Britain needs 900 hydrogen filled salt caverns to hit climate goals, says Royal Society – Hydrogen Storage.
Britain needs to set up a network of hydrogen-filled salt caves to avoid power cuts in future and meet its carbon commitment, a new report from the Royal Society has concluded.
After looking at ways the country could store surplus wind and solar-generated electricity, the scientific think tank said a network of 90 clusters of ten caverns filled with hydrogen is the cheapest option.
In its report, the society said Britain needed up to 100 terrawatt hours of storage capacity (TWh) to achieve its target of all electricity generation coming from low-carbon sources by 2035 and to be carbon-free by 2050.
Power produced from renewable sources such as solar and wind can be stored by splitting water through electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen, a process that is reversible when more power is needed.
Chris Llewellyn Smith, lead author of the report, said:
The need for long-term storage has been seriously underestimated.
“Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.”
“It will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but are volatile”.
Llewellyn Smith added the only large-scale low-carbon sources are nuclear, gas with carbon capture (CCS) and bioenergy with or without CCS such as proposed by Drax.
“While nuclear and gas with CCS are expected to play a role, they are expensive, especially if operated flexibly.”
Peter Bruce, the society’s vice-president, added:
Combining hydrogen with ACAES (compressed storage), or other forms of storage that are more efficient than hydrogen, could lower the average cost of electricity overall, and would lower the required level of wind and solar supply.
Salt caverns are among the most stable of geological formations and are already used by the National Archives and museums to store historical records.
Britain currently has three hydrogen storage caverns in the UK, which have been in use since 1972.
Britain needs 900 hydrogen-filled salt caverns to hit climate goals, says Royal Society, September 8, 2023
