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Zebediah - the grid has always had difficulty in balancing demand and generation - in the distant past they simply made more energy than they needed and then discarded it in load banks (big resistors) - then they found pumped hydro energy storage and discovered that they could do something more useful with the excess energy - namely store it for later use. However peaker plants have never been fully offset by pumped hydro storage and so we have had peaker plants from day one of electricity generation.

These 'last minute contracts' you mention are simply the primary and secondary firm frequency response services that they have previously negotiated with various suppliers, some of which are operated by batteries - you can find out more about primary and secondary frequency regulation in this article :- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414 and the contained reference https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705 , if you want to find out more about the National Grid FFR contracts they are described here:- https://www.nationalgrideso.com/balancing-services/frequency-response-services/firm-frequency-response-ffr

dumaskullanga - he is also the author of the 2014 Adam Smith Institute (self confessed neoliberal think tank) "Solar Power in Britain: The impossible dream"

dubmaskullanga - I find this one easier to read:- https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent

Yellow is PV, Cyan is wind, currently supplying 39% of UK electricity.

Zebediah - I'm afraid that you seem a bit wide of the mark on windpower. Yesterday windpower accounted for 30% of UK electricity generation and I did not notice any power cuts.

Windpower has accounted for more than 43% of Denmark's electricity generation since 2017, with plans to increase this to over 80% by 2035.

We've been getting this kind of stuff from the telegraph for years. Fortunately it makes no difference to reality.

Uksteve - he's out of touch what what is really going on in VRFB marketing. Plus he is also running marketing for a number of Lithium ion companies.

we are aware of all Vanadium projects, yes.

My guess on the immiscible thing is that it would likely be the Fe/Br battery - Br of course being more soluble in organic solvents than aqueous ones. I've heard of some people working on that but not for the benefit of being able to do without the membrane. The trouble is that this would place quite a strict requirement on the power stacks to remain perfectly horizontal or you get all of one phase at one end of the power stack. The membrane allows you much more flexibility in what you can do to the power stack - orientation, flow profiling etc, albeit at the expense of paying for it.

I believe that those flow batteries use ferrocyanides

Hamil - in this context the key thing to point out to him is that Vanadium is more plentiful than Nickel, Chrome, Zinc or Copper - our US cousins seem to think it is rare, only because they don't mine any in their own country, yet.

It's literally the one metal that you would choose to make a massive scale energy storage industry out of, and its the only metal used in any quantity in the VRFB.

indeed we shall see

Zebediah - the transmission lines and all the step-up step-down equipment of course has a maximum rated limited, which has to be bigger than the maximum peak transmission that that part of the grid experiences. As many fossil-fueled systems of transportation and heating become electrified the amount of electrical energy being transmitted around the grid will necessarily increase.

Either you have to increase the transmission capacity of the transmission lines or you arrange it that the peaks of consumption do not produce simultaneous peaks in transmission. The way you do this is to store energy in batteries before you need it. You do this when the grid has excess generation power and when the amount of energy being transmitted around the grid is also lower than the average. You deliver this stored energy when demand is high and the amount of transmission on the grid is also high.

Thus at that point you do not want to be transmitting the energy a long way across the grid as you will only be putting yourself back into the situation of pushing the transmission limits of the lines, ergo you want to locate the energy storage close to centres of demand, not generation.

Above I describe the peak shifting application and not of the backup application that batteries can of course provide, eg should a generator go down unexpectedly. In this scenario you might assert that you want to have battery back up by every generator, acting as a simple drop in replacement. This way of looking at things quite clearly overstates the amount of batteries that you need as you don't need to guarantee that every generator remains supplying in the one in a trillion year scenario that all generators go down simultaneously (if that's the case it is likely that there are bigger issues than keeping the lights on) - a few dotted around will hopefully do for the whole country should 2 or 3 generators fail at the same time.

I doubt it Matt there are not the patterns redolent of previous incarnations

dubmaskullanga - exactly right.

You've also skipped , to my mind correctly, ahead from the obvious 'put the batteries next to the windfarms so that you can turn them into something like a baseload generator' to 'put the battery storage close where you are going to ultimately need the energy'.

Of course the latter approach is one that has clearly been envisaged within the Eskom 1440 GWh BESS proposal - they have a ring of batteries located around capetown, a high demand area, a long way from the main sources of generation which are centred around Johannesburg.

Who is the GWPF ? From google:-

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is a lobby group in the United Kingdom whose stated aims are to challenge "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. Wikipedia

Founder: Nigel Lawson

You can get further information here:- https://www.desmog.co.uk/global-warming-policy-foundation

Madasahat - it's a narrative that the GWPF have been pushing at the obvious newspapers for years

yep the SP certainly seems to be doing that

I don't think it applies to aim, our Market Makers don't need to use these newfangled computer things.

anything this morning ?

Vauxhall Viva - this of course is the reason I invested in commodities in the first place - to have a reserve of value that is immune to what paper currencies do.

Vanadium is not just any old commodity, as you point out we are standing on the threshold of a huge potential change in its usefulness to humanity, with climate change or building safety not going away any time in the next 1000 years.