However, Dinorwig, UK is far larger at 9.1 GWh, and is 40 years old.
Timelines go down as battery manufacturing scales up. TBMs and mountain cutting are not getting faster or cheaper.
I mean somebody should make a giant battery backup, but Dinorwig does have a pretty big advantage in terms of existing-ness.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-up-c...
(Add storage to offshore wind and it suddenly looks similar in cost to nuclear.)
So, no one’s suggesting replacing pump storage with giant battery banks, just spreading batteries and other storage across the grid.
We still have no technology capable of storing TWhs though, and that’s what we need to remove carbon from our power grid.
Nobody is arguing Dinorwig should be torn down. However, it took 10 years to build dinorwig. It takes less than a year to build a battery version of Dinorwig with basically 0 geographic requirements. The cost would be roughly comparable for a battery backup (at $200USD/kWh, it'd be $1.8 billion to build a similarly sized plant. or 1.4 billion GBP)
Cruachan 2 will take total site capacity to 1GWh https://www.drax.com/about-us/our-projects/cruachan-2/
> This could include the introduction by the UK Government of a ‘revenue stabilisation mechanism’ in the form of an adapted Cap and Floor scheme to support investment in long-duration storage. This would also be alongside broader consideration of how the electricity market, including the Capacity Mechanism and the Flexibility Markets, value the contribution of low carbon flexible assets such as pumped storage.
AKA... They're waiting for a government handout before they begin build. While they can 'buy low, sell high' and make a lot of money, they also want a government guarantee that they will make that much money. Payouts from that guarantee will effectively become an electricity tax.
