Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "UK government defeated in High Court over climate plans | BBC News" video.

  1. Britain currently has 39.3 GWh of pumped storage. There are 4 pumped storage stations in Britain. No meaningful storage capacity has been added to the grid since the 1980s, and there is no other large scale energy storage in the country. To cover a cold dark still winter you would need to increase pumped storage capacity by a factor of about 1000 (taking into account pumped storage is about 75% efficient). So we would need to find 4000 suitable locations where a 300 to 400m dam can be built to hold back 10 million cubic metres of water, with a fall to the turbines below of about 400 metres. Then we would have to build 160 of these every year, year after year, for 25 years. The scale, and the massive cost of storage, by whatever method (pumped storage is one of the cheapest by the way), make it an impossible mission. "Wind droughts" where electrical generation runs at 20% of capacity lasting 100 days or more can be expected once every 50 years. This would see a shortfall of 2TWh at current capacities. 665TWh electricity is projected to come from wind power in 2050 (National Grid). Current wind power 75TWh (2020). 350TWh of Hydrogen storage would exceed by a considerable margin the current annual electrical generation in the UK (~300TWh). It would also be more than 50% of electrical consumption in 2050. Hydrogen storage is also one of the more expensive energy storage strategies at $203/MWh. Pumped storage $131/TWh with gas generated about half of the latter (At 2021 prices researched by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory). Let's look at it another way. The Royal Society recommend the UK should have 100TWh of energy storage (it's currently 39.3 GWh from 4 pumped storage facilities). That's over a 2,500 fold increase. That means building 10,000 pumped storage facilities or 400 every year. That's at the same time as increasing wind power generation from 75TWh (in 2020) to 665TWh (in 2050 - these are UK National Grid figures). That's around 100,000 giant wind turbines. And by the time you get to 2050, the 4,000 wind turbines you needed to install in 2025 would have reached the end of their working lives and will need to be buried in landfill, and replaced with another 4,000. It's all impossible and absurd.
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