Storing the power produced by intermittent generation

I dread to think that they will be sending huge shafts down in to the earth, especially if they will need several for each town /village, but an above ground one sounds like a good idea.

I think they plan to use existing shafts at former coalmines and so on. There are plenty of those in some areas.

Really? That sounds ok if the shafts are in good repair, but I wouldn’t think it likely. Interesting though.

If they build above-ground shafts with the lifting mechanisms at the top, as high as mine-shafts are deep, there could be objections.

I think that there will objections whichever route they go!
Shafts opening up all over the place can be a nightmare 50 years down the line and the costs involved will be very high either way .
Think of all the old shafts opening up over the country.

The trial run in Leith will show up whether it seems viable. The ideal would be a reduction in the use of power, but that is increasing as the demand for more gadgets and equipment seems apparently insatiable.

Nuclear power and coal-fired power have drawbacks and dangers. Alternative sources are cleaner, but not as continuous and dependable. If this system stores power and brings it back into availability faster, cheaper and more efficiently than anything currently known, it will be worthwhile for energy firms to get old shafts back into use and safe.

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This is the same energy storage system used in grandfather clocks or with a spring in any clockwork mechanism, you can store compressed air, or pump water uphill then release it to generate power, they have all been used at some point

Their efficiency is poor, using a battery to store electricity from solar or wind generators is around 90% efficient. Tesla Powerwall is one system, another connects the battery in your electric car to store, then release power to your home. Currently too expensive for most of us, maybe widespread in 10yrs.

We visited the Dinorwic pumped storage sytem in Wales a few years ago. We were told that more electricity was used pumping the water uphill to the storage area than was generated when it was released through the tubines.

Think about that.

It worked because the water was pumped up when demand for electicity was low (late at night/early morning) and released to generate power when power demand was at its highest.

From Katie59's post I deduce that something similar happens when you compress air, more power is needed for compression than is generated when it is released.

The biggest danger from big batteries, however efficient they are, is the danger of explosions- and a big battery exploding would do a lot of damage over a large area.

You may remember a few years ago Samsung developed a small high capacity battery for one of its mobile phones, but it had to be withdrawn after a few months because of its tendency to explode, especially on planes.

At the end of the day there is no easy way out of the current system of hydrocarbon generated electricity. No matter how many wind turbines we build offshore all round the British Isles, The British Isles are often covered by large weather systems that mean the wind conditions are the same, whether on the furthest northern top of the Shetlands to the southern most tip of the Scilly Islands and in all our coastal waters.

I regularly check a site called GridWatch gridwatch.co.uk/ which gives the source of all the electricity the country is consuming at any given time. Over the last fortnight, on different days, it has been as much as 40% + of all our power and as little as 3%. It means that we will always need to have nearly as much back up capacity as there is wind capacity installed to provide support for when the wind doesn't blow.

Like it or not, until the Holy Grail of Fusion is sorted, the only way we can meet the exponentially growing demand for electricity, as everything now powered by hydrocarbons moves to electricity, is nuclear power.

Not the huge behemoths costing billions of £s and requiring Chinese technology, but the much smaller modular systems championed by Rolls Royce with the nuclear reactor based on their expertise in designing the engines for our nuclear submarines which have been in use for decades.