Well offshore wind is now too expensive.

Offshore wind auction fails to attract any bids - BBC News

Maybe it was always more expensive and the low strike prices were politically driven. 

I think you underestimate the size weight and cost of a battery that can store the output of a decent sized wind farm for any reasonable no of hours, say a day...

You need perhaps a few gigawatt hours of capacity to be useful, and this relatively little installation (50Mwatt hours) near Oxford needed about 60 shipping container sized  boxes full of battery and associated control electronics.

Project cost about £40 million, not sure how that scales as there were other things like transmission network upgrades in that cost as well. However to assume giga pounds per giga watt hour is probably not utterly unreasonable.

'pylon legs for scale'. Not sure how easy it would be to put many of these out to sea with the turbines, or on the land where the cables come ashore.

(formal report with more data here  from page 94 onward. Includes models  of battery voltages (P104) life against various use cases.-P100, )

Mike.

There's no particular reason why the battery needs to be in the turbine.  Or even very near to it.  The whole lot is connected to the grid, after all.  So building a big battery bank near the substation where the wind turbines connect to the grid would work fine.

It would need a lot of batteries to do any good.  Maybe 10's of MWh per wind turbine.  That's 4 orders of magnitude bigger than the battery sitting in my loft.  It may turn out that one way to dump excess electricity is to make hydrogen, or some other fuel, that you can burn later.

The economics of wind power are such that you have to massively over-build.  Because it's not windy everywhere all the time.  But wind turbines are now cheap, so that's the way you do it.

Simon Barker said:

So building a big battery bank near the substation where the wind turbines connect to the grid would work fine.

With battery stations connected to the grid the viability of wind power is greatlty enhanced.  I assume this would also apply to solar PV.

Hopefully we will start to see these appearing across the UK very soon.  With some careful planning this could also help with bottlenecked 400kv HV lines like from Scotland to England

Already happening, eg:-

https://www.energy-storage.news/800mwh-of-utility-scale-energy-storage-capacity-added-in-the-uk-during-2022/

https://www.edf-re.uk/what-we-do/battery-storage/

Thank you Roger for the links

Isn't nuclear for base load only though as the output cannot be varied to meet peak demand (as compared to gas, for example), so would still need storage which can produce variable output?

That was certainly true for earlier generation reactors, hence pumped storage systems like Dinorwig. Newer reactor physics allows reasonable load following, but probably not quick enough if there is too much wind and solar PV on the grid.

Hello Sam. Nuclear power plants are indeed well-suited for providing base load power. As discussed the output of nuclear power plants is generally not easy to adjust to meet the peak demand because of the time it takes to ramp up or down the reactors. In comparison  gas power plants can be more flexible in adjusting their output to match fluctuations in demand.
To address this issue I would think additional energy storage systems could be employed to help manage the variable output of other energy sources ? However, would integrating energy storage technologies with nuclear power plants enhance the overall flexibility and reliability of the electricity grid? 

This is a brief note on load following of npps. As the author notes they can have similar charecteristics to coal fired plants, but for fast response you need gas turbines.

A Brief Survey of Load-Following Capabilities in Modern Nuclear Power Plants (stanford.edu)

Yes, Roger is correct nuclear is best as base load.

Grid watch have only once I believe managed to get wind to supply the full load but even then they were importing some energy from Europe.  

Grid watch should be able to estimate the economic limit of nuclear we should be investing in.

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ 

Yes, Roger is correct nuclear is best as base load.

Grid watch have only once I believe managed to get wind to supply the full load but even then they were importing some energy from Europe.  

Grid watch should be able to estimate the economic limit of nuclear we should be investing in.

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/