The U.K. government on Tuesday introduced new rules requiring developers to install heat pumps and solar panels in all new homes across England, in policymakers’ latest response to the economic fallout of the Iran conflict.
U.K. ministers say the Iran war and the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market reinforces the need to leverage clean power as an energy security tool.
The Future Homes Standard — a set of new-build regulations for England from 2028 — will establish requirements to ensure homes are built with on-site renewable electricity generation, the majority of which is expected to be provided by solar power.
The rules will also see homes built with low-carbon heating, such as heat pumps and heat networks.
The government added that plug-in solar panels, which homeowners can install on balconies, would be available within shops over the coming months.
Its definitely a cool option where practical, but batteries will fit almost anywhere and take a tiny amount of space compared to this. Where its practical though its a cool option.
Most substation could pretty easily hold a large battery and you could plop a handful down on any empty lot anywhere in a city and have megawatt hour level storage.
The downside of the pumped is it doesn’t provide instant grid balancing like a battery would as its a much slower option.
Also you have to maintain the pump and the mechanism that let’s the water out when needed, its not quite as low maintenance as you think, and the whole mechanism itself needs power. It probably needs a gas/battery backup to open the gates in a power outage to generate power for the outage.
My thought along the lines of “where practical” is that it can be used as a reservoir for fresh water as an added function, especially in high elevation areas or renote rural areas where having direct mains pressure water isn’t viable.
In the event of a true grid level power outage it would require staff to physically open pump valves, the same way a regular hydroelectric power station or potable water pumping station would, I wasn’t thinking of the system being entirely automated.
It’s not an infallible system, absolutely. The same way battery storage isn’t a perfect solutuon. This is just a more stable and reliable source of power than battery storage, which degrades in the course of around 5 years in the case of batteries like LiFePo4 or other Lithium ions.
A water pumping or hydroelectric station which can survive for multiple decades with regular maintenance, using already existing technology and infrastructure (there are a lot of companies that produce very robust pumps for the petrochemical industry that wouldn’t lose out on too many contracts if they supported the idea, and in a lot of places where it makes economic sense to build, there’s already water infrastructure that could handle if not benefit from additional water storage, not even mentioning the potential for more semi skilled jobs keeping the sites operational. )
You’re a little off on your 5 year for battery, its more like 15-20 years for grid scale LFP batteries and they still have ~80% power after that.
If they can find spots by existing water reservoirs that does seem like an ideal location.
Edit: Also newer Sodium based batteries are even better than that, but they do take more space than LFP. They might exceed 10,000 cycles which could be 25-30 years and the tech is very early.
Ahh my bad, I’m running off my knowledge of the lifetime of batteries we use at work and extrapolated out, the industries are a little less lenient on how long they can be used for (despite being functionally usable, insurers love to say “nah, swap them out, they’re safety critical.” So we send them off to get recycled/reused elsewhere)
Glad to hear the tech’s improving
Are the batteries you use smaller and in a high cycle environment? Like are you fully discharging and recharging it multiple times a day, like our older cell phone batteries? That can definitely wear them quicker, but ya that’s not typical for grid scale which would be closer to just a cycle a day.
Kinda lame about the early recycle (reuse would be better) but ya if they are that saftey critical I can see insurance being very conservative.
They’re not high cycle but when they are under drain it’s pulling a lot, and they’re consistently sat at high temps which can’t be the most comfortable.
The company that they go to is pretty good, the batteries only get recycled if there’s damage or they’re too far gone.