400KV requires 44,444 PP3 batteries. And a half. You wouldn't want to try that with your tongue!

Kudos to the companies that built this, and the infrastructure around it.

are not hydro electric dams bigger batteries?? i suspect a number of dams in europe store more than this battery. IMO the focus should be on 'natural' batteries, esp as wars are being fought over the land mined for lithium etc...

Look why bother giving a figure "We store enough energy to supply 3.1m houses with energy for 2 hours" when the 3.1m houses doesnt have any real world parallel!

A quick Internet search shows there are approximately 2.5m houses in Scotland. So surely a statement along the lines of "We can supply energy for EVERY house in scotland for ~2.5 hours!" would be a much better sound bite.

But it is great that they are implementing this, and using European tech to do it! :)

300MW divided by 3.1millon is 96W per home. Just about enough to run the TV. Tough if you want to boil a kettle...

They did say "energy", no mention of how much...

Do you really think all those people will be running their TV 24hrs a day? Even in Scotland it's unlikely they'd be running lighting to that extent.

Added to which this would only be drawn on while none of the renewable sources were providing power directly.

"Even in Scotland it's unlikely they'd be running lighting to that extent"

we only turn on the lights when guests are in

"You'll have had your tea?"

I disagree. I can assimilate what 3.1m houses means - I can derive a rough figure for how many people that covers, roughly what percentage of the UK populate that represents and so forth.

But "every house in Scotland" means very little to me. I don't know how many houses there are. Being pedantic, are we talking houses or households? Are we talking about populated house(holds) or including every holiday-let, second-home and other unoccupied premises?

I'm really puzzled as to what you mean by saying "3.1m houses doesn't have any real world parallel"!! I'd have said the real world parallel was... 3.1m houses!! Can't get much more real than that, and certainly more real than a nebulous "every house in Scotland".

"and using European tech to do it!"

Despite the leaders of Scotland and the UK incessantly touting that *we*, meaning their respective fiefdoms, are going to become world leaders in green tech. How does buying the engineering from Finland (who almost certainly bought the batteries from China -- a quick perusal of their website offers up no details but I'm pretty sure they'd have it splashed all over the front page if the batteries themselves came out of a factory in Europe) make us leaders?

Its a completely commercial play. There's big money to be made by being the generator of last resort especially if you can fuel up for free.

And, yes, houses as a unit of energy consumption is complete bollocks. Running 3.1m houses at 5pm is a very different prospect from doing that at 5am.

Zenobē claims Blackhillock will somehow save folks more than £170 million over the next 15 years on their bills .. belive it when I see £1 discount off my yearly bill or is this the same style money digital meters claimed to save for each person and in fact ended up costing each person? Spin, lies and deceit !!

Unless things have changed recently or are planned for the near future then my understanding is that the electricity price for a period (24hrs I think) is set by the cost of the most expensive generation. So if just 1% of generation is from gas-powered stations then that lovely cheap renewable electricity will cost the same per unit as if it were generated by gas. I bet the likes of Tesco and Aldi look on with envy at a market where the suppliers' prices are automatically raised to that of the most expensive every day.

As a minimum there should be a legal limit on the amount of profit the power companies are allowed to make under this absurd system but, IMO, it's the best reason in the world to nationalize them.

The pricing has to change but this is something OFGEM don't seem to want to tackle as it is profitable for generators. Really we need a more localised market with local pricing. And we are hampered by the abomination that is the smart meter rollout.

@Headley_Grange: "Unless things have changed recently or are planned for the near future then my understanding is that the electricity price for a period (24hrs I think) is set by the cost of the most expensive generation. "

It was vaguely like that a long while ago (actually a 30 minute trading and balancing period, not 24 hours), and there's still a wretchedly broken pretence that the system works this way now. However, there's all manner of different subsidy schemes for renewables dating back twenty plus years that distort this supposed wholesale market. The current method is Contracts for Difference, administered by the Low Carbon Contracts Company. Whilst the theory is that CfD enables the market to work, it clearly isn't much of a market when the most expensive wind farm (Walney) is getting £208/MWh when the average wholesale price is £80-90 at the moment. Likewise Hinkley Point C, which hasn't even been finished but has a current strike price of £125/MWh. All those CfDs will keep going up by inflation for the duration of the contract - in the case of Hinkley that's until about 2063.

It's the same "savings" associated with smart meters. In some cases the saving is "real" in the sense that it could avoid constraint payments to wind generators when there's no demand - your choice whether that's a real saving, or simply an artefact of a very a poorly designed subsidy scheme for renewables. How that stacks up against the capital and O&M cost of the battery system, and the inherent systemic losses of battery storage.

The power that goes into the Zenobe battery will already have been bought at a nice generous price from the Beatrice and Moray East wind farms. Moray East chose to defer their inflation linked CfD contract, meaning that this single wind farm has already hit consumers for an extra £460m, but they can/have reverted to their strike price where wholesale prices drop - an appalling contract design failure that means they can have their cake and eat it.. Beatrice benefits from an inflation linked strike price that's currently £194/MWh.

It's the same old rubbish from government - they'll credulously throw any amount of subsidies at anything that sounds vaguely net zeroish, but the way that the energy system is structured these subsidies don't come out of tax revenues, they're just added to consumer's bills. And THAT is why we have the most expensive electricity prices in the developed world.

To achieve net zero the government needs to encourage citizens to ideally switch to electrical energy only as electrical energy can be generated by renewable sources.

What I can see is that the UK seems to be encouraging the switch to electrciity by making it the most eexpensive option for energy. Why heat your home with gas when you can do it for 4x more with electricity?

If the price of elecricity was the same as the price of gas per unit of energy people would be queuing up for heat pumps and evs as the saving would make it a simple choice. Industry would switch to electricity wherever they could as well. Cheap 'leccy would be transformative.

But it'll never happen as it would need thinking that extended beyond the 4yr parliamentary term

Indeed, for reasons no one seems to quite understand all the green taxes are lumped onto electricity rather than gas.

Obviously, leccy is green, so it can pay a green tax. Gas isn't, so it can't.

Errr....

They are also encouraging us to move to electricity when the distribution network has not been upgraded to cope with the new loadings.

Yes there are people who will use averages to claim that there are no upgrades needed but the reality is the IET says its needs upgrading, the grid operators say it needs upgrading, new renewable projects are waiting years for connections and current large scale renewable generation has to be turned off due to lack of capacity in the network to get the 'leccy from the source to where it is needed.

Every little doesn't help said the Blair government's science adviser, unfortunately no longer with us. Google sustainable energy without the hot air.

Batteries probably can't do the job, except for smoothing.

We need the equivalent of a coal tip able to supply power for three months stacked in the rain outside power stations. Until a solution on grid scale at a cost equivalent to that of a coal tip is found, we will continue to burn gas when the wind and sun stop.

No-one seems to have an answer to that yet. Except nuclear.

In 3...2...1...

A battery with capacity to keep an iPhone powered for a couple of days.