You also can't just arbitrarily increase the amount of wind generation and hope the grid copes. There need to be major structural changes to cope with the intermittency of power.
There's no easy solution for a single one of these problems, much less for all of them.
I think there's something to be said for storing excess energy like this - it beats paying into fossil fuel economies.
The one area where the principle works currently is ultra-short storage times like Tesla did in Australia... but that's not much of actual energy being stored, the service Tesla provides here is smoothing out demand - it has 194 MWh @ 150 MW, so barely one and a quarter hours of runtime at full load, with the complete grid having something like 60 GW peak capacity [1].
Another idea that is being floated is to repurpose old electric vehicle batteries or electric vehicles themselves as decentralized storage. That is a very charming idea, but again it requires large upfront investment for the batteries as well as for expanding the grid to keep up with the demand... and there are no standards yet for all the "smartness" needed for such a system to work, many chargers and electric vehicles are not capable of running in reverse, and many people are skeptic of putting a difficult to extinguish fire risk into their basement.
And yet another idea for arbitrage comes from the consumption side - basically have large consumers with storage such as a heating or warm-water system enabled for remote control so that oversupply spikes can be mitigated. But again, the current grids lack the "smartless".
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984457/australia-install...
It's definitely worth looking at with another 3x wind capacity or so.
There's coire glas being built already but we'll need more, and it takes about 2x as long to build as a wind farm does.
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...
Also that said, andy_ppp is right, or will be soon. If you want to make a dent in our fossil fuel needs on a cold windless day, you'll have giant globs of excess energy on warm windy days, that is simply orders of magnitude more than any practically-costed battery can store. At that point, who cares if electrolysis is only 30% efficient?
That 70% loss defines the lowest possible price difference between buy cheap power and sell expensive. Therefore any other smart consumer or storage has that margin to work against, to compete you out of the market. This is why batteries can work, in some cases. But it is a pure inefficiency that will find a minimum equilibrium.
Be real. It's not going to catch up financially. It will never catch up financially. Nuclear will be what we start deploying only when we're working on the last 20% of capacity and trying to wind down the old fossil fuel generators (which will themselves be increasingly expensive as they become peaker plants).
Nuclear will never appeal to market producers of energy. It's just too expensive. Which is why we need to throw public funds at it instead. And if we're going to throw public funds at the problem, let's start with the low hanging fruit. The UK should be putting that money somewhere else, not here.
It seems to me that these two sentences contradict. The first implies that Nuclear will be appealing for 20% of the energy market, which is still a huge market.
Or did you leave a number out of your comment and 400MW of wind is only 50M, one-tenth the price.
It's had 70 years!
Hi, I'm French, I know a thing or two about how valuable the ROI on Nuclear is.
More recently, we (stupidly) accepted an abominable price for energy from Hinckley C, and indemnified the operators (including EDF if memory serves) against the cost of decommissioning.
There's evidently a good way to do nuclear, but Britain doesn't do it. We are inept, so our ROI is lower than yours. It is a great shame.
How long will wind turbines or solar panels last? The batteries for them also need to be factored in