Simply supply and demand, if you become reliant on gas because suppliers know you have shut down your coal fired power stations then you are at their mercy.
I'm suspicious that it isn't "simple supply and demand" and that rather it is price gouging.
Maybe rather than gas we should use more pellets like Drax but then they require bulk transport and not just a pipe.
Another facility on the M74 in Scotland, not too far south of Coalburn, there is one of Europe's largest (I believe) sawmills.
It shares a common boundary with a power station that uses waste wood.
Just like your car the cost do not stop once you have purchased it, windturbines require a lot of maintenance with the offshore ones being even more expensive to maintain due to access and the high salt content of the enviroment. Then nothing last forever, the blades being composite have to be dealt with as the Americans have found
We've had this discussion before, about the running costs, I think.
Maintenance is not "very expensive", even when compared to fossil fuel enterprise.
Offshore maintenance is, of course, complicated by access costs. (Although offshore turbines are designed and built to reduce salt-water and salt-air deterioration, right? composites do not "rust"...)
However, the absolute main driving force when I said "
generation" is free is that there are zero raw materials involved. With gas, you need to BUY gas, with coal, you need to BUY coal, with pellets you need to BUY pellets - pellets could be more "free" than fossil fuel, but still require pellet processing and transport. Minimise transport of pellets like above and you can drive a virtuous circle of using excess/waste wood - and if you can harness renewable energy to process the pellets, all to the good. However, the elephant in the room is still the CO2 released, which is what we actually need to minimise, so it isn't all positive.
With renewables, the "raw material" input is FREE. Wind, sunlight etc, are Zero Cost.
So while one of the biggest criticisms of renewables (silly criticisms, if you ask me, but, hey, fossil fuel industry has it's powerful lobby groups and compliant media to "spread the word", right?) is that it doesn't always generate "when we need it". That argument can be entirely killed off when battery storage enters stage right. It's not a valid criticism any more.
Neither is any criticism about "efficiency", because all you're doing is storing the excess capacity that we need to have built to get around the "doesn't always generate at 100% capacity" and have, in some cases, already created the excess capacity such that on "light wind days" or "cloudy days" the wind or solar farm is still generating what it needs even at 50% output. That "extra" 50% output can be stored and used for later. Oh - and that "extra 50%" is
100% free, because the capacity is already there, already paid for, already in its maintenance program...
We are still in the early days of battery technology in the grand scheme of things...
Another reason why this development hits the right space - further development will not proceed unless there are requirements for development. This installation drives the requirement and will lead directly to further development. Another virtuous circle.
Yes a great idea but is used to meet sudden demand over a short time frame rather than deliver power for longer durations.
It can be used for either - depending on capacity of storage. Instantaneous release when demand requires or long term usage for "a country the size of wales" (insert any everyday analogy that you like - the "3 million homes" is just that - an analogy. It isn't literal on how the energy will always be used - instead it gives the reader a yardstick that is far more easily assimilated. It could've used SI Units, but to the everyday reader - quoting "GWh" for capacity is meaningless without some kind of mental reference point.)
Personally, I interpret this battery installation as a very important step on the path to cutting CO2 and saving the planet. And we're in on the ground floor
