COMMENT POWER STORAGE
Renewables bring
new challenges
AS RENEWABLE POWER GENERATION EXCEEDS TRADITIONAL SOURCES
OF POWER, A NEW TYPE OF INFRASTRUCTURE WILL BE REQUIRED
Last year was a record year for renewable power in the UK and wind power
produced a quarter of Britain’s electricity. However, that led to more than £250
million having to be being spent on costs where energy had to be dumped
because of network constraints.
While this has led to a call for additional technologies like nuclear, hydrogen and
carbon capture to compensate for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine,
it also demonstrates that the next steps we need to take towards achieving a net zero
power system will be more challenging.
With this greater reliance on renewable energy the UK’s power infrastructure system
will be exposed to greater swings in power production which can then lead to surges in
power prices, and much higher grid balancing costs.
Systems for storing energy such as batteries are going to be critical if we are to
provide grid balancing services to make up for a drop in renewable power.
So it was interesting to see that a team of engineers had developed a hydropower
system that uses gentle slopes rather than steep dams or mountains to store electricity
and, as a result, hundreds of hills across the UK could be used to store renewable
energy, acting as giant batteries.
This hydropower system, embedded underground, could see the unlocking of many
potential hydropower sites across the UK, with fewer environmental impacts.
These projects mimic traditional hydropower plants by using surplus electricity to
pump water uphill, then releasing it through turbines to generate electricity when it’s
needed.
These are described as “high-intensity” hydro projects and use a mineral-rich uid,
which has more than two and a half times the density of water, to create the same
amount of electricity from slopes which are less than half as high.
RheEnergise, the company behind the project, said it would be possible to pump
the dense uid up a hill with a height of 200 metres, at times of low electricity demand
where it would be stored in an underground storage tank.
This technology could allow around 700 sites across the country to play host to
these new high-intensity hydro projects, which in theory could create a total of 7GW of
energy storage to help the UK use more renewable electricity.
These types of technologies are going to be critical to the UK’s ambition of
delivering cleaner and more effective forms of power generation and storage, as by the
end of the decade the UK is expected to need around 13GW of exible clean energy
generation and storage to help balance the electricity grid.
Neil Tyler, Editor (neil.tyler@markallengroup.com)
“Hundreds of
hills across the
UK could be
used to store
renewable
energy, acting
as giant
batteries.”
www.newelectronics.co.uk 23 February 2021 5
/www.newelectronics.co.uk