Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants
www.reuters.com
Giant batteries that ensure stable power supply by offsetting intermittent renewable supplies are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation world-wide.
  • poVoqMA
    8·
    7 months ago

    This is good news of course, but natural gas is often a by-product of oil mining, and if it can’t be sold it has to be flared off. So if there is little demand for it, then we also need to urgently reduce the demand for oil based products.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      7 months ago

      There’s also plenty of dedicated natural gas drilling, so I don’t think this’ll impact the amount of flared methane that much.

  • MrMakabar
    4·
    7 months ago

    The big advantage of batteries is that they are not just able to balance the grid by providing more power, but also are able to take power out of the grid. They are able to do that extremly quickly as well. For those who do not know electricity grids fail if there is too much electricity or too little. With falling prices we are likely to see more of these even in largely fossil fuel based grids.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Reflecting the shift in economics in favour of storage, this year it launched plans to build one of the world’s largest batteries at the site.

    “In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that’s going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years,” Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters.

    Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run.

    “In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply,” said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG.

    The start-up in March of UK energy company SSE’s Keadby 2, a gas power plant in eastern England, was supported by a 15-year government contract signed in 2020 to provide standby electricity services to the grid from 2023/24.

    The trials covered the equivalent amount of power demand that a small gas plant would meet, or what could be saved by turning off more than half of London for an hour.

    The original article contains 1,165 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!