Elon Musk 'to build the world's biggest battery' in Kent, UK

[1208]

Elon Musk 'to build the world's biggest battery' in Britain as part of £400m plans to carpet a swathe of Kent with almost a million solar panels

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5905675/Elon-Musk-build-worlds-biggest-battery-Britain-400m-solar-panel-plans.html

They say its marshland, although the area has a lot of it, the site Elon wants it on is currently farm land, which is monoculture, with no biodiversity or wildlife.

Google Maps

As someone who lives in Kent and hates the current concreting over of "the Garden of England", I do actually approve of the plan. We will get more wildlife both plants and animals living there than currently with the farming.​

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Given the marshland, I can't see it happening. On the plus side, if it can't happen for solar there, nothing will happen there.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

There's 8-10GW of offshore wind planned for the nearest coast to Kent. Plenty of intermittent electricity to be stored and sold, even without solar.

 

[RDoc]

Based on the image in the article and the google satellite view, I don't see the "marshland" the article is talking about. The main objections to the project seem to be that it's big, not that it actually impacts any existing natural habitat.

As 1208 says, assuming that the developers allow plants to grow under the panels with something like sheep to manage them, this could be very good for the local ecology.

 

[Phoenix1]

Maybe they will just ditch the solar portion and do the battery to offset the wind production.

 

[thegruf]

Excellent project.
Hope it goes ahead.

I have been in that area on a couple of occasions - to be blunt it is completely unremarkable , nobody would know it was there unless you told them or you looked out of a plane window. As for local wildlife - well that is going to be present everywehre to some extent. some simple and inexpensive measures to mitigate the effect of the installation are all that is required.

This is NIMBYism gone mad, so called green campaigners really need to wake up and look at the bigger picture.
What do they want - a gas power station instead?

This is exactly the sort of project that is needed in the UK.
Silent low visual impact, low maintenance, long lifetime, flexible instant power delivery.
Show me a better option - thought not.
Make it happen please Elon.

The more solar, the better in my book and a definite sihift in the supply mix from today. Personally I would legislate for much higher adoption of distributed solar and a good chunk of storage to go with it, but it must be said not on prime farmland as recent legislation has encouraged.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Excellent project.
Hope it goes ahead.

I have been in that area on a couple of occasions - to be blunt it is completely unremarkable , nobody would know it was there unless you told them or you looked out of a plane window. As for local wildlife - well that is going to be present everywehre to some extent. some simple and inexpensive measures to mitigate the effect of the installation are all that is required.

This is NIMBYism gone mad, so called green campaigners really need to wake up and look at the bigger picture.
What do they want - a gas power station instead?

This is exactly the sort of project that is needed in the UK.
Silent low visual impact, low maintenance, long lifetime, flexible instant power delivery.
Show me a better option - thought not.
Make it happen please Elon.

The more solar, the better in my book and a definite sihift in the supply mix from today. Personally I would legislate for much higher adoption of distributed solar and a good chunk of storage to go with it, but it must be said not on prime farmland as recent legislation has encouraged.

Not NIMBYIsm gone mad. As the environmentalist said in the article, they want solar on existing construction, not covering (environmentally) productive land. (Of course, they also oppose new construction on greenfield anyway). It's more a question of cost: economics v environmentalism.

 

[thegruf]

Absolutely NIMBYIsm gone mad, maybe you overlook that I have actaully been to that area.

Of course we would all like solar on construction, I have advocated exactly that.

The article is full of misrepresentation, most importantly the site is not marshland, it is farmed, so to claim valuable bird habitat is tosh.
It does however have the potential to flood hence the solutio of raised structures.

The reality of course is that is quite simply impossible to build a project of this scale on existing construction, and frankly with the pressure on land in the UK anything even vaguely brownfield will get built on. The route for solar on buildings is per site micro projects and maybe even some of the upcoming materials usable on walls, even on glass. The big advantages of these is that they are distributed which is good for grid security, also being local to demand they can in part negate grid transmission losses.

Quite simply there has to be a mix of supply, but in the UK at least solar has a long way to go in particualr as the uk government made a complete mess of the subsidy/feed in tariff schemes.

(Some) environmentalists are just delf-defeatingly narrow minded and oppose every project irrespectively and are utterly incapable of looking at a wider picture. As usual the hysterical are heard over the voices of reasoned debate.

 

[WannabeOwner]

I don't like good agricultural land being converted to Solar Farms at all, it just puts pressure on food production and the risk that we import and then add food miles ... nor very eco. No problem with Solar Farm on marginal land. Of course I don't know which this is ... the photo looks like wheat prairie, but given that it is capable of flooding maybe it is indeed marginal land.

There are plenty of solar farms near us (Suffolk) on prime agricultural land, probably with 20+ year contracts, so even if we wanted to bring that back into agricultural use whatever "early exit penalty clause" some finance outfit is holding will become the stumbling block.

 

[miimura]

PG&E in California has proposed much larger battery systems to be connected directly to the transmission grid in California. The UK system mentioned above is "only" 350 MWh. PG&E is proposing to own 182.5 MW & 730 MWh Tesla battery system and also interconnect an even larger system owned by a third party that will be 300 MW & 1,200 MWh. PG&E will have the option to increase the Tesla discharge duration from 4 hours to 6 hours by increasing the battery size to 1,095 MWh.

My point is that "World's Largest" proposed grid battery is a moving target.

Tesla + Others Join PG&E On World's Largest Energy Storage System