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From: Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: 1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:40:16 +0000
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There is a startup company in the UK called NatPower (no relation to the 
real National Power PLC aka NPower) claiming to have over 25 years of 
experience in BESS. They are proposing 1GW (sic) BESS in all sorts of 
brown and green field UK sites. They have no track record that I can 
find. Does anyone here know of any real international project(s) that 
they have actually done and more importantly *delivered*?
(their own PR or its uncritical repetition in the press doesn't count)

Their website is very slick indeed but I suspect that beauty is only 
skin deep. I am interesting in evidence of substance not PR fluff.

Can someone provide me with some rough estimates of what a 1GW class 
energy storage system ought to look like in terms of layout and the 
number of container sized units and space required?
(or at least sanity check my guesstimate below)

Assuming that they mean 1GWh I reckon it will be about 2000T of Lithium 
batteries. If each module is storage container sized and can contain 
20m^2 of batteries I reckon it is about 100 units (twice that if I have 
over estimated how much battery you can safely fit in a module). I 
haven't been able to find any manufacturers specifications for them.

At what point in the scale up from 50MW storage units (which are quite 
common in the UK) to these new Gigaparks do things get interesting?

It also strikes me that if these storage battery systems have similar 
characteristics to the Lithium ion cells in my laptop they will require 
complete replacement every 5 or so years if they get cycled daily.

And I presume each module needs integrated fire suppression systems to 
handle thermal runaway problems. Lithium fires being notoriously 
difficult for ordinary fire fighting methods to put out.

Also what additional measures will it need to tie into 400kV supergrid?

How do you even do that at 1GW using semiconductor components?

It can obviously be done since some big interconnectors are DC but how 
much does that sort of hefty high voltage infrastructure cost?

-- 
Martin Brown