Fantasy: Major Infrastructure with Zero Chance of being Built

[Uncle Buck]

The Oft mentioned Glasgow metro. Plenty of studies, plans, announcements. I will be amazed if a spade is ever put in the ground in connection with this proposal.

Meanwhile every new road proposal in the city and its surrounds will sail through to completion.

Strongly agree. Many good ideas in there but the whole thing seems at once too ambitious and somehow not needed badly or at least urgently enough. And it’s already been talked about for years.

 

[Megafuss]

Rather pertinent given this week's announcement, but A1 doubling north of Morpeth.

 

[Technologist]

That’s not speculative, they are coming…

The economics of pumped storage is being massively challenged by batteries especially once you factor in the Wrights Law (observation) effects that mean that batteries will be a lot cheaper by the time any pumped storage plant actually goes into service.

Dinorwig cost about £9bn in today’s money which is more than an installed Tesla Megapack on a MWh basis. I doubt that the Scottish schemes will be dramatically different in price.

From a risk perspective a pumped storage site is a multi billion pound bet where there are plenty of things that can go wrong in both construction and the relative cost compared to batteries whereas batteries are useful today and just get better over time.

 

[Nottingham59]

Dinorwig cost about £9bn in today’s money which is more than an installed Tesla Megapack on a MWh basis. I doubt that the Scottish schemes will be dramatically different in price.

That might be out by an order of magnitude. Dinorwig stores 9GWh. Coire Glas will store 30GWh and is expected to cost around £1.5 billion.

 

[HSTEd]

The economics of pumped storage is being massively challenged by batteries especially once you factor in the Wrights Law (observation) effects that mean that batteries will be a lot cheaper by the time any pumped storage plant actually goes into service.

Dinorwig cost about £9bn in today’s money which is more than an installed Tesla Megapack on a MWh basis. I doubt that the Scottish schemes will be dramatically different in price.

From a risk perspective a pumped storage site is a multi billion pound bet where there are plenty of things that can go wrong in both construction and the relative cost compared to batteries whereas batteries are useful today and just get better over time.

Dinorwig was a scheme designed for maximum power output, not for energy storage.
It's primary design operational role was allowing a reduction in standby plant requirements, it's secondary role was load shifting peak power into the night. That's why it only has a handful of hours worth of storage.

So on a MWh basis it is not surprising that the plant came out very expensive.

The Coire Glas scheme, on the other hand, is proportionally a much longer duration, lower power scheme.
So it will very much have a lower cost per megawatt hour.

EDIT:

My understanding is the Dinorwig plant's cost was around £425m, which in 1974 money is about £4bn.

 

[Bald Rick]

The economics of pumped storage is being massively challenged by batteries especially once you factor in the Wrights Law (observation) effects that mean that batteries will be a lot cheaper by the time any pumped storage plant actually goes into service.

Whilst this is true to an extent, the scale of some of the pumoed storage proposals offers very substantial medium term storage. It is highly unlikely that all the large pumped storage proposals in Scotland will happen, there is not sufficient construction market capacity for them all and also I doubt there is sufficient transmission capacity for them all to operate at at full power (import and export). However, given the money invested to date - SSE have spent well north of £100m on Coire Glas for example - my guess is that at lesst one of them will happen, probably more.

 

[Mr. SW]

And meanwhile...
Here's something that's never going to happen. The realignment of the Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington on a more gentle alignment. Original route in red, diversion in sky blue.

It's never going to happen. Not ever.

 

[MadMac]

Although some people have pushed the "plausible" element of the topic.

The idea is that any suggestions are actually "realistic" as in no rockets from Altnabraec to Sugar Loaf to improve North Scotland-Mid Wales connectivity.

Reports indicate that there are already a couple of rockets in Altnabreac…..

 

[ASX_Terranova]

Heavy Rail Services to Newcastle Airport.
Would go inline with the planned expansion

 

[Technologist]

My understanding is the Dinorwig plant's cost was around £425m, which in 1974 money is about £4bn.

I very deliberately used worker compensation as the metric to do the inflation calculation as for a project of this nature worker’s salaries are likely to be the big cost.

Using RPI to value a large project from a long time ago gives you results like suggesting that George Stephenson built a viaduct across a valley for £15 million. Which what that is actually telling you is that we can produce the value of groceries and consumer goods that would be equally to a viaduct in 1845 for only £15m! (This does not account for the fact that the basket of goods has changed in that time)

So £425m is £4.9bn today by GDP deflator, £6bn by RPI, £8.5bn by labour and £13bn by economic share.

Either way building a similar plant with the same sorts of requirements like burying it in a mountain is not going to be cheap.

 

[Howardh]

SaxaVord is the space station on Unst, quite one of the most remote places in the UK. Therefore in order to reduce lorries carrying their equipment over the islands and using the ferries, we totally need a high-speed passenger and goods rail link from Inverness to SaxaVord via Thurso, Kirkwall and Lerwick. Can't work out whether a tunnel or bridge would be better between those islands.

 

[Dennyboy]

Strongly agree. Many good ideas in there but the whole thing seems at once too ambitious and somehow not needed badly or at least urgently enough. And it’s already been talked about for years.

The only thing that invites me to challenge such pessimism is (1) the presence of dedicated bus-ways (Clyde Fastlink) already in Glasgow and that (2) swathes of tram-line in E'burgh's Broomhouse, Stenhouse & Saughton started out as Glorified/Guided Bus Routes.