Really great video merging a bit of the environmental, technological, political and social perspectives. I feel really lucky on having the opportunity to work in the UK energy industry and contributing in fixing what seems to be one of the most interesting and important challenges from a techno-social and environmental challenges. Congratulations Modo and I hope there could be a time where we could all meet and brainstorm some technological ideas as well! Best, Cesar Angeles, Head Electrical Engineer and Data Scientist at Yottar LTD.
Why no real mention of home/business solar/battery being useful to reduce the strain on the grid and need to keep building "silver bullet" solutions with these massive projects. If 50% of the building stock had solar/battery, what would that do to the need to have a massive grid?
@@Lewis_Standing Possibly with the building of a battery but it will should create more jobs and help by not being a single point of failure that a grid battery could become that could take out an area rather than just a single building if it fails. And we wouldn't need as many grid scale batteries and we'd get cheaper electricity if we made our own with home solar/battery
@@rtfazeberdee3519 Sorry, but this barely makes a dent in the scale of the problem. All the rooftop solar we have already just means a fraction less demand on the grid overall. The grid still needs to provide for everything else that can't have its own individual supply, and that demand is likely to increase in the next few years as more EVs and heat pumps come online rather than go down. Leave aside the seasonal variation that's inherent in solar. Try running a heat pump and an EV and all your other devices exclusively on solar in the middle of winter. It's not possible and you'll be reliant on the rest of the grid to bale you out. The sad reality is that there are no grid-scale batteries. The current battery systems and those that are planned are designed for small-scale load adjustment at best, a few hundred MWh at peak times when prices are highest, rather than the 10's of GWh you need to displace significant amounts of fossil gas. It's nibbling around the edges. Pumped hydro gives you more capacity but that's currently only 30GWh in total across the existing sites. Even if the new Coire Glas pumped hydro system eventually gets built it will only double capacity to 60GWh. To put it in perspective, 60GWh can be equivalent to just 2-3 HOURS of gas-fired power on some days in winter. Those 2-3 hours worth of gas are all you are able displace by emptying all of battery capacity of UK (which then needs recharged). The truth is that we need to build a dozen more PHS systems like Coire Glas if we are going to make renewables work at the scale people seem to think they ought to.
I agree wholeheartedly! Clearly we need to empower the local people to generate their own energy. Importantly, this needs to be with hybrid/ off-grid inverters as standard rooftop solar installs are grid tied, so people don’t even know their house will have a blackout even with their panels generating!
Let's not forget that having a lot of DERS at the distribution side will still raise the fault level constraints and will still need a lot of infrastructure and control challenges. It's not the same trying to control few grid scale generators than millions of small scale DERs and their volatility.
We can’t just look at energy generation and storage solutions that make electricity utility monopolies and cartels more wealthy! Solar panels, battery storage and EVs can allow us INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS to generate and store our own electricity so that we can CITIZENS stop being energy serfs to the CARTELS.
Freeheeler, no body is stopping you, ask your local area board to disconnect you and you are at liberty to buy and install the equipment you want. Good luck, but prepare to live abroad for four months in the winter as solar is minimal at that time
EVs and home solar/storage got a brief mention but deserved more. I have my 86kWh (6 Tesla PowerWalls) EV plugged into my solar system using V2L. V2G gets all the attention but V2L is widely available now on many EVs and gives 3.5kW of output power. More renewables on the grid needs more energy storage and EVs and home solar storage seem to be being ignored in the UK, where are the virtual power plants? Videos on my channel on my setup.
Can we get a piece on how our wind based grid will balance. Alot of push back around this in the press and it would be good to get clarification on the details.
It surprises me that the potential of home solar and battery storage capacity for a constantly increasing EV fleet did not get a mention. I am an ordinary guy with no real insight or expertise, but I do read that several schemes are examining this aspect of energy storage and distribution in Australia and the Netherlands.
Whenever I have seen clips of national grid control centre it looks like an old-fashioned trading-floor with people looking at graphs and buying via telephone call. A logical step surely would be to have an "API" (computer to computer connection) with each supplier to make reaction times quicker and more efficient
I think its great listening to Emma Pinchbeck, we get an inside view on our energy futures, and how it is shaping up. One thing I'd like to hear more about is the Swansea UK Bay Lagoon Project (Blue Eden Project???) no mention in this episode (power from the moon twice a day, couldn't be more reliable). food for thought.
I want to know if it's even possible to achieve a greater percentage of national investment in renewables rather than relying on international investment. I don't dismiss international investment but I see being able to stand on ones own feet as a priority!
Localised private investment would be better still, and could easily be done partnering with bitcoin mining. It's location agnostic, and creates a demand and use for rewable energy at times when nobody else wants to use that energy, and will switch off when demand on the grid increases. Zero gov funding required, a more stable renewable grid achieved. Gov just needs to encourage this through supporting bitcoin as payment, and creating more awareness.
@@jameswhitlock4041 I don't know enough about the crypto currency world but what I do see tells me that there are lots of uncertainty about it which on the face of it just tells me no. It's too much of a gamble only suited to those who do gamble. Also generating crypto currency requires a massive amount of energy which is counter to the use of renewable tech. I'm sure your plan may well work but I suspect the risks of using crypto are greater than its benefits.
The UK Energy report discussed here contains some good recommendations but the 55GW of new offshore wind capacity that the fanboy from Modo Energy keeps demanding is a pipe dream. It ignores some pretty glaring engineering and materials challenges, even if you could rush it through the planning process. Right now we have about 30GW of wind capacity. Looking back through the data for calendar year 2023, we can get 15-16 GW of that (i.e. just over half) into the grid on a good day when the wind is blowing. On bad days with a big anticyclone on top of us it can be as low as 1-2 GW or barely 5% of the installed name-plate capacity. That is just a feature of our weather and you can see the same patterns going back over decades. Wind capacity factors are consistently around 25-35% depending on weather, with offshore wind being a bit higher than onshore. What the fanboy interviewer would like to avoid and what, to her credit, the speaker does acknowledge is offshore wind's dirty secret. There is no grid storage capacity for excess wind power on day's when the wind is good (but the wind developers still get paid curtailment charges for power that can't be dispatched to the grid). There isn't even 10% of the pumped hydro storage capacity we really need for grid storage even if we could magic up another 55GW of nominal wind capacity because of a failure of any strategic vision and the power struggles with devolved governments in Wales and Scotland who control planning. The harsh truth is that onshore and offshore wind is bailed out by gas on the days when it inevitably cannot deliver. The correlation between gas-fired power and rising and falling wind power is near perfect. That's just a fact and it's not going to change any time soon. Close those gas turbines in 2030 if you dare Labour Party, and see how long we last without blackouts.
See my comment and point above. Sadly, that's really hard to do a the moment when we are critically reliant on gas to not only provide a big chunk of baseload, but also bail us out when renewables inevitably fail to deliver when we need it. We're going to be tied to gas for longer than most people think.
@@Delchursing I'm no so sure. The energy losses associated with running electrolysers to generate the green hydrogen from a renewable source, and then compressing and transporting the hydrogen to where you might burn it in a turbine to generate electricity somewhere else are pretty big. On the order of 30-40% of the original electrical energy you put in and that's just a crazy waste. Unless you are thinking of liquifying and transporting hydrogen like LNG across an ocean and burning it in another country (like the insane plan that Germany and Canada have suggested) and are happy to only recover less than half of the input energy, then you might as well just use the energy you get from the renewable electricity in the first place, without anything more than transmission losses. The only advantage is the storage potential of the green hydrogen, in that you can potentially use it when you need it like natural gas - but the poor energy efficiency of the process probably makes that uneconomic in most cases.
@@iainmcdonald9764 in the Netherlands they are paying people to not connect solar to the grid. If instead we could harness this energy to run electrolysers then in a way I don't care about the inefficiency. Is that logical?
Not lots of taxpayers money used for lots of cables and infrastructure A virtual power plant (VPP) is a network of energy sources that work together to provide power to the electrical grid. VPPs are made up of many different types of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as:   Solar panels  Batteries  Electric vehicles  Smart water heaters  Rooftop solar panels  Electric vehicle chargers
Energy transition from fossil fuels cannot be done powered by fossil fuels; "No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).
The grid is a $TRILLIONS infrastructure investment and was built out over 10 decades. Grid owners need $100sBILLIONS cashflow every year. If central generation then cashflow crashes when the sunshines on customers rooftop PV. BVs oversized battery parked 23hrs every day and all selfparking selfplug-in V2G in the millions and millions then grid cashflow crashes all day long and all night long. BVs trickle currents trading on a $60 wall outlet is ezi pezi. Bump plug-in 23 hrs every day. Millions and millions and millions of customers rooftop PV and BVs, then central generation and distant generation cashflow is a dead duck everyday the sun shines. In warming latitudes shaded rooftops with PV panels will be a feature. More grid capacity is stupendously expensive as it would need to be 7 times bigger. Grid blindness is universal, and so people are deceived by bs promoters who want government taxpayers money 💰.
Why are we not investing in base load storrage? Look at America and what there planning in this field iron air batteries lithium and sodium iron all base load storage as well as other methods
Really great video merging a bit of the environmental, technological, political and social perspectives.
I feel really lucky on having the opportunity to work in the UK energy industry and contributing in fixing what seems to be one of the most interesting and important challenges from a techno-social and environmental challenges.
Congratulations Modo and I hope there could be a time where we could all meet and brainstorm some technological ideas as well!
Best,
Cesar Angeles, Head Electrical Engineer and Data Scientist at Yottar LTD.
Why no real mention of home/business solar/battery being useful to reduce the strain on the grid and need to keep building "silver bullet" solutions with these massive projects. If 50% of the building stock had solar/battery, what would that do to the need to have a massive grid?
I'm wondering if labour costs per installed kWh are much much higher for home installed systems Vs the scaling economies of a grid battery.
@@Lewis_Standing Possibly with the building of a battery but it will should create more jobs and help by not being a single point of failure that a grid battery could become that could take out an area rather than just a single building if it fails. And we wouldn't need as many grid scale batteries and we'd get cheaper electricity if we made our own with home solar/battery
@@rtfazeberdee3519 Sorry, but this barely makes a dent in the scale of the problem. All the rooftop solar we have already just means a fraction less demand on the grid overall. The grid still needs to provide for everything else that can't have its own individual supply, and that demand is likely to increase in the next few years as more EVs and heat pumps come online rather than go down. Leave aside the seasonal variation that's inherent in solar. Try running a heat pump and an EV and all your other devices exclusively on solar in the middle of winter. It's not possible and you'll be reliant on the rest of the grid to bale you out.
The sad reality is that there are no grid-scale batteries. The current battery systems and those that are planned are designed for small-scale load adjustment at best, a few hundred MWh at peak times when prices are highest, rather than the 10's of GWh you need to displace significant amounts of fossil gas. It's nibbling around the edges. Pumped hydro gives you more capacity but that's currently only 30GWh in total across the existing sites. Even if the new Coire Glas pumped hydro system eventually gets built it will only double capacity to 60GWh. To put it in perspective, 60GWh can be equivalent to just 2-3 HOURS of gas-fired power on some days in winter. Those 2-3 hours worth of gas are all you are able displace by emptying all of battery capacity of UK (which then needs recharged). The truth is that we need to build a dozen more PHS systems like Coire Glas if we are going to make renewables work at the scale people seem to think they ought to.
I agree wholeheartedly! Clearly we need to empower the local people to generate their own energy. Importantly, this needs to be with hybrid/ off-grid inverters as standard rooftop solar installs are grid tied, so people don’t even know their house will have a blackout even with their panels generating!
Let's not forget that having a lot of DERS at the distribution side will still raise the fault level constraints and will still need a lot of infrastructure and control challenges. It's not the same trying to control few grid scale generators than millions of small scale DERs and their volatility.
Excellent and insightfull so good to see the bigger picture
Enjoy this? Should I have enjoyed this? Love brilliance on full display. excellent two-sided conversation! Maybe a true dialogue!
We can’t just look at energy generation and storage solutions that make electricity utility monopolies and cartels more wealthy!
Solar panels, battery storage and EVs can allow us INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS to generate and store our own electricity so that we can CITIZENS stop being energy serfs to the CARTELS.
This is beginning to happen.
Freeheeler,
no body is stopping you, ask your local area board to disconnect you and you are at liberty to buy and install the equipment you want.
Good luck, but prepare to live abroad for four months in the winter as solar is minimal at that time
EVs and home solar/storage got a brief mention but deserved more. I have my 86kWh (6 Tesla PowerWalls) EV plugged into my solar system using V2L. V2G gets all the attention but V2L is widely available now on many EVs and gives 3.5kW of output power.
More renewables on the grid needs more energy storage and EVs and home solar storage seem to be being ignored in the UK, where are the virtual power plants? Videos on my channel on my setup.
Can we get a piece on how our wind based grid will balance. Alot of push back around this in the press and it would be good to get clarification on the details.
It surprises me that the potential of home solar and battery storage capacity for a constantly increasing EV fleet did not get a mention. I am an ordinary guy with no real insight or expertise, but I do read that several schemes are examining this aspect of energy storage and distribution in Australia and the Netherlands.
Whenever I have seen clips of national grid control centre it looks like an old-fashioned trading-floor with people looking at graphs and buying via telephone call. A logical step surely would be to have an "API" (computer to computer connection) with each supplier to make reaction times quicker and more efficient
I think its great listening to Emma Pinchbeck, we get an inside view on our energy futures, and how it is shaping up. One thing I'd like to hear more about is the Swansea UK Bay Lagoon Project (Blue Eden Project???) no mention in this episode (power from the moon twice a day, couldn't be more reliable). food for thought.
Quality of life drives transiton!
i had my gas removed this yeat , the guy said i was the 3rd that morning .
Congratulations to Emma on her new job as Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee.
She looks pretty happy about the bills.
Further, all of this transition MUST consider the environmental impact. It MUST NOT degrade any further the land that we all live and rely on!
I want to know if it's even possible to achieve a greater percentage of national investment in renewables rather than relying on international investment. I don't dismiss international investment but I see being able to stand on ones own feet as a priority!
Localised private investment would be better still, and could easily be done partnering with bitcoin mining. It's location agnostic, and creates a demand and use for rewable energy at times when nobody else wants to use that energy, and will switch off when demand on the grid increases. Zero gov funding required, a more stable renewable grid achieved. Gov just needs to encourage this through supporting bitcoin as payment, and creating more awareness.
@@jameswhitlock4041 I don't know enough about the crypto currency world but what I do see tells me that there are lots of uncertainty about it which on the face of it just tells me no. It's too much of a gamble only suited to those who do gamble. Also generating crypto currency requires a massive amount of energy which is counter to the use of renewable tech. I'm sure your plan may well work but I suspect the risks of using crypto are greater than its benefits.
The UK Energy report discussed here contains some good recommendations but the 55GW of new offshore wind capacity that the fanboy from Modo Energy keeps demanding is a pipe dream. It ignores some pretty glaring engineering and materials challenges, even if you could rush it through the planning process.
Right now we have about 30GW of wind capacity. Looking back through the data for calendar year 2023, we can get 15-16 GW of that (i.e. just over half) into the grid on a good day when the wind is blowing. On bad days with a big anticyclone on top of us it can be as low as 1-2 GW or barely 5% of the installed name-plate capacity. That is just a feature of our weather and you can see the same patterns going back over decades. Wind capacity factors are consistently around 25-35% depending on weather, with offshore wind being a bit higher than onshore.
What the fanboy interviewer would like to avoid and what, to her credit, the speaker does acknowledge is offshore wind's dirty secret. There is no grid storage capacity for excess wind power on day's when the wind is good (but the wind developers still get paid curtailment charges for power that can't be dispatched to the grid). There isn't even 10% of the pumped hydro storage capacity we really need for grid storage even if we could magic up another 55GW of nominal wind capacity because of a failure of any strategic vision and the power struggles with devolved governments in Wales and Scotland who control planning. The harsh truth is that onshore and offshore wind is bailed out by gas on the days when it inevitably cannot deliver. The correlation between gas-fired power and rising and falling wind power is near perfect. That's just a fact and it's not going to change any time soon. Close those gas turbines in 2030 if you dare Labour Party, and see how long we last without blackouts.
Who's job will it be to collect all the corpses at the bottom of each wind turbine?
unlink our energy cost from price of gas
definitely and stop giving them subsidies and the royal family money for using the sea bed .
See my comment and point above. Sadly, that's really hard to do a the moment when we are critically reliant on gas to not only provide a big chunk of baseload, but also bail us out when renewables inevitably fail to deliver when we need it. We're going to be tied to gas for longer than most people think.
@@iainmcdonald9764agree, but I think green hydrogen can be run in gas turbines to provide same back up.
@@Delchursing I'm no so sure. The energy losses associated with running electrolysers to generate the green hydrogen from a renewable source, and then compressing and transporting the hydrogen to where you might burn it in a turbine to generate electricity somewhere else are pretty big. On the order of 30-40% of the original electrical energy you put in and that's just a crazy waste. Unless you are thinking of liquifying and transporting hydrogen like LNG across an ocean and burning it in another country (like the insane plan that Germany and Canada have suggested) and are happy to only recover less than half of the input energy, then you might as well just use the energy you get from the renewable electricity in the first place, without anything more than transmission losses. The only advantage is the storage potential of the green hydrogen, in that you can potentially use it when you need it like natural gas - but the poor energy efficiency of the process probably makes that uneconomic in most cases.
@@iainmcdonald9764 in the Netherlands they are paying people to not connect solar to the grid. If instead we could harness this energy to run electrolysers then in a way I don't care about the inefficiency. Is that logical?
Should be more focus on cheaper energy
Not lots of taxpayers money used for lots of cables and infrastructure
A virtual power plant (VPP) is a network of energy sources that work together to provide power to the electrical grid. VPPs are made up of many different types of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as:


Solar panels

Batteries

Electric vehicles

Smart water heaters

Rooftop solar panels

Electric vehicle chargers
Energy transition from fossil fuels cannot be done powered by fossil fuels;
"No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future" (2017).
We need fossil fuel back up along with appropriately sized fossil fuel supply chains.
The grid is a $TRILLIONS infrastructure investment and was built out over 10 decades.
Grid owners need $100sBILLIONS cashflow every year.
If central generation then cashflow crashes when the sunshines on customers rooftop PV.
BVs oversized battery parked 23hrs every day and all selfparking selfplug-in V2G in the millions and millions then grid cashflow crashes all day long and all night long.
BVs trickle currents trading on a $60 wall outlet is ezi pezi.
Bump plug-in 23 hrs every day.
Millions and millions and millions of customers rooftop PV and BVs, then central generation and distant generation cashflow is a dead duck everyday the sun shines.
In warming latitudes shaded rooftops with PV panels will be a feature.
More grid capacity is stupendously expensive as it would need to be 7 times bigger.
Grid blindness is universal, and so people are deceived by bs promoters who want government taxpayers money 💰.
Why are we not investing in base load storrage? Look at America and what there planning in this field iron air batteries lithium and sodium iron all base load storage as well as other methods