The UK relies far too much on gas turbines, rather than renewables and as a consequence we have energy costs far higher than other European neighbours.

Gas is not cheap, it basically doubles your costs.

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martinald 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Renewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh.

Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.

Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.

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iso1631 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Last time I did the maths based on data from gridwatch the storage capacity required dropped dramatically if you over built the on the production side.

But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh

A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car

That doesn't seem unrealistic.

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bencord0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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Gareth321 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are making the mistake of thinking that if the grid could provide 100% renewable energy on a windy day at noon in summer, it could also provide 100% renewable energy at night in winter with no wind. Obviously that’s not accurate. Renewables provide energy in a highly volatile sine wave. It’s the bottom of the sine wave which determines the capacity required for base load and dispatchable generation, not the top of the wave.

[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.

People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.

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martinald 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas.

The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.

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tcfhgj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

you don't even need to use carbon capture and storage if you use green gas instead of fossil gas.

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oezi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.

	▲	iso1631 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario. Or indeed when petrol runs out as happens occasionally (in 2022 most recently). Of course there's also the problem of gas supplies stopping

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adrianN 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well the goal is to only run the backup a few hundred hours a year, the question is which technology can provide close to 100% of demand a few percent of the time in the cheapest way. Turbines or even gas motors are relatively cheap in capex and gas is easy to store in large quantities.

	▲	toomuchtodo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gas turbines have a manufacturing backlog of at least a half decade. The longer is takes to build them, the more favorable battery storage is (as it can be installed today), and the faster more battery storage manufacturing spins up, this further drives down the cost. https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-queue-before-the-queue-gevs... https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/thought-leadership/20... > For its part, China – a battery manufacturing powerhouse – has no such supply chain issues. It dominates global lithium battery production accounting for two-thirds of it. This relative strength gives it the confidence to relentlessly amplify its BESS footprint as evidenced in the capacity build-up between 2021 and 2026. > In fact, China’s battery storage build-out has no global parallel thanks to this one factor alone, according to Ember. It estimates that nearly all (i.e.149.8 GW) of China’s “new energy storage” consists of lithium-ion batteries. > In terms of the future, following a June update to its 15th Five-Year Plan, China is now aiming to deploy 300 GW of new energy storage by 2030. That would keep the country’s BESS industry progression, that outgrows all other countries combined, firmly on track. (battery storage printer goes brrr)