ESB: un Giga Watt di accumulo di energia ora disponibile sulla rete elettrica irlandese
ESB – One Giga Watt of Energy Storage Now Available on Ireland’s Electricity Network
di It_Is1-24PM
ESB: un Giga Watt di accumulo di energia ora disponibile sulla rete elettrica irlandese
ESB – One Giga Watt of Energy Storage Now Available on Ireland’s Electricity Network
di It_Is1-24PM
8 Comments
Doc Brown would be impressed.
turlough hill is pretty cool. I’d say there’s a couple secret nuclear bunkers headin in there somewhere. It looks like the secret lair from [You Only Live Twice]()
Going back to Mid-80’s Ireland would be an utterly alien experience.
Shouldn’t storage capacity be measured in either Joules or MW hours? A GW is a unit of power, it doesn’t tell us anything about how long that power can be sustained.
One Giga Watt sounds great, but doesn’t mean much. Is it 1GWh total or less/more. I’m pretty sure I’ve read Ireland needs approx 10TWh stored energy to achieve its 2050 net zero goals. So 1 down and only 9999 GWs to go so….
OK, so the ESB press release is a mess, and this coverage from irishtechnews has just reproduced the mess…
Let’s try to make some sense of it.
Ireland now has (just over) 1 GigaWatt of **power** that can be called on from energy storage. Peak demand is about 5.5 GW, so we can now meet a swing of about 18% of peak demand from storage, which is pretty cool. The batteries should be able to be brought fully online within about 1 second. Turlough Hill will take about 70 seconds to go from practically zero to full output.
731.5 MW of power from batteries. Probably a mix of 1-4 hours storage at that power, so call somewhere in the range 750-2900 MWh of energy storage.
292 MW of power from Turlough Hill. I haven’t found an authoritative number for its MWh of storage. Four hours at full rated capacity would be fairly typical for European pumped hydro. It has a 281 metre drop, and 2.3 million cubic metres of water in the upper reservoir, so I think that means that the theoretical max storage with 100% efficiency would be 6 hours, so a real-world 4 hours is probably about right (call it just under 1200 MWh).
So in total we’ve got something in the range of 1-4 GWh of storage from pumped hydro and batteries.
We often talk about grid storage in terms of power rating, rather than energy rating, because that’s usually what the grid operator cares about most: how quickly the storage as a whole can respond to real-time changes. As long as the storage gives response times in seconds, and can last an hour or more, that gives enough time for other generators to change their outputs to provide longer-duration grid balancing services.
And whoever wrote this in the ESB press release, and whoever copied & pasted it at irishtechnews, both need to go back to school to brush up on their units:
>One Giga Watt of energy storage is enough to power the equivalent of approximately 450,000 homes for one hour,