A few weeks ago The Royal Society published this comprehensive report: Large-scale energy storage. It can be found HERE . I thought this might be of interest and had planned to write a short commentary as a basis for discussion. But the wind has been taken out of my sails, first by two excellent articles by the redoubtable Francis Menton at Manhattan Contrarian and this morning by a useful and interesting post by Chris Morrison at The Daily Sceptic. Menton’s articles – titled ‘A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society’ and ‘It’s Time To Build The Intermittent Plus Hydrogen Storage Demonstration Project!’ – can be found HERE and HERE . Morrison’s piece – titled ‘Batteries Will Not Solve Renewable Energy Storage Problem, Says Royal Society’ – can be found HERE .

I suggest anyone who’s interested should first read at least the Executive Summary, Chapter 1 (Introduction) and Chapter 10.1 (Conclusion) of the Royal Society’s report – the Conclusion is especially interesting as it’s essentially a commentary on each of the report’s chapters – and then read Menton’s and Morrison’s articles.

A few comments:

1. As Menton has noted, the report’s analysis of the problem that has to be overcome – far worse than I thought – is extremely helpful.

2. However their ‘solution’ would be a quite extraordinary undertaking. Is it even feasible? The report notes numerous uncertainties such as the stated need for ‘detailed engineering estimates’. One item that took my eye was the statement that ‘Building the number of caverns that this report finds will be needed by 2050 will be challenging, but not impossible’. My experience of project management suggests that in practice such words mean that it almost certainly is impossible. If so of course, the whole undertaking would be pointless.

3. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that anyone living anywhere near any of these proposed caverns filled with hydrogen is likely to be very happy. Surely such concerns could kill the project?

4. This is an extraordinarily complex ‘solution’ and, given the UK’s apparent inability to complete large projects on time or within budget (e.g. HS2) would seem, even if shown to viable (practically and economically), to be doomed to failure from the outset.

5. It seems probable that, even in the unlikely event that the project could be shown to be technically viable, it would be so enormously expensive that no government could approve it.

6. With impressive logic based on a comprehensive analysis of the facts, the Royal Society has concluded that large-scale hydrogen storage is the only realistic solution to the wind and solar power intermittency problem. Therefore if, as seems likely, their ‘solution’ isn’t realistic either, there is no solution and the net zero project is wholly unachievable.

18 Comments

  1. Robin,

    Thanks for this, and for providing the links – all of which are well worth following. As usual, Francis Menton’s pieces are particularly worthwhile, and Chris Morrison’s is also a good read.

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  2. And a very important point is the huge scale of moving transport and other areas, such as gas central heating, from fossil fuels to electricity, and then making “renewable” the sources of all the additional electricity that will be needed. I strongly suspect that much of the population (and, regrettably, many politicians) have little understanding of how little renewable electricity currently contributes to the UK’s energy requirements.

    The BBC has today put this article on its website:

    “Fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear: The UK’s changing energy mix”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63976805

    For me the key statistic it includes is with regard to the UK’s primary energy:

    In 2022, the majority of the primary energy consumed within the UK (78.4%) came from coal, oil and gas, known as fossil fuels.

    That is down from 87.2% in 2012, mainly due to the declining use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal.

    “Primary” energy refers to fuels in their raw form, before they are converted into “useful” energy which heats and powers homes, businesses, transport and industry. …

    Included in that mix are risible levels of “renewable” energy, with wind coming in at 4.1%, solar at 0.7% and hydro at 0.3%. Between them, they contribute a grand total of 5.1%, which is 1% less than our increasingly depleted nuclear capacity.

    Does any serious person really believe we can achieve net zero by 2050, and even if it is feasible, do they seriously believe that we will by than have worked out how to store enough energy to cover the shortfalls when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining?

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  4. I’m disappointed that there appears to be little interest in this article. As I set out HERE , there are many reasons why the UK’s net zero policy is a dangerous absurdity, but I suggest that the two most immediate are (1) the plan to get all our electricity from renewables by 2035 (for Labour 2030) and (2) the fact that the politicians responsible for this plan have only the vaguest idea about how, in the unlikely event that it’s achieved, a comprehensive grid-scale back-up would be available when there’s little or no wind or sun. Yet without a detailed and practical engineering plan for this, we’d be facing disaster. 

    In my view, this Royal Society report demonstrates that it’s most unlikely that any such plan will ever be possible – neither by 2035 nor by net zero’s total completion date of 2050. Although the report, after a comprehensive analysis of the facts, concludes that large-scale hydrogen storage is the only realistic solution – batteries, the principal alternative contender, being ruled out because they can never store more than a fraction of the required energy – a review of the report indicates, to me at least, that this ‘solution’ is itself completely impractical. Am I right?

    If I am, the impossibility of effective back-up is yet another reason why the net zero project should be terminated as soon as possible. 

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  5. Robin,

    I share your surprise at the apparent lack of interest in this topic. It’s good that the Royal Society recognise problems, but odd, bordering on the bizarre, that they claim to be so confident that energy shortfalls can be adequately met by back-up. The concluding paragraphs of the summary from the Royal Society document offer both cause for celebration that they recognise that there are massive uncertainties in this area, and perplexity that despite recognising those uncertainties, everything will apparently be fine:

    Caveats and avenues for further work This report is focussed on the large-scale
    storage that will be needed in 2050 in GB. While the possible roles of nuclear and of gas plus CCS are considered, the modelling does not take account of continuing contributions from burning waste and biomass, hydropower and interconnectors, or the relative locations of supply, storage, and demand, and their implications for the grid.

    The design and implementation of procedures for scheduling the use of a mixture of different types of store together with other flexible supply need to be studied further. More work is also needed on the long-term variability of wind and solar supply and the need for contingency. The need for hydrogen for large-scale electricity storage should be studied together with other uses for green hydrogen. This would almost certainly reveal systems benefits that would lower costs.

    The underlying assumptions on the cost of storage and of providing wind and solar power should be underpinned by detailed engineering estimates. Meanwhile, it should be stressed that the cost estimates in the report, which are in 2021 prices, are obviously sensitive to increases in commodity prices and other forms of inflation, and depend critically on estimates of the future cost of wind and solar power.

    Constructing the large number of hydrogen storage caverns that this report finds will be needed to complement high levels of wind and solar supply by 2050 will be challenging but appears possible.

    Given what net zero implies (pretty much everything being powered by renewable energy sources, with little or no place for fossil fuels) and given how little renewable energy contributes currently to the UK’s overall energy needs (see my earlier comment on this thread), I also believe the estimates of future electricity needs to be staggeringly complacent:

    2.2 Future electricity demand in Great Britain
    Basic electricity demand was 317 TWh in 2021. It is expected to increase in the future, by an amount that will depend on: the extent to which the provision of heat, transport, and industrial processing are electrified; increases in the use of air conditioning; improvements in efficiency, economic growth, changes in population and changes in behaviour. Projections for 2050 range from 518 TWh in one of the National Grid’s net zero compliant Future Energy Scenarios (FES)5 to 672 TWh in BEIS’6 high demand model. The higher projections assume high levels of electrification of space
    heating. The lower FES projections assume very big improvements in efficiency, and / or changes in behaviour.

    Any questioning mind reading the report really should be questioning the feasibility of the net zero project.

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  6. Hello Robin,

    1. I’m inclined to think that the problem that we at Cliscep have to overcome in the minds of our politicans and their media chorus is primarily psychological rather than engineering. In that spirit I had commented recently on the Eichmann moral trap that I believe they have fallen into. However, that thread had not received much interest either when I last looked. Are we all, perhaps, focused on our prime minister’s conference speech – was he, for example, going to expand on the nothing-burger of his minor delays to the Net Zero agenda?

    2. However, as an electrical engineer I am keenly interested in this topic of energy storage. So my mind went back to the summer of 1976 when, some of us may recall, there was a high pressure system stuck over the UK for some 65 days. At the time the great concern was about the lack of rain – a Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, was appointed in order to appease the rain gods. However, such weather conditions are often accompanied by light winds.

    In such a wind drought I would apply my standard engineering safety factor of multiplying by 1.5 or 2.0 to cover my ignorance of Nature’s inner workings and thereby come up with an energy storage requirement of about 100 to 120 days. Probably better to err on the side of caution and opt for the higher number …

    … If, in addition, we have to allow for energy loss/leakage from the stroage system then 150 days does not seem unreasonable to me. Simples!

    Regards,
    John.

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  7. I suggest that this report will be largely ignored and the government and media will continue to concentrate on the main fantasy solution of battery storage with pumped hydro – because the public will be more amenable to this, rather than massive stores of extremely flammable hydrogen stored under their feet. Massive battery storage facilities will be built and they will fail. I’ve had major problems with my laptop battery and van battery – the laptop battery failed and attempting to charge it resulted in my van battery going dead. Battery technology can fail even in the most mundane of circumstances: trying to base a national energy policy upon it is certain to invite disaster. Attempting to convert all personal transportation to rely upon battery technology IS already failing in real time.

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  8. Jaime, you may well be right about the likelihood of battery failure. But that’s not why the Royal Society rejected battery storage as a solution to renewable intermittency. Their reason was that batteries could never store more than a fraction of the required energy – surely a correct conclusion? As for the government etc. concentrating ‘on the main fantasy solution of battery storage with pumped hydro’, that doesn’t seem to be the position of the Labour Party. According to THIS , regarding their ‘clean power by 2030’ mission, they would fix the intermittency problem by investing in ‘carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and long-term energy storage to ensure that there is sufficient zero-emission back-up power and storage for extended periods without wind or sun, while maintaining a strategic reserve of backup gas power stations to guarantee security of supply.‘ [My bold] No mention of either batteries or pumped hydro – and the ‘strategic reserve’ idea seems eminently sensible. But one thing is clear: it’s not ‘zero-emission’. I wonder just how much gas power they have in mind?

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  9. John C: if I’ve read it correctly the Royal Society envisages a very long period of storage: ‘At the levels of additional supply needed to compensate for storage inefficiencies, it remains true that there is a need to store tens of TWhs for many years.’ (Chapter 1, page 11)

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  10. This morning David Turver has published a detailed demolition of the Royal Society’s storage report. Titled ‘Dismantling the Royal Society Large-Scale Electricity Storage Report – The Royal Society report makes extraordinary claims that do not stand up to scrutiny’, it can be found HERE . He concludes that it’s simply not credible. Here’s his final paragraph:

    ‘The RS report shows the dangers of “official” figures propagating from one institution to another in a daisy chain. The thing is daisy chains are pretty but very fragile. Hopefully, this article has exposed that fragility and demonstrated the extraordinary evidence required to support their extraordinary claims is simply not there. Quite the contrary, there is a plenty of evidence that their claims are a fairy tale. The Royal Society report shows that their vision of 2050 does not quite violate the first law of thermodynamics, but it goes on to break all the basic tenets of sound engineering. Because the RS report also effectively rules out batteries as the energy storage medium to support intermittent renewables, the entire renewables project should be scrapped.’.

    [My emphasis]

    Worth reading in full.

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  11. Robin,

    The most important sentences there for me are these:

    ‘The RS report shows the dangers of “official” figures propagating from one institution to another in a daisy chain. The thing is daisy chains are pretty but very fragile. Hopefully, this article has exposed that fragility and demonstrated the extraordinary evidence required to support their extraordinary claims is simply not there. Quite the contrary, there is a plenty of evidence that their claims are a fairy tale.

    Once a claim is made (however fanciful it may be) by officialdom, it seems to be written in stone and endlessly re-cycled. Thus the claims that the cost of HS2 were justified depended on fanciful claims about the costs (as always, those costs have been massively exceeded) and the exaggerated claims about the financial value to the economy of the benefits. Similarly, the Government made claims in 2019 about the benefits of smart meters. Those claims were fanciful, and its clear (to me, at least) that the costs of smart meters massively exceed the benefits, but now we find those assumed benefit figures repeated as simple facts in the Impact Assessment which seeks to justify the costs of the Energy Bill. Similar points could be made regarding fanciful official claims relating to things like “the social cost of carbon”.

    The Emperor has no clothes. I’m hoping that people are starting to notice.

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  12. Speaking of the Royal Society, this is mildly interesting:

    “Settled Science Shock: Earth Temperatures Rise AHEAD of CO2 Emissions, Say Scientists”

    https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/08/settled-science-shock-earth-temperatures-rise-ahead-of-co2-emissions-say-scientists/

    Dramatic new and improved evidence points to temperatures on Earth rising before an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The new findings are causing considerable concern in the ‘settled’ world of climate science where a political narrative promoting Net Zero demands that it is undeniable that temperatures rise after humans burn fossil fuels. The controversy has been building for about a year since initial findings were first published by the U.K. Royal Society.

    The latest work from four scientists uses sophisticated stochastic or change-formulated causality techniques to examine data from numerous temperature and CO2 data sets over the last 60 years. As with the initial findings published by the Royal Society, they found the causality link placing a CO2 rise ahead of temperature cannot be scientifically supported since it is clearly shown that temperature precedes CO2 by six or more months. “All evidence resulting from the analysis suggests a unidirectional, potentially causal link with temperature as the cause and CO2 as the effect,” they state….

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  15. This morning David Turver has published a further commentary on the Royal Society’s storage report. Titled ‘More Royal Society Inconsistencies Have they split renewables by installed capacity or delivered energy?’ it can be found HERE . His conclusion:

    ‘In some ways, the RS report is worse than I first thought, because as demonstrated here, it is not internally consistent. Therefore, we do not know which parts of the RS analysis has been conducted based on installed capacity and which on the basis of delivered energy.

    Moreover, reanalysis based on delivered energy makes the whole system less deliverable and even less desirable. What a mess.’

    Worth reading in full.

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  16. I dismantled the RS report here:

    https://davidturver.substack.com/p/royal-society-large-electricity-storage-report

    I have also done a follow up article further exploring how they might have arrived at 40GW of solar capacity to deliver nearly 80GW. It seems they switch between splitting the renewables capacity by generation capacity and by delivered energy. So the report is not internally consistent.

    https://davidturver.substack.com/p/more-royal-society-inconsistencies

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  17. “Salt, air and bricks: could this be the future of energy storage?

    Start-ups turn to heat over batteries as they aim to industrialise the practice”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/01/thermal-energy-storage-industry

    I would be interested in comments – a good idea practical at scale, or the Guardian’s April Fool?

    Interesting to note that is Harrabin’s new gig after years of spouting climate propaganda, funded by the licence-payer, at the BBC, and also that he’s apparently a fellow at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

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  18. From Net Zero Watch:

    Royal Society understates cost of Net Zero by half a trillion pounds

    • Net Zero grid will cost at least £38 billion per year to build
    • Scientists have failed to correct major error

    A key report published under the auspices of the Royal Society understated the cost of building a Net Zero electricity grid by half a trillion pounds, according to Net Zero Watch, in a post published today on its website.

    According to Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford, the error revolves around how the costs of building wind and solar farms and other equipment will change over the next 25 years. The Royal Society has used Whitehall estimates of the costs for 2040 but has applied them from the start of the build period. Mr Montford said:

    “It is simply absurd to use estimated costs for a windfarm in 2040 when calculating the costs of building one today.”

    Mr Montford said

    “If we assume that costs fall, over 25 years, from the levels seen today to those assumed by the Royal Society, the cost of building the Net Zero grid is around £960 billion rather than the £410 billion claimed by the Royal Society.”

    Mr Montford says that there is no doubt about what the Royal Society has done, since the basis of the figure they have calculated is clearly stated in the report. However, although the Royal Society author team has been aware of the problem for several months, they have made no correction.

    Mr Montford said:

    “If the error is corrected, the cost of decarbonising the grid looks unaffordable. £960 billion is £38 billion per year, at a time when we are cutting winter fuel allowance to save less than £2 billion per year. Setting these painful facts out clearly would certainly be politically inconvenient for the Government.”

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