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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Gigawatt Scale Storage for Gigawatt Scale Renewables
Author(s)
Mark Howitt
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DOI:10.17265/1934-8975/2018.02.006
Affiliation(s)
Storelectric Ltd., 15 Weaver Close, Alsager, Stoke-on-Trent ST7 2NZ, England
ABSTRACT
Multi-GW renewables need multi-GW storage, or fossil fuelled power stations
will be needed to balance for intermittency. For the same reason, such balancing
must be able to last for an entire evening peak if renewables are not generating at the same
time. Batteries and DSR (demand side
response) make very useful contributions and there is a large market for both, but
without large scale and long duration storage, they cannot do the job. Interconnectors also contribute to the solution, and storage
will make them more profitable, but (taking a UK perspective) Ofgem identified that all our neighbours have similar generation capacity crunches and
similar demand patters, so if we need the electricity when they do, we’ll have to
pay through the nose for it. Last winter’s £ 1,500/MWh prices proved
that―even with only 4 GW interconnection. Following
exit from the single market, our neighbours will be able to say “our consumers are
more important than yours at any price”. We need UK-based storage at the right scale,
to store UK-generated electricity for UK use and for export―otherwise we lose security
of supply. CAES (compressed air energy storage) and pumped hydro are the only technologies
currently able to deliver this scale and duration of storage. Pumped hydro is cost-effective
in the long term but there are few sites, and it is (location dependent) over 3x the cost of CAES. Storelectric has 2 versions
of CAES: one is a comparable price to existing CAES, but much more efficient (~70%
v 50%) and zero emissions (existing CAES emits 50%-60% of the gas of an equivalent sized power station). The other is retro-fittable
to suitable gas power stations, is more efficient (~60% v 50%), almost halves their
emissions, adds storage-related revenue streams and is much cheaper. Both are new
configurations of existing and well proven technologies, supported by engineering
majors.
KEYWORDS
Electricity storage, CAES, compressed air energy storage, adiabatic, grid balancing, renewable.
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