The Gyle Premier Inn in Edinburgh has just installed a 100kW Li-ion storage battery, enough to power about 70 hair dryers. Rarely in the history of renewable energy has a battery so tiny attracted the attention of so many. Here, based on limited information, I make an attempt to scope out the specifications of this battery and how it might assist in cutting the hotel’s costs, if at all, and whether it makes any difference if it does.
Everything we know about the E.On Li-ion battery is contained in these excerpts from the 7 Jan, 2019, which was reported by numerous other web sites:
Whitbread-owned Premier Inn is trialling a new 100kW lithium ion battery at the 200-room site in Edinburgh. The battery is 3m3 in size and weighs approximately five tonnes. It has capacity to run the Gyle hotel – including powering meals cooked at its Thyme bar and grill – for up to three hours. The battery takes two hours to fully charge and will be used for at least 2-3 hours per day on-site. The battery allows the Premier Inn to avoid increased peak-time energy costs and generate revenue by offering energy support services to the National Grid. The installation is expected to save the hotel £20,000 per year.
In summary:
- Power output 100kW
- Charge time 2 hours
- Discharge time up to 3 hours
- Full charge-discharge at least once/day
- Size 3 cubic meters
- Weight Approx. 5 tonnes
I looked for E.On battery specifications on the web but couldn’t find any. It is in fact now virtually impossible to obtain battery specifications from UK web sites without requesting a quote whether you want one or not.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In 4Q 2018 Gorona del Viento (GdV) supplied only 27.7 % of El Hierro’s electricity and 6.4% of its total energy consumption, down by a factor of almost three from the 74.2% and 17.1% recorded in 3Q 2018. Since project startup in June 2015 GdV has supplied 45.2.% of El Hierro’s electricity and 10.4% of its energy. During 2018 it supplied 56.6% of El Hierro’s electricity and 13.0% of its energy, up from 46.3% and 10.6% in 2017. Whether this is a result of improved practices or stronger winds in 2018 is unclear at this time. There is an ongoing labor dispute at the Llanos Blancos diesel plant, where workers are demanding more money because their work load has quadrupled since GdV came on line.
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a recent and significant climate perturbation that may still be affecting the Earth’s climate, but nobody knows what caused it. In this post I look into the question of why it ended when it did, concentrating on the European Alps, without greatly advancing the state of knowledge. I find that the LIA didn’t end because of increasing temperatures, decreasing precipitation or fewer volcanic eruptions. One possible contributor is a trend reversal in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation; another is an increase in solar radiation, but in neither case is the evidence compelling. There is evidence to suggest that the ongoing phase of glacier retreat and sea level rise is largely a result of a “natural recovery” from the LIA, but no causative mechanism for this has been identified either.
Tesla has repeatedly claimed in publications, articles and tweets from Elon Musk that its Reno, Nevada Gigafactory will be powered 100% by renewables. Specifics on exactly how Tesla plans to do this are sparse, but the data that are available suggest that Tesla’s 70MW rooftop solar array won’t come close to supplying the Gigafactory’s needs and that the other options that Tesla is now or has been considering (more solar, possibly wind, battery storage) will not bridge the gap. As a result the Gigafactory will probably end up obtaining most of its electricity from the Nevada grid, 75% of which is presently generated by fossil fuels.
This recently-issued study (the “Assessment”) was seized on by the media as proof of the massive damage the US will suffer if nothing is done about climate change. The Assessment’s conclusions are based largely on speculative model projections that aren’t amenable to checking, but it also claims that the US is already experiencing some of the impacts of man-made climate change, and these claims can be checked. This post accordingly evaluates them claim-by-claim and finds that they are rarely backed up by any hard data, that in some cases they are contradicted by disclaimers buried in the text, and that in no case is there any hard evidence that conclusively relates the impacts to man-made climate change. The credibility of the Assessment’s predictions can be judged accordingly.
The list of countries, states, cities and towns that have announced ambitious plans to go 100% renewable continues to grow. The latest entrant is Spain, which according to 
For some time now we here on Energy Matters have been harping on about the prohibitive costs of long-term battery storage. Here, using two simplified examples, I quantify these costs. The results show that while batteries may be useful for fast-frequency response applications they increase the levelized costs of wind and solar electricity by a factor of ten or more when used for long-term – in particular seasonal – storage. Obviously a commercial-scale storage technology much cheaper than batteries is going to be needed before the world’s electricity sector can transition to intermittent renewables. The problem is that there isn’t one.
IRENA, the International Renewable Agency, has just published 
Buckland is one of a number of projects in remote Alaskan villages that aim to replace expensive diesel with “cheap” solar. Here I examine how much diesel the Buckland array will actually save and how cheap the solar electricity that replaces it will be. The results show that Buckland’s solar array will cut its annual diesel consumption by 3% at most and that any impacts on electricity rates will be imperceptible. If the array’s capacity is expanded to the level where the impacts do become perceptible then electricity rates will probably increase because solar electricity will likely be more expensive than the diesel electricity it replaces. The rationale for the project is therefore questionable (Inset: Buckland Village, Credit NANA regional corporation).
Well over half of Scotland’s wind generation between January 12, 2018 and the present was exported to England and not consumed in Scotland. Euan Mearns reached substantially the same conclusion in his review of 
We are told that the cost of Li-ion storage batteries is decreasing. Not so with Tesla, which has just increased the price of its 13.5 kWh Powerwall unit plus supporting hardware from $US6,600 ($489/kWh) to $7,800 ($578/kWh). The $100/kWh “holy grail” price considered necessary to support mass deployment of battery storage is obviously still some way off. To follow we have our usual mix – the latest doings of OPEC; natural gas in California; coal in the US, Germany and Finland; nuclear in Japan, Ontario, India, Belgium and Germany; hydro and pot in Canada; 100% renewables in Puerto Rico and Scotland; the Ireland-Wales Greenlink; the UK backs off EVs; car bodies made from carbon fiber batteries and what climate change is going to do to beer.
A number of operating small-scale renewables plants provide advance warning of the potential problems involved in transitioning the world to renewable energy, but only two of them – Gorona del Viento in the Canary Islands (GdV) and King Island, Tasmania (KI) – provide grid data that allow their performance to be checked. In this post I summarize the results of another batch of KI data covering the period from July 15 through September 30, 2018. Over this period KI generated about 60% of its electricity from renewables, effectively the same estimate as I made for October and November 2017 in 
The IPCC Special Report:
The results of the report are presented in:
Here I address only the first three documents. The Chapters are a little too long for a brief review.
What the press release says
We begin with the more important statements made in the press release, which is what the media will read first and quite possibly all the media will read:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…