Solving for Storage - Ep122: Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith

This time on Cleaning Up, Michael hosts Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, one of the UK's greatest living physicists, for a fascinating and detailed dive into the UK's energy storage requirements as it moves towards a fully carbon-free grid. Sir Chris is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and a former Director-General of CERN. At CERN he steered the funding and commissioning of its Large Hadron Collider, and as a theoretical particle physicist, Sir Chris predicted the existence of the very particle - the Higgs Boson - that the Large Hadron Collider went on to help discover. Sir Chris is likely the only person ever to have been knighted for "services to particle physics." In the last few years Sir Chris has been busy leading a forthcoming Royal Society study on large-scale energy storage as part of the net-zero transition. He and Michael discuss the significance of storage to a newly configured, renewable grid, the likely cost of stored electricity, and the role of salt caverns in hosting hydrogen stores.