[DrBazza]

This is a consequence of the UK having little capacity for pumped-storage, i.e. hydro-electric. We don't really have the height, and we have "areas of outstanding natural beauty" that cannot be built in easily, so we need alternatives to store the energy.

The rest of the world just builds a dam, creates a new lake, and moves on.

[btbuildem]

I would be grateful for having such strong legislation that protects the remaining swathes of nature.

[sloucher]

As I understood the article, this isn't about storing energy so much as just stabilising the frequency of the grid.

(Yes, if we used more hydro-electric then that would do the job for us, but it's not the case that we need this in order to store energy).

[LeoPanthera]

Frequency is proportional to voltage, and the voltage drops when the supply is insufficient, so this is absolutely about storing energy.

[jrockway]

That's not quite how the grid works. Consider a case where you wire two AC motors together. You spin one, and the other one spins. That is kind of like how the grid works; many loads are AC motors that spin at the line frequency, and generators try to also spin at that frequency. If the load on the motors increases, the load on the generators increases. Eventually there won't be enough energy going into the generator to spin at the nominal line frequency, and the motors attached to the mains will spin more slowly (and correspondingly use less power, and output less work).

This all becomes more complex when the loads are switch-mode power supplies and the generators are solar panels. The flywheel project adds some smoothing to the grid, as spinning generators are replaced with DC devices. But the principles are the same; without any extra devices, electricity has to be generated at the exact instant that it is consumed, and the consumers have a large physical effect on the generators.

(Frequency is not proportional to voltage in general, only in this spinning-generator connected to a spinning load case. You can obviously switch DC on and off at whatever frequency you desire, and a perfect on/off cycle consists of infinitely many frequencies at various amplitudes.)

[VBprogrammer]

I'm not sure where you are getting that frequently is proportional to voltage. Voltage in a synchronous generator is controlled by varying rotor excitation current. Frequently is controlled by varying the power to the prime mover.

But your main point is correct. This has to store energy to control frequency.

[jlmorton]

That's a good point. But I'm not sure it's quite as simple as you make it sound to construct a dam with 2.5 million cubic meters of concrete, divert all of the water for a major drainage basin into the newly-created reservoir, and flood 500 square kilometers of land to a depth of 100 meters, and then just move on.

[corobo]

Generally you don’t do it by yourself

[adolph]

Just put Thomas on the front of a train full of slate and everyone will love watching it go up and downhill as energy storage.

https://www.wired.com/2016/05/forget-elons-batteries-fix-gri...

[epistasis]

Hydro storage and flywheel storage have very different use cases, typically.

Flywheels contain tiny amount of energy, but can respond nearly instantaneously To provide frequency regulation on the grid.

Hydro has massive amounts of energy storage (days+ worth of output), but takes a looot longer to respond than flywheels.

I think we will see very little flywheel or dam construction in the coming decades; battery storage is becoming cheap enough that it will hit the non-linear inflection point in deployment in the next few years. First, lots of lithium ion, and likely after that lots of flow batteries.

[ascorbic]

Hydro can be fast. The UK uses pumped hydro for frequency management among other things, and can spin up several GW in seconds.

[epistasis]

Oh interesting! I had heard of some hydro in the US planning to instal batteries to help with faster response. But I guess there is great variety in design.

[grey-area]

Scotland has quite a lot of hydro schemes that could be used as pumped storage and 2 large projects planned.

Balmacaan and Coire Glas are in the planning stages and due to start building soon. There's plenty of high land available.

[deleuze]

lmao, only on hn would someone scare quote areas of outstanding natural beauty.

[happytoexplain]

>The rest of the world just builds a dam, creates a new lake, and moves on.

Your wording implies this is better than the flywheel solution - can you elaborate for a layman?

[DrBazza]

I'm just cynically generalising - the rest of world compared to the UK has typically less stringent planning requirements, and more mountainous terrain. To store energy in other countries (except perhaps Holland..!) you build a hydro dam, and pump water into those dammed lakes using excess electricity to store it up for later release.

We have mountains (Wales, Lake District, Scotland), but the likelihood of creating lakes for hydro use is close to zero. And you would need many, many, flywheels to substitute for one lake.

[sloucher]

> the likelihood of creating lakes for hydro use is close to zero

Yes, because they'd be lochs, not lakes :-)

We already have some (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station) and are talking about building more (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-445...).

[flohofwoe]

Also, pumped-storage plants are massively big and expensive projects. E.g. the pumped-storage plant near my home town [1] (which I think was the biggest in Europe for a while) took two decades from planning to running [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@50.514101,12.8731705,3067m/data...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markersbach_Pumped_Storage_Pow...

[jimnotgym]

There are two pumped storage stations in Wales that I know of. Dinorwig (where the power station is inside the mountain, as a student I got to go in there) and Ffestiniog. Wales has a long history of having dams built to provide water to English cities, see the Elan Valley, Llyn Vyrnwy, Llyn Clewedog and many more. The displacement of people and 'theft' of water even spurned a terrorist organisation to stop it called the Free Wales Army!

[pbhjpbhj]

>Wales has a long history ...//

Or to put it another way, Britain has a long history of building water capacity for British cities.

Scandalous! /s

[kitd]

Cofiwch Dryweryn!

[frobozz]

Cofiwch Dryweryn!

[DonaldFisk]

Remember Tryweryn!

In case anyone's wondering what this is about, in the 1960s the Tryweryn Valley in Wales contained a village (Capel Celyn) which was evacuated and the valley flooded to make a new reservoir to provide water for Liverpool. There's a portion of a nearby wall painted with these words.

[rbanffy]

And people say Hungarian is hard...

[twic]

It looks wild, but the pronunciation is very regular:

https://wikitravel.org/en/Welsh_phrasebook

Or rather, the orthography is - spoken Welsh is ancient, but the way of writing it with Latin letters is relatively new, so it was worked out fairly sensibly.

The actual grammar is headache-inducing, though.

[_sbrk]

Lol. Reminds me of The Crown where Price Charles is learning Welsh.

However, at least all the letters are familiar. Asian languages are at least an order of magnitude harder for westerners.

[rbanffy]

In Irish, at least, the letters being familiar doesn't help when they sound totally different.

When I moved here, I arrogantly stated I was going to learn Irish. I'm humbled now.

[baybal2]

> We don't really have the height,

UK is an island, and you have highlands. Why not make some salt water lakes there?

[dragonwriter]

Because saltwater is going to escape the artificial lakes even if they have impermeable beds, and we'll, there's a reason “salt the earth” is something that historically people have done, or at least talked about doing, to mortal enemies’ lands and not their own.

[swarnie_]

Have you seen how small the UK is vs. our population density? I highly doubt you could find a site big enough and at the correct elevation to make a noticeable difference.

We're the size of Michigan with 67 million people.