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PatBPat et al - that brings the excess of buys today to over 450,000.

nice one PatBPat - this brings the balance of trades today to a nett excess of 160,000 Buys

there's news if you know where to look

I think we should all take his own advice "Learn to IGNORE, including me."

I

but even then it won't be enough.

Try £1.19 if they want mine.

BorderSpirit - I think you need to be more even handed assuming that the south is not pulling its weight. In fact as there is inevitably energy lost in transmission there is a nature desire on behalf of National Grid to site the energy generation close to populations centres. In fact as sources of energy generation become less centralised this is becoming even more the case. Remember that many large coal fired power generators were only sited in the midland because that is where the coal was.

If you look at the renewables map here you can see a fair distribution apart from snowdonia, the yorkshire dales and the highlands close to aviemore.

http://www.mygridgb.co.uk/map/

But it could fix our energy system. That was my point.

100 Billion spent on HS2 will not fix that.

Border Spirit - with respect I don't live in the south east but the east midlands. There are already trains that connect Birmingham to London as there are trains that connect London to York and York to Manchester and to Birmingham and Leeds. Shaving half an hour off the time to Birmingham does nothing to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

the general thrust of the article may be correct but utter balls such as the following should be called out by all right thinking people.

"[being autistic] It meant he could mentally create and store charts detailing a market’s microsecond to microsecond price fluctuations over periods stretching back years."

and smell which way the hedges are blowing

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/blackrock-targets-storage-with-new-multi-billion-dollar-renewables-fund?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreentechMedia+%28Greentech+Media%29

Yes

I was just thinking about HS2 and the number 100 Billion pounds.

100 Billion pounds is of course enough to create 100,000 Millionaires. If the project goes ahead I wonder how many of those would be in the companies building it, but I digress and must think more patriotically.

Okay let us consider that we can persuade 500,000 people from Birmingham (50% of the pop.) and 500,000 from London (5% of the pop) to use the line once a year for 10 years - how much does that work out per trip ? - Well that's 10 million more journeys, so only 10,000 pounds per trip, hmmm still seems quite expensive to me.

Okay, lets imagine that something crazy happens and the government for whatever reason decide not to go ahead, how much VRFB energy storage would 100 Billion quid get you ?

Well let's just say that Cellcube's $200/kWh figure ( https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/cellcubes-highly-vertical-ambitions-for-long-duration-redox-flow-batteries ) works out around £200/kWh when you add in all the import duties and tax and whatever, £100 Billion quid would buy half a Billion kWh, or to put it another way half a thousand GWh = 500 GWh.

This is a lot of storage, but is it as much as the UK needs ? Well the recent Future energy scenarios estimates that by 2050 we will need 50GW of energy storage, but they neglect to tell us what duration energy storage this averages out at, so let us assume 4 hours. This totals to 200 GWh.

So it seems clear that we can either press on with an overly expensive London-Birmingham vanity project or we could install ALL the Battery Energy Storage Systems that National grid says we will need, plus have half the money left over to build something like 80 GW of PV (2018 capex less than a dollar per Watt) that would be the kind of thing that you would need to charge up 200 GWh of batteries.

To me this seems like the obvious sort of no-brainer substitution that needs to happen. Boris has the opportunity to play the green card in the year of COP26 and keeps all those Tory MPs in the shires happy - the question is does he have the balls ?

vauch with inverters to transform between AC and DC you can site the batteries wherever you like. If you have a dc generating source such as PV nearby then you save on the inverter efficiency by coupling the DC PV system to the DC battery simply by DC, but because the DC is generally relatively low voltage the distances should not be too great. Having said that the PV arrays at the John ****erill site in Liege at connected to their battery systems only via DC and I would estimate that that distance is up to 200metres so it is not unreasonably close.

On grid systems you can place batteries at either end of constrained transmission lines to create a 'virtual transmission line' which would otherwise be overloaded during peaks of transmission. In this way you can avoid the need to stress the transmission line too highly, which might be dangerous or otherwise hugely expensive to try and mitigate.

In a true 'virtual transmission line' you are simply replacing A) the input to the line with input to the battery at the start and the B) the output with another battery at the other end of the line. If that is all you and all you were doing is emulating the old high transmission problem then you would still be pumping energy into A at the peaks of system demand thereby forcing you to use gas peakers or turning the nuke up to 11, however if you have batteries at both A and B there is no rule that says you have to charge A at the same time that you discharge B thus it is clear that you can be cleverer and not force yourself into the position of paying massively over the odds to run the gas peakers or similar and instead simply charge A when you have excess generational capacity earlier in the day, when everyone is stuck in traffic jams trying to drive to work.

Mikinaman - Isentropic were the guys I was talking to - they were still going a couple of years ago but disappointed to hear that they had folded. Oh well.

yes as I am from the cryo industry I was talking to some people about something similar about 7 years ago. The problem is that the cryobattery is relatively inefficient so cannot really be effectively used for repeated charging on a daily basis. Maybe it can be used for weekly balancing or to some extent interseasonal storage but in both cases the number of cycles you would get out of it per year might be only 30-50 instead of the 300 or so you could get out of a battery. Thus a battery might have paid for itself after 10 years but the cryosystem would take 100.

I can find no information on Margaret Lake Diamonds (well part from the Internet Archived website from mid 2019 that make zero mention of anything to do with Vanadium or VRFBs - https://web.archive.org/web/20190711123345/https://www.margaretdiamonds.com/ )

This would appear to be an RTO with Korid/Protean getting listed on the TSX

pb940 - I must confess that I have not come across either of the companies (Margaret Lake Diamonds or Korid) before but I have heard of Protean, a Korean manufacturer of VRFBs, I believe.

Those familiar with the Robert Friedland story may not be surprised to see the seemingly unconnected name of the first company popping up in connection with something completely different.