alt Hacker NewsRenewables require gas in the UK. There is no realistic route to 100% renewable grid without gas currently. I did some modelling of this and you'd require something on the order of 4000GWh of battery storage. We currently have 40GWh.
Gas is far, far cheaper than building ~£1T worth of battery storage. Even if prices dropped, you are still looking at multi-hundred billions, and you still need the renewable capacity on top of that.
Arguably if we had spent the £100bns (in subsidy and transmission upgrade and curtailment costs) we've already spent on renewables on nuclear instead we would have a very clean grid, even at crazy UK nuclear build prices, and stable electricity prices.
Last time I did the maths based on data from gridwatch the storage capacity required dropped dramatically if you over built the on the production side.
But ok, 30 million homes, 100kWh storage each, that's 3000 GWh
A 100kWh battery is about £25k, less than 1/10th the cost of the house, and less than the average new car
That doesn't seem unrealistic.