the force one gets from flammable gas and air mixtures, and so far they have all been rather small compared to your typical refinery fire.

Low voltage inverters, transformers to HV then big stacks of optically triggered thyristors to rectify would be the old school method from before I retired and quit reading the trade rags a decade ago.

Gigabucks. Not that I checked historic costs of HVDC distribution projects for that estimate :-).

In our overhead pylons? they are all 130/330kV AC 3 phase.... Undersea country to country, yes, as it allows bidirectional transfer as required.

There's quite a bit of off-shore wind. Americans don't seem to pay any attention to that, but back when I was driving from the Netherlands to France we drove past lots of on-shore wind turbines, and off-shore wind-farms are even less controversial. The Danes are quite enthusiastic about them.

And the UK has nuclear reactors - which turn out to offer remarkably expensive power, but if you wanted atom bombs that was the cheapest way of getting lots of plutonium.

They've already got a bunch of undersea cable to various bits of Europe, and the most recent ones are certainly DC.

The first one - across the channel to France - dates back to the 1950's.