Batteries Will Not Solve Renewable Energy Storage Problem, Says Royal Society
The penny is finally starting to drop. Current batteries cannot possibly store more than a fraction of the energy needed to keep the lights on when the wind stops blowing and the sun doesn’t shine. The learned U.K. Royal Society has recently analysed 37 years of wind patterns across Britain and concluded there is a serious underestimate of the amount of storage required. Around 50 academics and specialists led by Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Oxford University state clearly that batteries are not the answer to the vast storage required. But like many learned people, wedded to the idea that it is possible to remove the fossil fuel source supplying 80% of the world needs in less than 30 years, they fall down at the practical level. Having lost batteries, the study goes for hydrogen, an idea only slightly less dumb than digging up the planet to produce vast quantities of limited-life batteries.
The Royal Society report envisages dissolving huge salt caverns capable of storing ‘green’ hydrogen. To keep the electricity grid functioning when renewables go off line, around two to three million tons of hydrogen would need to be stored for decades at a time. Wind not only stops for days during periods of intense cold in winter, but the Royal Society found recent periods when speeds were low for a number of years. Salt caverns are only available in a limited number of places in Britain, so a huge network of specialist pipelines would be needed to move the gas to turbines on constant standby. Over a period of time, hydrogen would leak from porous salt caverns.
The report, lacking a practical answer to wind and solar intermittency, seems to have been ignored by mainstream media. The news that batteries cannot play any significant part in the collectivist Net Zero project is unwelcome to those who have been betting the ranch on this solution for many years. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian sees the report as an “enormous improvement” on every other effort on the subject of large scale energy storage systems. But in the end, the authors’ “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future leads them to minimise and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. “As a result, the report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose,” he concludes.
What are the problems with hydrogen? Where to start. It is a highly explosive and flammable gas that needs careful handing. Its molecules are small and it has a low density. This means it escapes easily, while three times the volume of hydrogen is required to produce the same energy as natural gas. Kathryn Porter is an energy consultant and an associate member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group. She recently wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph about the gas and its possible role in Net Zero.
Hydrogen is also hard to move around. To get the gas to move through pipes, it has to be compressed and pushed along using compressors. This process requires energy: the losses in moving hydrogen through pipes are ten times greater for hydrogen than for methane; up to 30%. In other words you need to use up almost a third of your gas just moving it from A to B. …
The infrastructure for hydrogen does not exist, neither for the most part do the production facilities and they will cost billions to build. Then the underlying cost of storing hydrogen is probably at least four times that of storing methane. Huge amounts of energy are lost in each stage of the process due to the fundamental properties of hydrogen.
As a solution to storing renewable power, Porter is of the view that “hydrogen is one of the worst substances you could choose for this purpose”. But, she adds, because you can burn it in air without creating carbon dioxide, “it has been hailed as the answer to Net Zero dreams”. Both carbon capture and hydrogen are “square pegs” which people are desperately trying to force into round holes. It might be noted, in the light of this last comment from Porter, that the Royal Society traces its roots back to 1660, and published Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Its politicised track record on Net Zero has yet to live up to the highlights of its glorious past.
Lead author Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith notes that the need for long-term energy storage in a renewable electricity system has been seriously underestimated, and work on constructing storage caverns needs to be started immediately if the Government is to have any chance of meeting its Net Zero targets. Construction of a large green hydrogen production and storage facility would appear to be a “no-regrets” option, he claims.
Someone regretting the option might be the consumer. Francis Menton observes that the Royal Society’s hydrogen plans suggest a cost “to the grid” of around £120 per MWh, a figure described as high but not stratospheric. But this is the wholesale cost, not the one charged to the consumer. In addition, Menton wants to know how much a nationwide set of new pipes will cost, plus the entire new fleet of standby turbines capable of burning 100% hydrogen and providing all the power to the grid when renewables stop working. In addition, Menton notes a “low” rate of interest for capital costs of 5%.
“The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that will never occur before the whole Net Zero thing falls apart from the disastrous skyrocketing electricity prices,” concludes Menton.
Menton sees some honesty in the Royal Society report. But as regular readers will probably agree, the top award for an honest Net Zero commentary goes to the U.K. Government-funded U.K. FIRES project. In looking at a 2050 Net Zero world, this group of academics ignore as speculative all non-scalable suggestions around carbon capture and hydrogen, along with all the green inventions yet to be made. They point to a future with barely a quarter of our current energy supply. There is nothing more honest than telling people that this will entail no flying or shipping, drastic cuts in home heating, limited transport, no meat, few modern building materials and houses made of “impacted” earth. Worryingly, though, there’s no indication the authors see this as a reason not to go full steam ahead.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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A religious cult. Some denominations are less fundamentalist than others. But the teleological end point is the same – the end of modernity. Co2 has nothing to do with climate, it is a rounding error chemical and controls nothing except oxygen production.
And – Fossil Fuels don’t exist. Hydrocarbon energy does exist and it has nothing to do with algae or dead dinos or trillions of years. Self producing and reduced at the earth’s mantle core boundary. Saying a rock makes fuel through Gods of the gaps is idiotic, not science. The mainstream narrative of how oil is created is pure fiction like so much of ‘the science’.
“But in the end, the authors’ “quasi-religious commitment” to a fossil-free future leads them to minimise and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues”
Agreed. Something else to mull over:
What’s the worst greenhouse gas?
Answer: steam (not co2)
What is the byproduct of burning hydrogen?
Answer: steam!
So to cut back on co2, we replaced it with more steam! Wow
But the evaporation of water on the surface cools the earth and clouds add to that by reflecting incoming radiation.
I’m not sure about methane or other fossil fuels being produced at the mantle core boundary as there is little to no carbon at this level, and any hydrocarbons produced at this level are unlikely to work their way close to the surface where they could be recovered. However some geologists and biologists, who are ignored by “mainstream” scientists think there’s a greater mass of bacterial life in hot rocks a few to ten of kilometres deep than the total mass of life on the surface of the Earth. There’s plenty of carbon, heat and chemical energy at these depths. When these bacteria die and decay it’s likely they’ll produce methane at depths that can be drilled for. Therefore methane may be a renewable resource at a certain level of extraction.
Looking at the other side of the coin, there would be ample electricity to go round if there were far less people around to use it.
So, maybe we need a really really deadly virus,
Or a 3rd world war.
Or a novel “vaccine”
Or maybe all three.
They wouln’t, would they…..
Some new developments on the safe and effective “vaccine”/gene therapies –
https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/5-ways-to-skin-a-genetically-modified?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=413756&post_id=137412013&utm_campaign=516896&isFreemail=false&r=x6a6a&utm_medium=email
Some day they’ll learn that there is a lot of long term storage deep underground – indeed, some of it is almost at ground surface level as well. An old natural occurrence, was the creation of that!
It really is a natural green fuel involving compressed biomass.
Well, there are one or two traders actually selling that idea, if they can demonstrate that they produce an equivalent amount from an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant at the sewage works, or a farm somewhere and so on. There are even one or two service buses in Bristol doing that!
I believe that Eon run the sewage works in Sheffield. It looks like a factory. If they coupled up my father-in-law the energy crisis would be solved
I cannot help but feel that major world geo-political and financial events will in the end have an impact on the UK’s mad drive to net-zero suicide. Can the UK’s economy be sustained at it’s present level with all this net-zero stuff going on?
We seem to be moving away from a uni-polar world where the USA and the West dominated to a a more multi-polar World with BRICS type groups becoming much more significant. In a few years will we end up with a BRICS dominated world laughing at an immiserated irrelevant UK living in squalor and poverty but happy at our virtuous state of net-zero along with zero everything else?
Welcome to the West – the third world!
We used up more than our fair share of the fuels in the ground to become prosperous and we MUST STOP according to the UN and WEF, and our own lackey politicians are fully onboard with that eco socialism.
Excellent little 5min clip to share with the brainwashed, demonstrating that ‘climate change’ was only ever a manufactured hoax;
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1708974932795736297
“Salt caverns are only available in a limited number of places in Britain,”…. Which happen to be quite close to the Conservative conference’s venue, as it happens! Despite the difficulties with actually creating Hydrogen from a suitable energy source (so as to call it “green”), there still seem to be plans to permit the blending of H and CH4 with up to 20% H in our gas supply grid to us all. Look up ”hydrogen blended with natural gas” in the usual places. Indeed, I know that a fair bit of old iron gas pipes have been replaced recently, probably on account of this, if not just for the avoidance of leakage from older systems.
Indeed, some of these caverns have been recently (and expensively) been filled to prevent the collapse of the town above. This phenomenon has been responsible tor remodelling the topography especially around the ‘wiches of North Cheshire
Today the wind is meeting 40% of demand. For a period of about a week last month it was producing an average around 2%.
Given the state of weather forecasting today, none of this variation is predictable more than a few days ahead.
Here in West Wales, you are lucky if the forecast is anywhere near what the weather finally does. Your figures are interesting, here in the month of January we had 9 hours of sunshine. Not going to buy a solar panel anytime soon.
The Government does not have Net Zero targets. The State/Kingdom does. If you change the government the targets remain until a government has the guts to change the law.
The very first Hydrogen project in the world (apparently) is happening not far from me in a place called Buckhaven in Scotland. People in an area of houses are currently getting hydrogen into their properties as a replacement for natural gas. The streets are currently all dug up as this project is underway. The people were offered free boilers etc . What these people maybe don’t realise is that as it says in this article that Hydrogen is very volatile. They maybe also don’t realise that it is not actually a fuel and has to be manufactured and that process is very expensive. They may also be unaware that there was an article in the Herald pointing out that this project is refusing to release safety check data, and apparently, they say they are not doing it because it would undermine the operation. ——I know this article is about storage, but we see the same absurdity and no cost/benefit analysis on everything remotely classed as Green. —eg Net Zero was waved through parliament with no questions asked, which is like me saying I am going to win the British Open at St Andrews without first checking if I am any… Read more »
Plus. Because hydrolysis is so inefficient, the only way to produce hydrogen on a commercial scale at the moment is to use methane as a feedstock. So what’s the point?
the potential pollution risk from leaking or defective batteries and enclosures. I understand that in the UK such batteries are usually built in 40’ shipping containers. Control gear is in 20’ containers. Both are air conditioned. The amount of energy loss must be huge. No one has experience yet of handling and decommissioning these units when they are obsolete and their life expectancy seems a bit vague. There could be huge decommissioning costs and pollution hazard with unpleasant chemicals leaking into the soil and groundwater. There are, as yet, no decommissioning plants for these, for solar panels or for windmill blades. The latter are just buried in land fill. Also * batteries are capable of hundreds of recharge-discharge cycles. That does not seem much * they lose 5% per month *rectifiers create a lot of heat which means a lot of wasted energy. it also presents risk as lithium batteries should not be overheated * claim the risk of a fire in one battery leading to further fires is minimised by separation within the enclosure – that seems highly suspect * local emergency services should be trained how to handle lithium fires (basically, don’t!) and local people should be briefed on the danger – a sure fire way to… Read more »
It’s easier to show the number of storage cells required, and the impossibility of actauily building them.
The proposed solution for the UK is to generate hydrogen when renewable energy is providing more than enough energy to meet demand and to store that as fuel in large chambers underground. The UK can’t even build a railway line from London to Birmingham in a sensible timescale (according to Wikipedia passenger service is expected to start in 2026 – yeah right.) and the proposal is to hollow out caverns and fill them with enough hydrogen to maintain our energy demands through… what period of time? 1) If air (oxygen) leaks into these caverns full of hydrogen there will be ignition and explosions. The caverns will need to be segmented and distributed to avoid major destruction to infrastructure and the surface above. Presumably nobody important cares if we lose Cheshire where most of our salt caverns are. 2) In order to begin filling these caverns with hydrogen the oxygen will have to be purged first – or there will be explosions. This may require filling the caverns with water – in a laboratory we would have used a nitrogen purge but I think gas mixing would ruin the value of the hydrogen. 3) To maintain pressure during periods of high… Read more »
We aren’t exactly blessed with redundant salt mines. I’ve been down the largest one in Cheshire and it’s still very much in production. Close it down and stuff hydrogen into it and our road network will seize up every winter.
Perhaps that’s the aim?
Well, yes. What do you want a car for anyway? 15min cities! That’s the ticket.
Hydrogen requires more energy to extract than it can deliver.
Ah, but everyone knows that renewable energy is free, plentiful, limitless – so we can use that. 🙂 Erm. Maybe not. Yes, it’s kind of the point of hydrocarbon energy: It’s taken millennia of high pressures and temperatures (a high energy environment) to push those molecules together – they release some of that energy again when reacted (burnt) in air to produce Co2 and water vapour. We never get all the energy that was put in out again but mankind has made improvements in engineering efficiency to get more benefit from the reaction than our earlier efforts (simply put: more mpg in more modern cars). If we use some of the released energy to capture and compress the CO2 that comes out of the burn (carbon capture and storage) we reduce the overall efficiency of the process – we burn more for less useful energy output. ‘Green’ H2 as fuel or synthetic hydrocarbons only makes sense if energy is essentially free. Generating methane is an additional high energy input step beyond H2. H2 is a bugger to work with but we have a lot of experience working with methane so that’s a more likely step. Free energy from renewables? As… Read more »
Ivor Cummins’ podcast is well worth a watch – “Net Zero …. in a nutshell.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvpyUEfo6jQ
I’m never likely to be a member of the Royal Society and I only have an engineering degree – I could have told you this 10 years ago.
The more they search for the answer to the energy crisis, the more it adds to the comedy clown show. It’s like people looking for a bargepole in a haystack, not a needle. There it is, in plain sight, an enormous great priapic bargepole sticking out of the hay like Cleopatra’s effin’ needle and yet still they scrabble about. Reminds me of the search for a cure for cancer in some ways – no disrespect to people who have had loved ones go down the mainstream route and lost them but there are alternative therapies that do actually work: they’re just not available or are hidden/ridiculed etc. Anyway, we still have a wonderful energy source that is clean and plentiful yet is now mired in lies about emissions and CO2. That’s the bargepole. The idea of batteries as storage is complete fantasy. You would need batteries the size of houses and even batteries have a shelf life and so there’s all the removing and attempted recycling once the battery life has gone. No, we are slowly but surely being led back to the medieval ages – I may even start an online shop for doublet and hose and get ahead… Read more »
Except there isn’t an energy crisis. And if there is, it is because our eco posturing UN lackey politicians created it. ———–There is a few hundred years of coal under our feet and plenty of gas. There is no shortage of energy. ——–It is a bit like saying there is a hunger crisis but refusing to eat the stuff in your freezer. .
The crass stupidity of hydrogen manufacture is you need 1.25kwh of electricity to make 1kwh of hydrogen. But I doubt that the BBC will report that fact.
The by-product of combustion (H2O) is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2
It would only make sense if the wind or solar generation was surplus to demand, otherwise they’d be better off selling it real time into the grid – unless there’s a better fixed price for H manufacture, that is. Entirely possible for the market to be rigged to justify almost anything, after all.
It’s curious that challenges to the ridiculous ‘Net Zero’ and ‘Climate Change’ agenda inevitably descend into reminiscences about a romanticized past that never existed and donning of armour to do battle with windmills (and other renewable energy sources), believing them to be malevolent giants. It’s almost as if someone doesn’t want us to have any local energy sources or storage of any sort.
I find this odd. I’m not in favour of giant wind turbines, there’s a scheme hatching in my area and it’s going to be awful, nor do I like solar panelled fields in the countryside. However, using hydrogen storage right next to turbines and solar fields with generators at each would mitigate the need for piping the hydrogen around, which is just dumb. It would still be expensive but a fraction of the cost and hazards of piping.
It seems pretty obvious as a storage system as it’s localised and can just feed into the grid when needed. Of course this would still take decades to implement.
Hydrogen requires approximately 25% more energy to liberate that it can deliver – the by- product of hydrogen combustion is steam (water vapour) a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
I’m guessing that you aren’t a STEM graduate?
I also thought that producing seals and joints that were gas proof for hydrogen was not so easy, because it is a very small molecule. Maybe technology has improved and solved the problem. Otherwise …. kaboom!!
Hydrogen leaking out would not be so terrible (apart from waste and inefficiency) unless it accumulates somewhere else – in which case, yes, as you say: Kaboom. I’d be more worried about oxygen (air) being accidentally pumped in to the pipes with the H2 – that would destroy much of the costly infrastructure.
A tiny amount of grease on a fitting while connecting an oxygen bottle for welding will have the same effect. yes oxygen is dangerous stuff in the wrong place.
Your comment about welding made something ping in my not so fast as it was, because I am now retired; brain. I seem to remember that H2 pipe works needed to be S/S API 5L, welded, joints and hydrostatic tested, has this now changed? We’re going to need a hell of a lot of coded welders.
It’s a bargain if used in conjunction with a solar PV or wind generation system plagued by irregular and unreliable output.
Im considering implementing a hydrogen storage solution on my farm as I create significant excess generation from my solar PV along with my Hydro. The excess generation can be stored in hydrogen collection units at a far cheaper basis than lithium storage. The efficiency of the conversion into hydrogen is irrelevant.
Lavo and Home Energy Solutions are just two of many companies who offer these kind of systems.
for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOkOPZ4M3bM
And as most people here would tend to agree, I don’t give a flying about Green House Gas Emissions “Maestro.”
No flying or shipping means people in the UK will starve to death. It’s that simple. England imports a large part of the food the population consumes and without adequate transport, there’ll be no imports.
For all those net zero zealots looking for a solution, try nuclear power. It has a far better safety profile than fossil fuels, produces almost zero CO2, and as a technology it is ready to go. It could fulfil virtually all our needs. The fact that they are only looking at imptactible renewables tells me that energy shortages are the real goal. An end to the consumer society and back to the stone age for us.
Do not, though, rely on the fusion unicorn.
Rely? Hell no. Workable fusion power is 30 years away – always has been and probably always will be – unless there’s some sort of unforeseen breakthrough. To get a breakthrough would require research… shame we don’t do much of that these days.
I remember the furore about the ‘cold fusion‘ claims. Wouldn’t that have been nice? Imagine: if fusion energy could be released in a room temperature device… fusion energy release would be popping off on planets all over the universe – which would almost certainly mean that life as we recognise it would not have evolved. If cold fusion could work it would have happened accidentally many times by now.
It was 50 years away 50 years ago – it’ll be 50 years away in 50 years.The answer lies in Uranium and Plutonium.
Current batteries may not be quite up to the job just yet. But such technology is making great strides and eventually will be. Also don’t forget about flywheel energy storage, pumped hydro, and stuff like that as well.
Wot, nothing from ‘MTF’ today? I’m disappointed.
4000-5000 years ago the earth was 2.5 degrees warmer than it is today.
Watch this short video 4 mins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmmmgiPha_Y
This is hard science => Climate change caused by CO2 warming is clearly nonsense.
Or nonscience
Not to mention this…
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/stilling-global-wind-speeds-slowing-1960
“Few people have probably noticed, but the world’s winds are getting slower. It is something that cannot be picked up by watching the billowing of dust or listening to the rustle of leaves on nearby trees.
Instead, it is a phenomenon occurring on a different scale, as the average global wind speed close to the surface of the land decreases. And while it is not affecting the whole earth evenly, the average terrestrial wind speed has decreased by 0.5 kilometres per hour (0.3 miles per hour) every decade, according to data starting in the 1960s.
Known as ‘stilling’, it has only been discovered in the last decade. And while it may sound deceptively calm, it could be a vital, missing piece of the climate change puzzle and a serious threat to our societies.
Some of it undoubtedly caused by wind turbines taking out energy from the wind.
it has always been so obvious ( the global electric con ) that event they cant keep silent any longer. They ALL aided & abetted to the Ideology
The solution is obvious. Abandon the storage problem and build fossil-fired power stations that can respond to a drop in wind power.
How about just forget the wind power altogether and build Nuclear that provides electricity all day everyday, and invest money into research and development for when the day comes that there is no longer fossil fuels left in the ground which is after all a finite resource.