Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Good Morning Britain" channel.

  1. What happens if we get 56 days of "dunkelflaute" like the UK got in 2018? Projecting out to 2050 with increased demand from electrification of transport and heating etc, we would need to find something like 28TWh of missing electricity generated from wind power (but the wind won't be blowing!). Britain currently has 39.3 GWh of pumped storage. There are 4 pumped storage stations in Britain. No 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.
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