Britain built the power stations.
It forgot the batteries.
We have spent twenty years and a lot of money building things that make electricity. We have spent considerably less on things that hold onto it. That mismatch is now showing up as negative prices, curtailment payments and margin warnings, sometimes in the same week.
🏗️ We solved the wrong half
The renewables build-out has been a genuine success. Britain went from a coal country to a wind country inside a generation and barely stopped to congratulate itself.
But generation was always the easy half. You can put a wind farm where the wind is and walk away. The hard half is matching what gets made to what gets used, minute by minute, forever.
We have a system that makes enormous amounts of electricity at moments of its own choosing, and a population that uses electricity at moments of its choosing, and almost nothing in between to reconcile the two.
🧱 Big batteries are being built, and it is not enough
Grid-scale batteries are going in fast, and they are doing well out of exactly the volatility described in these posts. Good for them.
But a grid battery needs land, a planning application, a grid connection and several years. There is a queue, and the queue is long.
Meanwhile there are already millions of batteries plugged into British homes, sitting on driveways. They are called cars. They cost the grid nothing, they needed no planning permission, and on any given evening about 95% of them are doing absolutely nothing.
🚙 The cheapest grid asset is the one you already bought
A car battery holds enough energy to run a typical home for two or three days. It spends most of its life parked.
Nobody is asking to drain it. Shifting when it charges, by a couple of hours, on days when the grid is drowning, is enough. You wake up to a full car either way.
The difference is that on one version you paid peak price, and on the other the grid paid you.
We built a country that can produce more clean electricity than it can swallow, and then acted surprised when it started giving it away. The batteries are already here. They are just parked outside, doing nothing, with the keys in the bowl by the door.