Next generation
We hear this week that ministers believe batteries will power Britain when there’s insufficient wind or sun. No doubt they haven’t read the progress reports on Leighton Buzzard, Britain’s flagship experimental battery bank. The reports admit that electricity storage by batteries is not profitable. What I can’t find in the reports is a figure for RTE (Round Trip Efficiency). RTE is the percentage of electricity originally fed into energy storage that is available for re-use later, the lost energy going as heat. It is worse for battery banks than laptops as the buildings housing the former need to be heated in cold weather, cooled in hot weather, and their control systems need energy too. I wrote to the company asking about RTE but, while they responded, the data wasn’t forthcoming.
At a cost of £19 million, Leighton stores a paltry 10 MWH (megawatt hours), whereas most good estimates for what Britain would require are between one million and ten million MWH. And lithium batteries last around seven years. Do the maths! If this idea were to go global, raw materials would likely soar in price and become scarce. Already cobalt, an invaluable material used in many batteries, has tripled in price in just 18 months. GEOFF MOORE
Braeface Park Alness, Highland So now the answer to our future electric power problems is batteries. As the hole that these green and renewable people dig for themselves gets deeper, the more crackpot will be the “answers” they create to cure their problems. Thanks to their unworkable ideas, we are now in a spiral of descending and costly madness that can only end in the cold and dark. MALCOLM PARKIN Gamekeepers Road Kinnesswood, Kinross In your article (24 July) reporting the WWF Scotland pronouncement that Scotland set a new record for wind electricity generation in the first six months of 2017, there was a claim that during the first six months wind generated enough electricity to supply Scotland’s total electricity demand for SIX days.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement considering the billions of pounds of capital invested in wind generation, plus the large consumer paid subsidies per unit of electricity generated – not to mention the consequent desecration of many of our landscapes. It also begs the question of where the electricity required for the other 175 or so days came from?
(DR) GM LINDSAY Whinfield Gardens, Kinross