Analysis of UK National Grid's Future Energy Scenarios 2020

The British grid tends to be a leader in developing the regulations and operational processes / procedures for the energy transition. Therefore its views are applicable, with appropriate adaptation, world-wide. Every year National Grid undertakes a scenario planning exercise on energy supply and demand, called Future Energy Scenarios. Its analysis this year is much better than previous years in that it puts forward three Net Zero compliant scenarios and one business-as-usual comparator. They state that the total storage needed in all scenarios is 20-40GW, which batteries cannot provide and which we can provide much more cost-effectively and efficiently than any other technology.

As every year, their assessed need for energy storage has increased - though it still needs to double to provide a secure and reliable grid. It has much less to say than last year on storage; 2019's analysis states that most required storage must be long-duration which, for NG, is over 4 hours. And it still relies on massive roll-out of technologies that have not proved that they can be rolled out on such scales, or on time, or cost-effectively.

This is a 6-page summary of the FES 2020 analysis. The full analysis can be found here: https://lnkd.in/dBgaHS9