1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems

Weeks? You are about as much of a weather expert as you are a climate expert, and that's because you get your information from climate change denial propaganda. The system has to be designed to cope with worst case situations, but wind power is never the whole answer, and there's certainly a lot of hydro electric power across norther Europe, which will probably become pumped storage to deal unhelpful weather systems

There don't have to be,

Nukes are a bit too reliable. You can't turn them off when you don't need them - in theory you can, but you really don't want to.

True. And you store up a lot of trouble for future generations when you exploit them. Climate change denial propaganda denies that.

Yes. The key is optical triggering via an optical fiber, which is both precise in time and electrically isolated, so one can stack many units in series.

The highest-power stuff is Thyristor based, and is directly optically triggered.

IGBTs are triggered by an optically-triggered IGBT driver.

Done outdoors in staged steps, from a safe distance.

There will be many wires. 12e9/8e5= 1.5e4 amps total. Icing will not be a problem.

Joe Gwinn

IGBTs are interesting but slow!

We use SiC and GaN for fast high voltage stuff, but to us high voltage is hundreds of volts or low KV.

People are making GaN fets with integrated drivers. Optical input would be cool.

There is plenty of energy in the form of windfarms that are quite literally paid to *not* supply electricity when the wind blows any faster than average. National grid CBA to put enough capacity into the North South interconnects and so there is a huge surplus in the North and a deficit in the South around London and the South East.

Cube law dependence of output power on windspeed means it isn't worth putting in the cables in to move the highest possible peak power levels (and that is a fair engineering compromise). However, right now they are well short of a proper solution and a lot of Scottish and offshore wind energy producers are paid to feather their blades!

The stored energy needs to be already in the South before conditions get tight since the N-S interconnectors have essentially no spare capacity left at times of peak load. That was in part what caused the spectacular fail when an insignificant little power station was struck by lightning and triggered a cascade failure across large swathes of the country in

Last coal fired power station shut down last month.

There is some ageing nuclear still running and large scale biomass greenwashed wood burning facilities like Drax (sounds like a Bond villain).

Having electricity used to be normal.

It has been normal over a lot of the planet for the last century. It took a lot of work to get there. Solar panels and battery packs have extend the range a bit recently.

Goofs like John Larkin who insist that you can only get it by burning fossil carbon are effectively shills for the fossil carbon extraction industry who want to milk all they can from their cash cow, and are in denial about the side effects.

Most of the time we still do. But the final leg of the electricity distribution was sold off and the vulture capitalists found a cunning way to extract value by ceasing to do any preventative maintenance!

It meant that when storm Arwen hit the north a single electricity pole falling over took the next one down and then they fell over like dominoes (or nine pins). We are OK with solid fuel stove and back boiler and a generator but anyone who is entirely reliant on electricity for heating (like our Village Hall) was screwed. My village was only down for a couple of days more remote places were down for a fortnight.

UK electricity generation capacity is somewhat odd, but it has been completely screwed by the lack of investment by the previous government. There have been warnings of impending doom from experts now going back more than two decades Professor Ian Fells at Newcastle for example:

Not by him but the same basic message this year

Each time we have somehow muddled through by skin of teeth. Paying people not to *use* electricity at absolute peak time is the latest wheeze. We are very very close to the wire (pun intended) in the UK due to decades of under investment in the electricity infrastructure.

At least there is some decent gas storage capacity again going into winter. They had decommissioned it as "unnecessary" prior to the Ukraine war. Talk about short sighted penny wise pound foolish!

The US "regulated monopoly" scheme, shareholder-owned companies with guaranted returns and performance incentives, worked great for 100 years, until the regulation got amped up (pun intended).

The power here is very reliable. Sometimes something local, an old transformer or something, breaks, but they fix it fast. City-wide outages are very rare, basically unknown, between earthquakes.

An old wood pole leaned over and broke on our block a couple weeks ago, and we lost power. An army of PG&E guys and trucks and heavy equipment moved in and installed a new pole in about 5 hours.

The fix was amusing. I'll post a pic.

Politicians make terrible engineers. And terrible business managers.

One swallow does not a spring make.

Despite Cursitor Doom's delusions, anthropogenic global warming is a very reliable trend.

When people get sensible enough not to vote for goofs like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson the trend may go into reverse. Look at the Manua Loa data.

I am no fan of Boris Johnson but to be fair to him he *was* convinced by the scientific data in much the same way as Margaret Thatcher was decades earlier (although she really wanted to close coal mines for other reasons than climate change - to shaft Scargill and the miners).

Boris who was a climate sceptic back when he worked for the Telegraph became convinced climate change was real around 2021 and as UK PM made quite a reasonable fist of COP26 see for example:

Spectacular "100 year" floods twice a decade seem to be one of the more interesting consequences of global warming in the UK right now. One just took out a chunk of Wales earlier in the week. Some riparian properties are now basically uninsurable (and yet they keep building on floodplains).

PG&E did a clean fast job repacing the pole and restringing the high power wires.

The City intends to underground all the wiring some day. I figure it will take 75 years and a hundred billion dollars.

Too bad they didn't dig big utility tunnels back when gas and electricity were invented.

Note that we don't have a high ground wire like many places do. We basically never get lightning strikes here.

UK power supply is generally way more stable than US. However, there is a huge imbalance between where electricity is generated and it is used. The North-South 400kV interconnectors are often maxed out at peak times.

The public consultation was yesterday. It really is 1GW injection power and 4 hours so a 4GWhr battery farm (40x bigger than the largest system currently in the UK and being built by a startup with no track record!).

It will have ~900 container modules of batteries as close together as they dare (half the US regulation spacing) and in double lines of 50.

SO that makes me wonder how big is a 1GW transformer operating at 400kV? And how much does one cost?

I'm guessing the secondary to handle 2500A will have to be (30A = 2mm^2 so 3000A ~ 200mm^2 = 16mm diameter) and at a 40:1 stepdown the low side will have to be 40x bigger cross section 6x linear size hollow core?). Are these guesses approximately right? How many turns on each?

How much soft iron core does it require (approximately)?

The location chosen is very cunning. They will get paid not to produce electricity by intercepting the payments (to not produce electricity) currently made to wind farm owners in Scotland and off the NE coast.

We don't have any worthwhile national infrastructure planning to speak of and so this national level storage facility will be approved by a county council planning department (any one of them if built would immediately be the largest BESS in the world). 3 within 20 miles of me.

There are plenty of images and descriptions of 400kV transformers on the web. You have to be an insider to get a fair idea of the cost. These things are usually made to order. I'd guess a 1GVA

Jeroen Belleman

I wonder if there's any mileage in this technique...

Have we got the industry that could make such a thing - or shall we be buying it from China?

In a quick Google search I wasn't able to find anything bigger than

I did also find these largest in Europe and UK BESS setups (real ones) as a result of your suggestion so thanks for that lead.

Any idea of how the scaling law for big EHT transformers runs in terms of power handling? eg how much cheaper is one for half the power?

I have to say that I was more impressed than I wanted to be with their sales pitch. The only thing badly wrong is the site access route. They were up to their eyeballs in expensive (but knowledgable consultants) - they must be burning money on this project hand over fist.

How many hours per year is your power out?

I'd estimate two total here, on avearge, but a pole on our street toppled down recently and that took 5 hours to replace

Large-region power failures are very rare here, between major earthquakes.

There was a forest fire east of Truckee this summer, and they shut off power around a big trans line nedar Verdi for a few hours as a precaution of some sort.

Power is impressively reliable here. Water too. Gas is reliable for years at a time.

However, there is

The USA is 3.5M square miles. The UK is 93K.

Big utility transformers are made to order, and that can take years. The hazards there are obvious.

It takes special gear to measure the inductance of a utility-scale transformer. A handheld meter won't do.

Hey, I know how to not produce electricity.

Maybe switchmode would work, to scale down the 50/60 Hz magnetics.