UK's largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation

Plugging in your EV might charge to 40% immediately. When it charges to 80% doesn't matter if it has that charge in the morning. So it probably charges somewhere in the night.

Starting your dishwasher, washing machine dryer on a timer before you go to work, so it runs when energy is cheaper.

This doesn't eliminate the need for storage, but reduces its need.

You could make the argument in the other direction: the AI training datacenters could run for 23/24 hours, saving electricity at the peak time when it's most expensive and when they're pushing up the cost of electricity for everyone else the most .. but of course all those GPUs are too expensive to leave idle.

> With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.

Unless they updated the original post, that all sounds correct to me. It's a 2-hour battery, rather common in the industry.

EDIT: Ah, you mean the https://stateraenergy.co.uk/news/thurrock-energisation is wrong, with the fantastically outrageous statement of "delivering its full output of up to 600MWh within seconds."

Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.

You could change that, but it would just mean prices will be higher at another moment (in a perfect market), no?

We work in half hours, 48 of them per day. If you're a very large user (e.g maybe you're a factory which makes cars), or if you choose to do this at home, you can be metered in half hours and billed this way.

In advance of the half hour, we guess how much power we might need. 9pm here soon, I reckon 30GW per the British mainland. Now we run an auction. Everybody who can make power from 9pm to 9:30 bids, saying how much they'd accept to make power

Then, starting from the lowest bids, we add bidders up to 30GW of power, those people will make our 30GW of electricity, and we pay all of them the same price, that price is last bid needed to meet our 30GW goal.

This is often a closed cycle gas turbine because:

1. There are fucking shitloads of them. Probably 35GW nameplate, maybe 40GW, that is a lot of power generation. More than any other single type (Wind can deliver about 20GW to the grid, solar is smaller, nuclear is much smaller, storage also smaller even if you count it as generation which it technically is not)

2. They are (almost, maintenance is necessary) always willing to run, for a price. Rain or shine, night or day, if there is gas at any price they can charge that price plus a little profit to make it into electricity. Only question is if you'll pay

For a typical home tariff the "supplier" you're paying has guessed that on average they'll make a healthy profit if they charge you say 24p per kWh plus standing.

They pay that half-hourly price, if they guessed badly wrong and can't cover the difference they go bankrupt, which sucks for the government who are on the hook to ensure you still get electricity anyway.

So, the de-coupling would happen automatically if the current system stayed the same but you added a lot of cheap storage and enough wind power that on average the country was mostly wind powered. Or indeed nukes or solar if somehow this country built loads of nuke stations or got improbably sunnier.

The issue in the UK is that we moved to renewables that can't produce energy at the margin, marginal prices are still driven by gas, and we simultaneously decided to shut down large amounts of non-renewable sources of energy to satisfy the ambitions of politicians.

Result? Highest energy prices in the world, most energy-intensive industry shutting down, and massive reliance on political direction/regulators by industry (the original comment is not right, since the mid-2010s energy companies have been directed day-to-day by the state, invest in this project, don't do this anymore, etc. Our policy is made by people who wish the world was a certain way, reality doesn't matter to them).

Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.

In terms of countries, it's closer to France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands than to Scotland.

It is in the UK though, so, if your model of where "Scotland" is just means vaguely "the United Kingdom somewhere" and thus also includes London then yeah, close enough.