We're going to need some bigger batteries

Blog main page RSS icon

UK electricity generation on 22nd May was fairly typical for a reasonably sunny summer's day.

Gas generation was low in the middle of the night because demand was low. As the day started, demand increased and gas generation increased but was limited as solar generation ramped up. Then as solar dropped off but demand remained high in the evening, gas generation went up yet again. You can see this repeating on most sunny summer days.

Now imagine we had twice the solar capacity we have today. We'd actually be able to turn off gas power stations in the middle of the day. That would be a pretty big deal in itself. But now imagine we had enough battery capacity to store the excess solar energy so we don't need to turn the gas power stations on for some of the evening hours. Keep on ramping up solar capacity and we'd eventually be able to store enough electricity for the evening and the nights, refill them during the day and keep going. We could go days without using fossil fuels.

Anti-renewables people often say "what happens when there's no sun or wind?". Even reasonably pragmatic people will say something similar. It's not an unreasonable point to make, in the middle of winter we can go days or weeks with little sunshine and not much wind and we'd need an absolutely huge fleet of batteries to deal with that scenario. But the batteries required to deal with getting from one sunny day to the next is much smaller. Even in the famously grey and gloomy UK, it's probably something that's worth doing. 

Tagged: Climate change