 Good afternoon everybody. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's webinar. Today's webinar is part of the Rethink Energy Series co-organized by the IIEA and the ESB. To kick us off, we're going to just have a first introduction from Jim Dollard, who is the director of ESB Generation and Trading. Let me hand over to Jim. Thanks very much, Lisa. Good afternoon everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of ESB, I'm delighted to welcome you to the latest lecture in the Rethink Energy Series in conjunction with the IIEA. It's rare I use the word excited. I am excited to be at this lecture today and maybe I'll explain why. ESB has a net zero by 2040 strategy. That is a really challenging target for us as a utility and I as director of Generation you don't have a key responsibility in reducing emissions. We see a net zero reality for our generation business across three key planks. Renewables, large-scale renewables, dispatchable generation, which will be important and most importantly in the context of this conversation storage. Storage is going to be a huge part of our future. When we look at I suppose the history of this island and energy security and I suppose the very makeup of the electricity system in the past and the recent past made up to 90 days of energy storage for electricity on this island by 2030 as we progress we'll have less than a week probably closer to five. When you look at that future and an intermittent renewables future it's clear as we look forward that intermittent renewables which we are absolutely adamant to drive out will require storage, large-scale storage. We are going to play a part in you know shorter term batteries and we are rolling out currently 300 megawatts of batteries but long-term seasonal storage is going to be required on this island and you know under certain circumstances we believe Ireland in itself will need 10 terawatt hours of storage you know in a relatively short time frame. So that's something like 20 times for those of you who are familiar with the Auri system, Turlock Hill which is you know a massive achievement in its day, 20 Turlock Hills in the context of the storage we need. You know Ireland is is driving towards you know in net zero I suppose government policy has you know laid the groundwork but we believe large-scale storage as I said is going to be a key part of that and green hydrogen is a key part of getting or enabling the storage. I'm pleased to say in recent weeks the government has launched a national hydrogen policy and ESB fully supports that. We fully support the steps that the government are setting out now in terms of hydrogen and related storage. ESB in conjunction with the Carbon X and this was their partner SNAM our intent on building large-scale storage projects around the island of Ireland but also in terms of building green hydrogen clusters that's part of that. We see that as a really important part of our remit as we go forward but also very important for the island. We're looking forward to the publication next week I believe or the week after of the energy security review from the government and we think that will be really important in this context and I suppose when you stand back as we see it now I've said there's three aspects to a net zero world from a generation perspective storage dispatchable generation renewables and today we're talking about storage which is a key plank so we are excited really excited when you look at where we have to go in terms of storage to hear what Professor Chris Lowell and Smith has to say in terms of the type of infrastructure that we will need for a zillion energy system the scale of that challenges of that challenge and the developments that are happening elsewhere so I hope you all enjoy this session we're really looking forward to it. Thank you very much Jim that's great so let's move on we're really delighted to be joined today by Professor Professor Sir Chris Lowell and Smith and he is emeritus professor at the Department of Physics and the University of Oxford and Sir Chris will speak to us for about 20 to 25 minutes or so and then we will go to a Q&A with the audience and so if you're at ESB headquarters you can join the discussion using Slido and you can enter the code 1927123 I hope you got that and if you're watching the event remotely you can use the Q&A function on zoom which you should see on your screen so regardless of which way you're joining the Q&A please give your name and the name of your organization when asking your question and so you can put these you know in the Q&A throughout the session as they're occurring to you and then we'll come to them at the end of the presentation after Chris has finished. So I should remind you that this is being recorded and both the presentation and also the Q&A discussion will both be on the record and we'd also encourage you to join the discussion using the Twitter handle at IIEA. Okay so I will now formally introduce Sir Chris Lowell and Smith and then hand over. Chris is a emeritus professor as I said already and he's recently launched the study by the he led the launch study by the Royal Society on Large Scale Energy Storage and Chris has among other things served as the director of energy research at the University of Oxford from 2011 to 2017. He has been the president of the council of the synchroton light for experimental science and applications in the Middle East and he was director general of CERN when the large hydrogen hydrogen collider was approved and construction was started. So professor Lowell and Smith's contributions to theoretical particle physics and leadership have been recognized by awards and honors worldwide including election to the Royal Society which awarded him a Royal Medal in 2015. So I would like to join you all in welcoming Professor Sir Chris Lowell and Smith to give his presentation. We're very excited to hear more about energy storage and particularly as Jim Dollard has outlined in the context of our rising share of renewables in Ireland. So over to you Chris. Thank you very much Lisa. So let me start by getting up my slides. So get into slideshow. Is that visible? It is. Okay. So I'm drawing on the report that we recently published which is about the situation in Great Britain but the lessons we've learned are more generally applicable and I will be saying some things about the situation in Ireland and the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. So I'd like to start with a sort of a with a list of points that I'm going to make and then I'm going to work through those points and joined up the dots and those points are that as fossil fuels have phased out an increasing share of final energy will be provided by electricity as electricity is decarbonized an increasing fraction will be provided by wind and solar. High levels of wind and solar must be complemented by storage or large scale low carbon flexible supply. The need for long-term storage and or flexible supply has generally been seriously underestimated because the periods that have been studied in most of the studies are not long enough. Despite the fact that the need is bigger than some people have thought the storage needs can be met while keeping the average cost of electricity at a reasonable level but it's not going to happen unless markets reward the provision of storage adequately. Finally in Great Britain long-term storage will be best provided by storing hydrogen and solution mine salt cabins but other solutions as I will discuss are available in regions without salt deposits. So here's my first point I think we all know this that as we move out of using fossil fuels in transport heating our homes and industry they'll be largely replaced by electricity and as electricity is decarbonized it will be replaced a lot of it will be provide an increasing fraction will come from wind and solar because they're very abundant and they're cheap. Now high levels of wind and solar must be complemented by storage and or low cost flexible supply and as I've said the need has been generally underestimated so that begs the question why is storage and or flexible supply needed and how should the need for storage or flexible supply be met? So wind and solar vary on time scales from minutes up to as we'll see decades you can easily install more than enough generation capacity for wind and solar to meet more than demand on average and but there are times when there is no wind the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining and those that really happens so but on the other hand electricity and supply and demand must exactly balance at all times or the lights go out so to deal with those times when there's none and you want the lights to stay on we must complement large scale wind and solar by storing excess wind and solar to use later and or adding large scale zero or low carbon flexible sources there must be large scale because we're talking about large scale wind and solar but there aren't many of them the large scale low carbon sources are nuclear but it's expensive and it's especially expensive if you try to operate it flexibly bioenergy with carbon capture and storage it's expensive and if you built it since it's carbon negative you'd like to operate it flat out not flexibly gas with carbon capture and storage again it's expensive and even more expensive if you operate it flexibly and it's not zero carbon in some countries you can get a lot of hydro but in Great Britain and Ireland there is some hydro okay but it's not large scale on the scale of the whole electricity demand now how should the demand be assessed you need to compare wind and solar supply with demand hour by hour or shorter periods if you have the data over as long a period as possible in Great Britain we are using in the model provided by consultancy a free of 570 terawatt hours of demand that's about twice today's and we've looked at 37 years of wind and solar supply modeled on the basis of real wind and solar data so these are actual weather data that period that period is probably not long enough and I can't stress enough that you must look at long periods now if I set the average wind and solar over 37 years to be equal to the average demand then if you had storage that was 100 efficient and you stored every puff of wind and every ray of sunshine since we've set supply equal to demand you could meet demand but you couldn't meet it instantaneously so here for example this in black is the model of demand higher in the winter than in the summer this is 2050 demand here mix 2080 solar 20 wind 80 as wind and solar supply so you see here there is more wind and solar supply than demand so you can eat demand and you can put the excess into store here you have to take something out of store then you put more back in store then you take more out of store and so on and so forth now this sort of time period is what has been the focus of most studies and most studies talk about long term storage meaning saying it's more than 12 hours for me long term storage is years meeting this need on ours is relatively easy the real problem is the very long term needs as we'll see in a minute notice by the way that people often talk about seasonal storage Tim just did it but in fact if you make the British Isles wind and solar appropriately you can more or less on average balance demand in the winter and the summer but then it's out of balance in every individual year so some years you have to transport energy from the summer to the winter some from the winter of the summer and often between different years so it's not really seasonality that's the issue it's volatility so as I said the real problem is long term variability so here I've plotted the same sort of thing as here with supply set equal to demand over 37 years actually there's only 36 years here I didn't want to split the winters so I took years from beginning of April to the end of March now here in a given year is the surplus with everything normalized to be 570 terawatt hours a year here's a deficit and this year there's a surplus here and so on and because I've set them equal on average the number of the surpluses and the deficits are exactly equal so if I stored all the surpluses I could fill the deficits but the problem comes here look at this or that it's particularly clear here here are three years where in succession there's very very little wind you can't fill these deficits with energy stored here there's not enough or here it's in deficit in fact you've got to use energy that's been in the store from the very beginning 30 years before so the message and this is true also when I add inefficiencies is that we need to store tens of terawatt hours in Great Britain for decades now if you're going to store a lot of energy for as long as that you've got to have something which is very cheap per unit of energy stored and storing hydrogen in solution mine salt cabins is by far the best option in Great Britain you couldn't conceivably do this with batteries you'd be bankrupt in a couple of weeks if you bought that much storage nor could you do it with pumping water up into dams and taking it out again this need is a thousand times what we have in Great Britain for pumped hydro storage and you could increase that but not more than a factor of 50 percent or something so as I've said and it's already clear back here actually but the you've got to look at very long periods and if you look at short periods as most studies have you will underestimate the need for storage so let me come back to that and I want to show this in what I will call a benchmark model so this is a model which I am not advocating in which the only thing you have is hydrogen storage and wind and solar supply you've got to have a little bit more than that because there are very short demands for very rapid demands for electricity when part of the system fails or the proverbial cup of tea at the halftime and the FA cup final or whatever and for that you need some storage that can respond in milliseconds that will be provided by batteries but meeting that need takes very little energy so we don't have to take it into account in modeling though we do put it into account in the cost now in a minute I'm going to add other things I'm not advocating this benchmark model we'll add other stores and sources of supply but let's start with this simple model to get oriented in this simple model this is the level of hydrogen in the store over 37 years it's jumping up and down every hour but there are 330,000 hours here so you can't see that the resolution is not good enough now the important thing to say is that if I forget the contingency the size of this store is the difference between the maximum and the minimum it's about 100 terawatt hours of hydrogen energy if I'd studied these 23 years in the middle the difference between the maximum and the middle minimum instead of being 100 would be 50 I'd have got the wrong answer I'd have built a system which had too little storage to work over 37 years by a factor of two and as I said most studies have looked at single years 23 years gets the answer wrong by a factor of two so you can imagine it's worse if you only look at a single year now to allow for this the fact that a lot of uncertainties and climate change and so on we have put contingency here I could talk about the effects of climate change nevertheless although these needs are very large by the way these units here this is not actually at the cost minimum if you go up a little bit in energy this number drops quite rapidly but you need to provide more wind and solar these needs although very large can be met while keeping the cost of electricity at a reasonable level so here's the average cost in this case that's slightly higher energy and it depends it depends on the cost of wind and solar it depends on the cost of storage it depends on the discount rate it varies in our modeling from something like 52 pounds a megawatt hour to 92 pounds a megawatt hour is that high or low in the last decade the he said the whole cell cost of electricity in the great britain was about 46 pounds a megawatt hour so it's higher than that but who said decarbonization will be cheap on the other hand in almost the whole of 2022 it was over 200 pounds a megawatt hour and I happen to have looked at the number exactly a month ago I haven't looked today I'm afraid it was 92 pounds at the top of this range so this somewhere in the middle of this range we reckon using storage is what what it'll cost so it's cheaper more expensive than in the last decade but it's cheaper than what we've become used to living with now this average cost is a combination of direct supply wind and solar going directly into the grid which in this case costs about 36 pounds a megawatt hour and the energy from storage which is 200 pounds a megawatt hour how come I can get an average it's about 60 pounds the answer is that this 38.6 pounds the amount going directly into the grid is about 85 percent of demand and this 200 pounds is only meeting 15 percent of demand so we have a situation with a reasonable average which is made of a very cheap direct supply an extremely expensive storage and the immediate question is how are we going to find investors who are willing to fund this expensive part which is essential the system won't work without it but expensive and that is a really big issue which I will return to now let's go beyond this benchmark model here so I'm going to go beyond it by looking at adding ammonia storage nuclear base load flexibly of the operating gas plus CCS and then imports so ammonia could do the whole job and the advantage of that is you could put it anywhere as we'll see in a minute there's only certain number of places in Great Britain you could put hydrogen storage and in Ireland the only place is up in the north of Ireland from Lawn inwards so it will be a metaphor everything is stored in one place you may get grid congestion problems transmitting the electricity so it's interesting to think about using something else not saying you would use ammonia to do everything you'd use as much hydrogen as you could but you might want to use some ammonia even if you've got the capability of storing hydrogen it will be more expensive five pounds out of about 60 to store ammonia you store it in tanks like this which will store 500 000 tons that's about a quarter of a terawatt hour in the island of Ireland you'd need about 40 such tanks if you did everything with ammonia which I'm certainly not advocating that's not an unimaginable number now there's another important market problem here if you have several types of store how are you going to use them supposing I know that in the next hour there's going to be surplus wind and solar do I put it in the ammonia store do I put it in hydrogen do I put it in batteries supposing that I know there's going to be a deficit which store do I call on to take the energy out to fill that deficit you need a protocol that minimizes the cost we have developed such a protocol as best we can but implementing that protocol requires collaboration between generators of operators of storage at a level that doesn't exist so that's another market problem now what about nuclear base load uh nuclear base load will increase the average cost of electricity unless nuclear cost less per megawatt hour I've said that sometimes twice there's a mistake there unless nuclear cost less per megawatt hour than the average cost per megawatt hour without it so if you look at the range I had 52 pounds to 92 pounds most estimates of nuclear in the upper half of that so what I'm saying here is that nuclear will increase the cost unless it's at the bottom of the range from most people's expectations and storage is towards the top of the range you can add nuclear it will decrease the amount of hydrogen storage you need but you're still going to need in great Britain tens of terawatt hours what about flexibly operating gas plus ccs you don't want too much because ccs isn't perfect there is some carbon dioxide is left and you've got to worry about leakage of methane which is a very potent greenhouse gas that could lower the cost but whether it would do so very much depends on what gas is going to cost in 2050 which was our target date for our study and if you know what gas is going to cost in 2050 please tell me so this is an interesting thing to think about whether it would lower the cost is not at all obvious there are some sets of values that lowers it but for many others it doesn't what about imports no question that importing and exporting electricity will make it easier to manage the system but you should not design a system that cannot meet demand when imports are not available imports are not available in occasional low wind periods that cover most of northern Europe and these are during anti-psychones so it's cold and demand is high so there are periods when there's nothing available to import so it's no good us in great Britain coming to you in Ireland or going to Belgium or France or Germany or Norway saying can we import some of your electricity there's no wind here and it's cold and they'll say we haven't got it it's cold here also we haven't got any wind so imports will matter but you shouldn't rely on them now let's now talk about what happens in other places in the world solutions this is one of my first points other than hydrogen are available in other countries where the need may not be so great so let's first of all look at the need in the rest of the world and then the other solutions in areas where salt deposits there are no salt deposits therefore that's not an option now it's refusing oh here we go so the inter-decadeal wind variation which you saw in those plots I showed you with those years with very low wind is especially large in northern Europe and by the way people who've marveled Germany come to very which their wind will come from the North Sea and the northern Germany also reach very similar conclusions or relative to demand that we have reached now the available evidence suggests that while northern Europe is particularly bad it's not an extreme outlier and that wherever you are in the world studies that looked at very short periods are misleading on the other hand we have modeled the rest of the world I can't tell you the exact storage need but I think I can go from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and agree with what Jim said you're going to need about 10 terawatt hours what if no suitable salts available so using hydrogen is not an option so it may be possible to store hydrogen in aquifers this is sandstone underground or in depleted gas fields now the problem with this is that this has never really been done there is one test of using depleted gas fields that began in Austria in April this year there was a monumental study of these possibilities by the international energy agency last year it says that hydrogen and aquifers is technology readiness level two to three they use a scale that goes up to 12 by the way and depleted gas fields is at three so we don't know if that's possible it will be very desirable if it was possible because it would allow us to store hydrogen in many different places but be a little bit careful the advocates of this idea claim that it will lower the cost because you don't have to dig a hole in the ground but that's not true the cost of storing hydrogen in salt caverns is mainly in their surface facilities so compressing the hydrogen and cleaning it when it comes out again and if you store it in aquifers or depleted gas fields you need more cleaning so it's probably the case that using aquifers or depleted gas fields will be more expensive than using salt caverns but this has not really been studied there is a depleted gas field 50 kilometers south of cork a tensile head which produced something like 5.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas in principle could store something like five or six terawatts meeting half hydrogen's needs that's a very interesting possibility if you can't use any of these things you can use ammonia it's a bit more expensive or the other long-term option is to make hydrocarbons out of captured co2 e fuels very cold e methanol will be the best now just a brief word about salt deposits to see where they are so here's a map of the salt deposits in europe there are three different types some in green some in yellow some in blue now in great britain the most promising area is here in north yorkshire actually there are some good situations in cheshire and down here in wessex and there is some in northern ireland but you see although there are in poland and northern germany and parts of spain quite a lot there's very little in france so this is not available everywhere in the united states these are the areas in yellow where there are salt deposits so there's essentially none in the west in united states this leads you to think about aquifers and aquifers here and everything that isn't brown actually so there's quite a lot here in in ireland there's quite a lot here in france whether one in assault cabins and so on the trouble with using aquifers is not just that it's at uh technology readiness level two to three but if you ask people who talk about it they can tell you all about where the aquifers are but they when you ask them how much could it store they say oh that needs more work to find out but using aquifers or depleted gas fields would enable large-scale hydrogen storage in regions that are emote from salt deposits and that will provide important systems benefits in great britain that would allow us to put storage anywhere and it would solve the it would avoid the possibility of grid congestion this means there's a compelling case for carrying out the additional work and trials that are needed to see if these are realistic options so let me finish large-scale storage is going to play a crucial role in decarbonizing the electricity system and hence the whole energy system in all regions that rely heavily on wind and solar the level of storage that's needed has been seriously underestimated by the many studies that looked at a single year and i'm sorry to say that our committee of climate change and national infrastructure commission have both relied on consultants who only looked at one year so they've come up with answers so they're just much too small in great britain the average cost of electricity with high wind and solar will be higher than the last decade but quite probably less than it is today a mix of technologies will probably lower the production cost and it may make economics case sense to add some gas plus ccs but this will not remove the need for large health scale hydrogen storage it might reduce it from say 90 terawatt hours to 70 for great britain but not to 10 elsewhere modeling that looks at long periods is needed before the optimum solutions can be identified and everywhere there is a need for large-scale demonstrators and large-scale deployment as soon as the core needs are clear and that and certainly in great britain we should be going ahead building a lot of hydrogen storage as fast as possible so we can find out what it really costs and by learning speed up the process and finally market structures that incentivize the required investment and support the efficient use of storage will be an absolute prerequisite thank you very much thank you very much chris that was really fascinating and it's something i think that we've all considered over our in our research from time to time so it was really nice to have an overview and really see the in-depth research i agree with you that this the issue of long term and what does long term mean does mean is something that i think isn't given enough consideration and okay so we have some questions coming in so maybe i will just start to get through those um we have a question from my own research institute here usd energy institute from hussain and as a valley from the point of view of resource adequacy can we take how can we take into account storage as a firm capacity what key metrics should be considered in derating storages not sure exactly do not sure i understand that question i'm not sure i do either um maybe we can come back to that we will ask an ESB question here from Diego Astrada do you think we will see fusion nuclear energy being commercial anytime soon to meet the net zero goals slightly different question but well i know something about that question i let you do fusion program and i shared the world's fusion project data when i got into fusion with us in 2003 i thought that uh it could compete with wind and solar but what has happened wind and solar has gone down in cost faster than the greenest green could have dreamt in their best possible dream on the other hand the cost of fusion has become clear was grossly underestimated we've seen that with the eta project so two things that we thought to compete have diverged radically but i cannot see fusion becoming competitive in the ways currently envisaged at all that doesn't mean it couldn't happen it could happen if there are breakthroughs in controlling turbulence and new types of fusion but they're not on the horizon as far as i know so i think we need to continue with the world project to answer some fundamental questions about whether we can use fusion even in principle but we certainly is not going to be there at large scale by 2050 and i will be surprised if it's there competitively even in the longer run than that interesting i think it seems that nuclear fusion is the one that we think about every time we're feeling a little desperate nearly isn't it but i agree with you the costs of wind and solar it's unbelievable how they've come down over the last decade or so okay so moving on to some other question from aiden macalier what are the potential synergies or trade-offs between large-scale storage and other flexibility options such as demand response interconnection and distributed generation okay so we've looked at all those things we haven't modeled interconnectors we've just concluded that we better design a system and cost it a system it doesn't rely on them but now one of the things one of our recommendations is we have not taken into account the location of supply demand and storage so we've identified the key needs and that's an input to a study that now needs to be done taking account of that there will be some hydro there will be some nuclear where the things are what happens to the grid what interconnectors there are and things like that now as far as demand management is concerned if you look at that period when the level in the store got very low and i showed you the filling factor the amount of hydrogen in the store that you cannot deal with by demand management it's just much too big and conventional demand management certainly shifts demand by a few hours so it will change the short-term needs if you shift demand a few hours but it won't change the long-term needs on the other hand we've looked at something and this is in the supplementary information for our report which we'll find on the web which i don't believe has been studied before that's to say something that i call pre-emptive demand management so the met office the british met office will now give you predictions three months ahead of whether how much wind there's going to be so we've taken that and we said supposing every time we see three months coming up in which the wind is going to be less than 80 percent of the normal and we cut demand in that period um what could we save and it's quite interesting we find that cutting demand by even two and a half percent which will be rather easy to do with higher tariffs tariffs for big users that you know require them to use less at certain times cutting in actually 44 months out of 37 years at the relatively small amount uh you could reduce the size of the storage we need by 10 percent now actually that doesn't seem much because the cost of the storage is actually rather small because storage is only meeting 15 percent of demand and the store a third of the cost is in making hydrogen a third of this is turning it back into power roughly and a third is in the storage so the cost of storage is only five percent so i can add 20 percent to the store and it only cost me a pound a megawatt hour so it's quite all right to have that 20 percent from that point of view and you say why bother to save 10 percent answer is building all that storage by 2050 or 2040 you're wanting to do in Ireland be very very difficult and every bit you can save will make it easier to construct the enormous wind and solar capacity and volume of storage that's going to be needed so i think this long-term demand management will be very helpful and something that needs more study we've only touched the surface of modelling about in the last few weeks i see okay um how do we plan for the possible additional variability in winds that may be caused by climate change itself for example changing in the Gulf Stream patterns from Terrence and work from IEA and ESP so um yes then i maybe should have included the answer to that on the slide but you know this wasn't the last talk the answer is we very early on we went to the MAT office and we said what's going to be the effect and they published papers on it and we studied the papers and the sort of establishment line is that the effect of climate change um will it will have uh it will leave interactive set in other words that after climate change in 2050 say the inter-annual variability will be much the same as today first point second point that inter-annual variability is going to be bigger than the effect of climate change now if that's right since it used historical data that has an inter-annual variability that's more than a change in the future of March according to the canonical view uh and it's going to be bigger than the climate change we think we're all right to forget about climate change although part of the reason for adding that 20 contingency was precisely because we don't know the answer to that however what i would say is the the contingency of course you would build last you don't build the contingency and not use it and by the time you get around to building that we're going to know a hell of a lot more about the the modeling climate change and what climate change is actually doing but at least according to the experts on the weather uh what we've done is okay as far as climate change is concerned but it's a very very good question i see i suppose a related question to that is from um one of the audience member has the seasonality impact of electrification of heat being considered in other words that would be much higher electrical demand in winter that's yes so the model we use from this consultancy AFRI it has um it's has electric vehicles on it which is sort of around the world around the year so that just increases demand it doesn't in fact it decreases the variability because it's there in the winter and the summer although people use their cars a bit more in the summer um and we included it includes a lot of electrical heating so um but we looked at that so we took their model this wasn't condemned by then and i played games with it i added a lot more electricity and heating and a lot less we varied demand up and down by uh from 570 down to 440 and up to 700 this is the demand that's into the grid by the way before transmission losses and they had a very different profile when we did that and it changed of course if i put in more demand i need more wind and solar and i need more storage but it's the cost per megawatt hour of the power you get out is very very insensitive to the profile and the level of demand so we did indeed you can find that in the report okay okay i have quite a few questions coming in very interesting i i suppose one thing that we didn't get into is how do you expect the hydrogen will be turned back into electricity is that gas turbines or fuel cells or that's a very good question so most studies of hydrogen assume will be combined cycle turbines or PEM cells fuel cells uh we actually think we think that combined cycle turbines will be much more expensive than PEM cells but we think they're cheaper than either could be using four stroke engines now people get very surprised by that and they say four stroke engines are such a good deal why are we not using them with natural gas and the answer is we are there is a 600 megawatt power station in Jordan operated entirely with four stroke engines powered by natural gas and the uh it used to be said that up the four stroke engines are only a good way of making electricity up to about a hundred megawatts but if you talk to the experts now that transition point is around 300 megawatts or maybe higher i don't know what now one of the good things about using a four stroke engine is the individual ones are quite small maybe printing megawatts so that's exactly what you want if you're dealing with a variable demand so you have a lot of small systems and you either operate them at the absolute your optimum operating point or you turn them off so you vary them by having a large number and having fully or fully off you don't flex them which makes them inefficient now the interesting thing is that with most of the work on four stroke engines started by people thinking of putting them in cars hydrogen engines and they just took conventional car engines and said what would happen if you put hydrogen into them that turns out not to be the best operating regime people started to worry about mox and they found that it's much better to go to a very lean beat burn where it's rather efficient so there are a number of companies Mercedes Toyota others who are looking now at hydrogen engines in the UK the big one is JCB the people who make those yellow diggers they again they have prototypes of a rather efficient in fact hydrogen engine but they want to put into diggers I haven't told them yet it's going to be a big market for you making power from hydrogen as well okay right so I have to I'm going to have to be selective here I think one thing close to my heart I don't know if this is something within your remit do you have suggestions as to how the electricity market should be restructured to remunerate long-term storage okay so I mean the first thing to realize that you know people say oh you have a CFD or something like that now those mechanisms things like I mean make a very trivial remark CFD is a reward output I mean you don't want to reward output or the storage stores will be in profit but empty when you need them what you want to do is pay people but not producing energy so there's got to be some sort of anti CFD your reward for keeping your store full so I think that problem probably not so hard to fix though it people don't get their minds right I think the harder one is that I said if you've got several stores you've got to work out how to use them and so you need coordination so one of the we've thought about two solutions one there's a solution that's advocated by my colleague Peter Helm which is an auction for power should be for firm power so you say I'm not I'm only interested if you will you will auction the obligation to be able to definitely produce this amount of power that would force owners of storage and owners of generation to get together but they probably are bedfellows actually and you'd start worrying about competition law so the other thing we thought about is what I call the extended central buyer model so in principle in Great Britain we have a liberalized energy market so it's up to people what they do in fact it's not like that we know that you know the minister stands up on the floor in the house of commons it says we're going to build so much wind although we're going to build so much nuclear it's not a free market at all under political pressure so people talk having saying taking that out of political hands and having an agency which has instructions about carbon but otherwise has a free hand who's responsible for buying you know deciding what to build and running the auctions but you could also that's the central buyer model the extended central buyer model would say such an agency is also responsible for buying and selling electricity so they will be a sort of you know they wouldn't actually hold it but they'd say okay next time I'm gonna buy your wind power and I'm going to sell it to these guys operating this store or those guys operating another now if you think about that that would be extremely like renationalizing operationally except that it would not put all the risks in the hand of taxpayers it would and it wouldn't involve renationalization of all the class amount of capital of course this will be a sort of free way of getting the equivalent of renationalization okay so we just put that forward as an idea I don't know the answer but is that agency not the government is that now it's public money well it could be I think you want to depoliticize it so I'm imagining something like the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee which is it's not it's got political guidelines you know reduce inflation in that case but it's not told what to do and it could be the ESO the you know the old national grid that would be a very good candidate for doing this job the only thing that worries about me about this is that I actually spent nine months in the old Soviet Union back in the 60s and so I know what's wrong with central planning the difficulty is I don't see how we can call we can decarbonize without a great deal more planning and coordination than we have at present but what if the planner gets it all wrong I mean I'd be happy for you Lisa to be the planner but I might not be happy for me to be the planner I mean that's that you know there's a terrible tension here between at least in this central bio-model you would keep competition and procurement and you would keep competition in generation and storage and so on but somebody's got to plan the thing that's the hard part how do you get competition into that I have no idea I see yeah maybe our ESB audience might be happy about this it sounds like we're going back to some of the old days as you say there was a question about thermal storage I'm just trying to find you have you looked at thermal storage I guess first of all I should say that we classify stores according to how fast you have to turn over the content to get your money back so lithium ion batteries if you store for more than three days or something like that you'll be bankrupt because they're very expensive you've got to churn it over then at the other end there's e-methanol ammonia and hydrogen you can store for years and still get your money back and in the middle of the whole range and we list a number of things and we just chose to start to choose one of them to model because we couldn't model all of them so we looked in very great detail at advanced compressed air energy storage but thermal storage is the other really good large-scale candidate there's a lot of things you know many a mech or max or marketplace in Scotland you'd have a lot of things individually doing a small amount that adds up to a lot but if you want to think of things that individual units can store large amounts of energy you're into large underground compressed air energy systems or very large Carnot batteries these are vast piles of volcanic rock maybe not piles put them in old disused quarries or something like that which you blow hot air through you've got them very hot ideally up to 600 degrees or something and then you take the heat out and run a turbine we've looked at that and those are quite a promising system okay okay we're nearly at the end so I was going to combine two questions here one is one that I look quite like the what are the likely taking into account Ireland size this from Jim Breslin and what are the likely research priorities and that we should be focusing on for research and demonstration and related to that I suppose you know what how soon do policymakers need to be working on this okay so the the the second question I think easy to answer which is as soon as possible as soon as you can see something we definitely need get on with it because you know 2050 is pretty close and if you're going for 2040 it's even closer by the way I get quite worried about near-term targets I mean our government is talking about decarbonizing electricity in 2035 I think that's possible but only by building an awful lot of carbon capture and storage with gas and I think that you know if you look ahead to 2060 that won't be the right system and the integrated carbon dioxide will be more you've got stranded assets of things you know there's a conflict between doing it fast and doing it right and that's a very difficult one but I would say as soon as you say things there's no question that we're going to need you know whatever it is and hydrogen storage or maybe gas process here get on with it and learn how to do it and get the cost done now the r&d priorities that's difficult because we did this study for the Ross society and they want me to say research is very important but anyone who understands the scale of the electricity system knows that nothing is going to save us in 2050 which isn't already being commercialized out of the laboratory today I can think of one conceivable example but only one and that's pretty damn dubious so the real to my mind the r&d priorities for example I talked about generating power with with fuel cells PAM cells PAM electrolyzers arrive rely on iridium that's in short supply so there's a research priority somewhere in the world get down the amount of iridium iridium things like that but I don't think there are many that to my mind it's really demonstrators that we need and I think increasingly since we started really looking at this question of aquifers is understanding whether you can use aquifers and depleting gas fields and I suppose people are looking at that because I know that somebody told me yesterday that some company whoever owns that can sell head is talking about a hydrogen down there so they must be thinking about the feasibility and I know that central from the thinking of the rough field in the North Sea putting hydrogen into that but so maybe they know something I don't or they know something that is the people who wrote a 250 page for technical report for the international energy agency don't but those people say that's a trl 3 but but that to my mind that I mean that really make a difference if we can use depleting gas fields and that's a big priority I just want to follow up there Chris when I hear aquifers I sort of feel a bit nervous are we are we worried at all about pollution or disturbing the hydrological cycle I think yeah I mean well some of these are dry stone as well I don't think so that doesn't seem to be a concern I mean I think some of the concerns yeah no that doesn't worry the people well put it like this you need to look at this IEA report there's a lot of discussion of biological reactions in particular with hydrogen and other things but I don't think it's an issue I mean one of the issues by the way if you make solution mines salt covens is getting over brine that's an issue too probably have to put it out to sea and then you know you have to be do that with extreme caution then we've looked at most of these things and you will find them somewhere in the report or in the supplementary information which is 200 pages on a break well that's our homework I think that we have to leave it there because it's just exactly two o'clock and but I would like to thank you very warmly for for your time regenerous time today it's a fascinating report I think it's certainly wet my appetite so I think we'll wrap up there I'm sorry for those of you that I didn't when I didn't get to your questions maybe some other time but in the meantime I'd like to thank ESP and the IEA for this providing this webinar and especially to Chris for his time today and we look forward to looking at the report thank you very much everybody thank you