Trailblazing Britain is leading the most ambitious rollout of offshore wind in the world
Source - Daily Telegraph 28/07/22
Today’s electricity price shock is the last crisis of the old order. Britain will soon have far more power at times of peak production than it can absorb. The logistical headache will be abundance.
Wind and solar provided almost 60pc of the UK’s power for substantial stretches last weekend, briefly peaking at 66pc. This is not to make a propaganda point about green energy, although this home-made power is self-evidently displacing liquefied natural gas (LNG) imported right now at nosebleed prices.
It is a point about the mathematical implications of the UK’s gargantuan push for renewables. Offshore wind capacity is going to increase from 11 to 50 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 under the Government’s latest fast-track plans.
RenewableUK says this country currently has a total of 86GW in the project pipeline. This the most ambitious rollout of offshore wind in the world, ahead of China at 78GW, and the US at 48GW.
The giant hi-tech turbines to be erected on the Dogger Bank, where wind conditions are superb, bear no resemblance to the low-tech, low-yield dwarves of yesteryear. The “capacity factor” is approaching 60pc, which entirely changes the energy equation.
There will be a further rise in onshore wind and solar as well, leaving aside nuclear expansion. The scale is breathtaking. So what will be done at night or at weekends when renewable power generation is 200pc or more of UK demand?
Much can be exported to the Continent through interconnectors for a fat revenue stream, helping to plug the UK’s trade deficit, and helping to rescue Germany from the double folly of nuclear closures and the Putin pact. But there are limits since weather patterns in Britain and Northwest Europe overlap – partially.
Some of the power can be turned into green hydrogen: either to replace fossil-based “grey” hydrogen in fertilisers, chemicals, and refineries, and to make steel. It can also be used to store in salt caverns as an alternative to natural gas or to turn into green ammonia for fuels, trains and shipping. But this will not be competitive at scale until the cost of electrolysis is slashed (circa 2030).
Much of the power will have to be stored for days or weeks at a time. Lithium batteries cannot do the job: their sweet spot is two hours, and they are expensive. You need “long duration” storage at a cost that must ultimately fall below $100 (£82) per megawatt hour (MWh), the global benchmark of commercial viability.
That is now in sight, and one of the world leaders is a British start-up. Highview Power has refined a beautifully simple technology using liquid air stored in insulated steel towers at low pressure.
This cryogenic process cools air to minus 196 degrees using the standard kit for LNG. It compresses the volume 700-fold. The liquid re-expands with a blast of force when heated and drives a turbine, providing dispatchable power with the help of a flywheel.
Fresh tanks can be added to cover several days or even weeks of energy storage. The efficiency loss or “boil off” rate from storage vats is 0.1pc each day, and much of this is recaptured by the closed system.
“Think of us as pumped-hydro in a box. We can store for very long periods, and discharge over long periods,” said Rupert Pearce, Highview’s chief executive and ex-head of the satellite company Inmarsat.
“We can take power when the grid can’t handle it, and fill our tanks with wasted wind (curtailment). At the moment the grid has to pay companies £1bn a year not to produce, which is grotesque.”
Highview is well beyond the pilot phase and is developing its first large UK plant in Humberside, today Britain’s top hub for North Sea wind. It will offer 2.5GW for over 12 hours, or 0.5GW for over 60 hours, and so forth, and should be up and running by late 2024.
Further projects will be built at a breakneck speed of two to three a year during the 2020s, with a target of 20 sites able to provide almost 6GW of back-up electricity for four days at a time, or whatever time/power mix is optimal.
Most North Sea wind lulls last less than 24 hours. Research by Delft University found that the longer Dunkelflaute events – caused by cold high-pressure weather systems – tend to range from 50-100 hours. They typically occur in November, December, and January.
Occasionally they can be longer. Every 20 years or so there is a giant Dunkelflaute. Obviously you need other forms of power for safety of supply, and that too is coming. The Xlinks wind and solar project from the Sahara should provide a tenth of the UK’s electricity demand with baseload consistency at a strike of £48 per MWh as soon as 2028, and that is just for starters.
Small modular reactors being developed by Rolls Royce promise further ballast. The Government has pencilled in 5GW of green hydrogen by 2030 in its Energy Security Strategy. Some of that can be burnt in peaker plants for back-up power, if need be - not a good way to use it.
Mr Pearce said Highview’s levelised cost of energy (LCOE) would start at $140-$150, below lithium, and then slide on a “glide path” to $100 with over time. The company has parallel projects in Spain and Australia but Britain is the showroom.
“The UK is a fantastic place to do this. It has one of the most innovative grids in the world and an open, fair, liquid, market mechanism with absolute visibility,” he said.
The latest wind auctions in the UK came in at a low of £37.35 MWh, and averaged £48. Carbon Brief calculates that this is a quarter of the cost of running a gas-powered plant at current prices in the gas spot market – admittedly an anomaly. New wind married with sub-$100 (£82) storage will win the horse race even when gas returns to normal.
Battery technology is in global ferment. The US Energy Department is all over it, working with the likes of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. It is the new darling of Big Money and the hedge funds, and they are pulling forward the process.
Form Energy in Boston – backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates – is working on an iron-air “rust” battery based on the reversible oxidation of iron pellets. It does not require rare and polluting minerals such as vanadium, and will have a 100-hour range.
“The modules will produce electricity for one-tenth the cost of any technology available today for grid storage,” the company told Recharge.
Form Energy has been working with National Grid to map out the economics of UK renewables with storage, and how to cope with future curtailment. And it too praises the UK as a global trailblazer, though its pilot project next year will be in Minnesota.
The company is making large claims, and there is many a slip twixt cup and lip. But what is clear is that some of the countless moonshot ventures under development – be they iron-air, zinc-air, molten salts, or organic flow-batteries (using rhubarb) – are going to cut storage costs low enough to shatter outdated Treasury models.
They will combine with solar and wind to produce quasi-baseload power locally for most of mankind at a cost that progressively renders the energy infrastructure of the 20th Century obsolete on pure economics.
It is irrelevant where you stand on the hypothesis of man-made global warming. It is free market capitalism that is solving the energy problem, though neither Extinction Rebels nor denialists seem to have noticed. In that respect they are twins.
It does require political support and the right signals from governments. The UK has managed this mix surprisingly well. It has done better than most in resisting capture by vested interests.
This country stands to enjoy the first rewards as the 2020s unfold, and probably a surplus in the energy balance of payments by the 2030s. It is the UK’s greatest economic and diplomatic success story this century. It would be nice if the Tory candidates celebrated the achievement rather than looking embarrassed.
The Telegraph’s latest poll found that 71pc of Tory members back the expansion of renewable power. They are not the stupid party that some seem to think.
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