Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables
bbc.com
bbc.com
What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different.
There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunny, windy and lower demand in the summer). Last year had more time than ever in negative, and the UK has another 10-20GW of commited offshore wind in construction.
Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide (right now it peaks over 50% regularly). There is approx 5GW of HVDC (with 1-2/GW a year more planned over the next while), but it won't be enough to export all of it outside the UK (and when it is windy here, it is likely to also be there, so they won't want it either).
This is going to end up with very negative prices for a lot of the time. Considering ~15% of UK supply is made up with nuclear, this is a real problem. You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas.
So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.
This may spur innovation in storage, but we are talking enormous quantities required in a very short period of time.
It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me.
There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity.
* Storage heating/cooling that's basically free
* Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel
* Cheaper aluminium production
It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust.
Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.
Negative prices are an incentive to build power buffers, or to use power when it is plenty. You can even do crazy things like make steel.
One funny side effect that might happen is that for individuals, power will not become more expensive from renewable energy, but rather cheaper - so cheap that the metering it is more expensive than the electricity, so there will be flatrates (up to a certain usage). The reason is that personal usage is just a drop in the ocean compared to all the cars and all the other things that now run on fossil.
When i looked into this last, it wasn’t common to have that bi-directional power flow capability. There was one, very expensive, Mitsubishi solution on the UK market around 2 years ago.
That said, if you leave a car plugged in overnight and it charges fastest when the wind is blowing and slowest when prices drift up that will have a similar effect - for free.
I was registered for a pilot at one point with a third party but never got invited to participate and have since forgotten who the company is.
EDIT: Looks like these can now be purchased and imported from China by end users: https://www.setec-power.com/product/vehicle-to-home-v2h-6kw/
https://www.indra.co.uk/v2v-grid-to-vehicle
https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/vehicle-to-grid-char...
If you want a V2G, you might try contacting Indra though we really sell more to installers rather than direct to customers. Alternatively, if you have a local(ish) installer that installs Indra's smart chargers, you could try inquiring through them.
I know it is possible to optimise to octopus's tariffs, but I don't know how available that is yet from the commercial side of things (I work on the technical side).
In the UK, there are a few companies offering V2G packages for the Nissan Leaf. For example, Octopus Powerloop (available in London and parts of South East England):
Wearing out a expensive electric car, with a high load, while it's not moving (harder to cool), to save a few pennies per Kwh isn't worth it. Keep in mind that there's power losses just charging and discharging, so you need a pretty big swing to make it worth while.
A powerwall (11kwh) costs $7500 or so installed and is generally enough to "peak shave" by charging when power is cheapest and discharge when it's most expensive. It does lower electric bills, but generally isn't really a good financial decision unless you put a financial benefit of having power when during outages.
For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time to earn back the investment.
Planned maintenance in that factory is worked with the power company. I'm not sure if that means they are also doing maintenance on some power plant, or if that means during Christmas lights season.
If you can predict high wind times a week in advance I'll work my energy hungry production around your cheap energy prices. The only thing I need is some sort of guarantee that those times will happen "often enough". I can pay employees to work 60 hour weeks some months, and other months get paid vacation, so long as over a full year I get reasonable use of my factory and there is some prediction.
At the moment pretty much every MWh generated is a substituted MWh not generated by gas and periods of negative pricing are still relatively rare.
Wind is so cheap though, that at some point, overproduction will become the norm rather than exceptional and being able to timeshift your usage could, unexpectedly, end up saving you more money than reducing your usage.
The counterintuitiveness of this and the fact that this is new territory is why I think that there's lots of profit potential.
Space heaters don’t become obsolete, and they’re not very capital intensive, or require much maintenance. You just need space to put them in.
What are you talking about? Just take the three phases from your power outlet and stick them in the ground, with some distance between them. There, zero capital costs, and a nice, mostly resistive load for the power plant. A bad time to be an earthworm, though.
What the fuck?!
It took a bit of persuading to get him to believe me about the smell of burning plastic and suspiciously dry area of pavement just down the road. Once he believed me, a crew came in, dug the thing up, replaced a section of cable, and relaid tarmac, in a surprisingly short time.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/11KV-10MW-Load-Bank-f...
Sometimes power plants have GW size load banks, it's an acre or so of steel wires strung up on poles. All the wires glow red hot when in use. It is quite a sight.
But if you're in a different industry, with equipment that takes a longer to become obsolete or wears out before it becomes obsolete, lower utilisation might be fine. Plenty of capital equipment spends loads of time idle.
Not paying for electricity is profitable by default.. Having a reserve for the long term that's environmentally friendly, its a benefit.. Investing in infrastructure that doesn't depend on finite fossil fuels is profitable.. So I have no idea what you're talking about.
> For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time to earn back the investment.
Its really nothing like that at all..
Then you should also read the sentence directly after the one you quoted, in which it's explained:
> > The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.
But the costs over time are negligible when current alternatives will eventually only go up due to scarcity. I might be missing something.
In heavy industry, they're very much not. Large machines often cost large amounts of money. You don't want large machines sitting around doing nothing when they could do useful work and earn money instead – so that you can, for example, pay off the loans you took out for them, or pay the operational staff that pulls the levers and turns the switches.
We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there's no financially viable way to make it from electricity which is generated from fossil fuels (and therefore always costs more). Once that electricity becomes free or negative, it completely changes the economics.
You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes.
Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.
We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K.
I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use.
Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it.
Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices.
All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.
For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning
Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down.
Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).
The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year.
Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER.
And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.
PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.
I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
I know. I made implicit reference to that with the 2025/2030 split.
> I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which…
Has it occurred to you that you might be… wrong? I mean, when I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people, I do ask myself that question. I could go thought all of your claims separately, but I’ve never found that to be successful at convincing anyone.
Everything. Literally everything.
> wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have
Almost all heat on Earth is solar in origin, including the majority that we don’t use.
> can't scale
Scales up to Kardashev III.
> requires insane amounts of land
Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people.
15TW all-source power use * 1kW/m^2 * 20% cell efficiency * 25% capacity factor = 300,000 square km = 1.7 years of lost rainforest = 38.9 m^2/person = a little more than half my apartment as land area per person.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15TW%20%2F%28%201kw%2Fm...
Again, that 38.9 m^2/person is for all power — heating and transport, domestic and industrial usage — if you only wanted to deal with electricity you can achieve that just by covering rooftops, while you can cover about 90% of car needs with PV on BEV cars (if you allow them to share, but that’s not difficult, heavy users need to charge just like they already do and light users would want to sell the excess, dismissing this as “complex” would be ridiculous given what cars are), meaning not much extra new land has to be dedicated to PV (or to wind if you want diversity).
The only big things people even need to think about now is stuff like synthetic jet fuel, and even then we already know the chemical reactions, it’s just about commercialising them.
> requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work
No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false.
And further, they’re still incredibly valuable even without batteries.
And they are the only existing long-term solution to our energy needs, given fossil fuels are finite and commercial fusion isn’t actually a thing yet.
> isn't reliable
Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail, and seasonally in broad brushstrokes. We’re not going to be surprised that winter is dark, we can plan around this trivially in much the same way and for much the same reasons that supermarkets don’t get surprised by seasonal demand for ice-cream or raincoats.
> requires absurd amounts of resources
Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people.
> needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload
Or, as demonstrated, batteries.
You could also do it with a sufficiently large grid, because transmission losses between e.g. Berlin and the Sahara desert are less than the price difference between PV and coal or nuclear.
> and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density
Literally Dyson swarms.
> A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress.
“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel.
Plus I can literally buy USB batteries with PV pre-mounted to them at negligible cost compared to those without PV — the hard stuff has already been done, commercialised, commoditised, and made it to the high street.
> Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
PV and wind are the cheapest power sources, so the most capable of improving that.
yes and it's spread out thinly which is why it doesn't kill us.Your solution is to take the least energy dense form and spend material, huge areas of land and money to build a solution that is inferior to all the other solutions.
Scales up to Kardashev III" In theory not in practice. You are speculating not actually proving anything.
"Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people."
Ehh we are going to be 9 billion. Not sure what exactly you think it proves. You are playing excel sheet scientist not actually proving the application in reality.
"No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false."
There is a world of difference between having a nuclear power plant or using oil or gas or coal which all have the energy STORED in themselves vs having to convert thin layers of energy into batteries which again aren't even close to be able to deliver the kind of utility the other sources can.
"Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail"
No it can't and it isn't and will require backup from other sources. Again excel sheet acrobatics isn't really useful here.
"Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people."
We are going to be 9. It's a reality and you aren't actually dealing with it. It's not going to go away.
Batterie are not demonstrated as being a solution by any metric what so ever so no.
You keep comping up with speculative solutions which wont actually work nor solve anything as the grid will never be flexible enough and batteries can't actually deliver what you seem to be dreaming they can.
"Literally Dyson swarms."
Again more speculcation.
Come back when energy from wind and solar is more than 10% of the worlds energy consumption.
"“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel."
I am not. I am calling all your other solutions to solve the issues with intermittency like grids and weather forcasting PLUS batteries plus storing of energy in batteries and PV for rube goldberg machines.
So there will be some innovation needed to shutdown (and boot up) these plants quickly, I would think?
Office work will ignore energy prices in general. Jet fuel manufacturing will if at all possible shut down when energy prices are high. If it isn't possible they will do some form of energy storage to cover high energy prices times.
For actual buffers to be developed, we need applications that are super cheap to set up but expensive to run. Storage heating / cooling is a good idea, I can't come up with others from the top of my head.
Charging your electric car battery.
BTW, heating/cooling my house is half my energy bill. Time shifting that could easily cut that by a third. All I need to make that work is variable rates. But with fixed 24/7 rates, nobody has any incentive to do that.
This isn't as simple as you make it sound. You can't just cool your house once when electricity is cheap and then have it stay cool all day. Keeping your house at a different temperature than outside is a constant, active process.
There are industrial systems that "store" cold by making large blocks of ice when electricity is cheap, and then using that ice as part of the HVAC system to cool the building throughout the day. This could be adapted to home use, but I have no idea the relative cost of the machinery vs electricity savings.
It is. There is no single comfortable temperature, it's a range. The first step is when electricity is cheap, cool the house to the low end of the range.
The next step is to cool a tank of water. People already have a hot water tank, it doesn't seem like much of an engineering or cost challenge to have a cold water tank, and using that to cool air.
A further step is to increase the thermal mass of the house, which means it will take longer to heat up. Thermal mass can be simply adding a big pile of rocks in the basement and blowing air through it.
In the summer, even if you cool your house down to 60F, it'll be back to 70F in a couple hours max. Electricity rates from renewable overproduction do not vary on the timescale of hours. It's not a solution without new equipment to "store" the hot or cold that you produce when electricity is cheap.
(Besides, I grew up in Arizona, and was comfortable up to 78 or so.)
I am sure the variable rates helped to incentivize people to conserve electricity in Texas recently but that is an extreme case.
Electricity infrastructure is capital intensive and long term stable rates are required to finance it.
Gasoline prices vary all over the place, and there's a heluva lot of expensive infrastructure for it.
Electricity is different from gasoline since it can’t be easily stored production and consumption are always perfectly in balance.
Gasoline is a world wide commodity, whereas electricity is consumed relatively close to where it is generated.
Oil and gasoline are global markets, but there are many regional electricity markets with their own sets of regulations which are constantly evolving.
From what I’ve seen The only way people sink money in to building electrical infrastructure is with some long term certainty for prices from some buyer. Maybe it is different once the asset is paid off you can operate in the spot market but I believe financiers prefer the certainty of a fixed contract.
Maybe refineries that are built find a buyer for their product before they build them too?
I doubt this would happen a second time, as people wise up. They'll either monitor the electricity prices, or put automatic shutoffs in place if the price exceeds $xx.
> long term certainty
Higher levels of risk simply mean higher prices.
If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.
Citation needed. Last time I looked the pricing of octopus agile went negative for like 15 minutes a year...
EDIT: just crunched the data... It looks like this only happened frequently in 2020 (not in 2018/19/21), and even then, for a typical 1 kilowatt household, it would only save £2 per year, and even if you deliberately maxed out and used the maximum current limit of your AC supply (100 amps, 24 kW, for most households), it's still only a saving of £50, which doesn't pay for the effort really...
https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-north-eastern-engl...
Shed the pool heater/cleaner, beer fridge and the hot water heater when things get incredibly expensive.
Put the washer/dryer in slow-mo when prices are high.
Ultra-chill the freezer and A/C when prices go low/negative.
Turn on a resistive heater and shut off the gas heat when things are negative...
Instead we want complicated too-big-to-fail grid storage systems instead.
For example, if you had a smart home that cut off heating in the recent Texas event when it saw prices rising (because it assumed prices would revert soon allowing for cheaper heating a little later) it would end up having to pay even more later when prices turned out to continue rising.
I don’t really think smart appliances are a sufficient solution for ordinary people because there is too much power usage that is fixed (or worse, correlated with high demand/low supply) and I don’t think consumers are actually signing up for the price volatility on their fixed usage.
It feels like you are suggesting that it’s ok to have everyone picking up pennies in front of steamrollers because they can speed up a bit if the steamroller gets too close or go and pick up more pennies if it is further away. But I say that this won’t be good enough if the steamroller starts going faster and they get too tired running away. It’s especially bad because many people merely thought they were picking up pennies and didn’t realise they were being chased by a steamroller. I feel like this analogy is pretty strained by now but the recent events in Texas showed a lot of people getting squashed without realising that they had been spending years running around in front of steamrollers.
I much prefer simple dumb appliances than smart crap that is garbage after 5 years. If the price is high like in Texas recently I can decide to not use the dryer.
Too many people think about the above two because it’s easier to see/feel/touch while it’s really thermal loads that are the bulk of household loads.
If I have to go down to 15C or deal with 30C, delay my shower/dishwasher/clothes washer/dryer to save enough bucks when it could really count, I’d do it.
Meanwhile on fixed pricing, I turn things off when prices are negative (that’s bad!) and indifferent to high prices when I have zero incentive to do differently.
I know my parents got half price electric for water heating, but I don't know how much they actually saved.
That's not say someone isn't eating the cost of the high spot prices, it's just a lot of that cost is borne by sophisticated professionals who's job it is to price risk and black swan events. The problem with wholesale passthrough rates is consumers are rarely sophisticated enough to understand the details of energy markets and the financial instruments to offset the risk.
“Just Energy” and another cooperative.
Reality is, electricity distribution corps are more tolerant of risk than individuals because generators have to sell, but the distributor can always file for bankruptcy if it suddenly becomes very unprofitable.
(I'm not in anyway associated with Octopus btw, just interested in this sort of thing)
I have my issues with this Tory decade but in this small area they've absolutely smashed it out the park.
> In 2004, the Enterprise Committee of the Scottish Parliament called for the development of a 'fully fledged' Scottish energy policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_Scotland?wpro...
The 2003 Scottish parliament was Labour, later parliaments were SNP.
Is there a UK wide energy policy that pushed aggressively for renewables?
Bitcoin miners probably.
* Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles
* Bitcoin, I guess
There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices.
There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power.
So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power.
Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly.
Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.
So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else, who pay in higher capital costs.
(For aluminum in particular you have another problem: if you shut down more than about six hours, the molten aluminum freezes and you spend a lot of money on repairs.)
It’s no different than Google getting paid when utilities send a signal to Nest saying, “power is going to be expensive shortly, precool everyone’s home in this geobound and then raise the temp so we don’t have to start gas peakers up.”
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
It seems a bit reckless to already be transitioning into a situation expecting those solutions to magically come to be.
The preferable solutions are ones that actually exist.
Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If only there was a ready trading partner nearby. Maybe Canada needs power.
Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for not producing energy.
Surely this can change, no? You'd just have to sell it at a cheaper rate to make up for the fact that the other side has to ramp up/down other sources to accomodate your changes in volume.
It’s pretty easy to predict the amount of wind two or three hours into the future, wind doesn’t just “stop” without any sort of warning. (At least not when you’re dealing with wind over 100s of square KM in the middle of an ocean).
So selling renewables into the grid isn’t that hard, even across grids. But you might not be able to command the same premium that a more “reliable” source could.
No you don't. Electricity is sold at spot prices in real time. At that is how I and most people in Norway buy theirs.
It should be possible to reduce the likelihood of prices going negative by continuing to improve the interconnectedness of the various national grids in Europe.
Real-time bidding for prices already works at some places, but we need to modernize the whole electric system of the world. Smart grid was always part of the renewable solution.
> Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for not producing energy.
It's already happening, but with all the negative conotations of Bitcoin mining, it's generally easier to listen to interviews with people working at energy companies than to discuss it on internet forums.
Maybe mars needs power, but neither of them is going to get any of it from britain.
Laws of physics take precedence over 'free trade'
There's no reason to believe that something won't be worked out in time.
So if by "hissy fit" you mean the people of the UK looked at the pros and cons of EU membership and narrowly decided that the cons can be lived with then.. yeah sure.
Live view: https://www.electricitymap.org/map
- electrolysis of seawater https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912...
- scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere directly https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-meth...
Neither of these is energy-efficient, but if the energy is negatively priced they don't need to be
We do this some with aluminum smelting, but it's not as free as it initially appears. You need a high energy usage to capital cost ratio for it to be economical. (Ideally, you'd also be able to ramp up and down somewhat quickly as-needed. IIRC, there's a big aluminum plant in Germany that can do this, but it's unusual.)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-loom...
If Scotland exports of wool exceeded the amount of imported cotton, then we can pretend that the cotton import never existed. Cotton and wool is pretty interchangeable as textile fibers. This then allow us to purchase cotton that is produce by child labor, because the cotton didn't actually exist because look, wool production exceeds the demand for textile fiber.
It pure silliness. If a country buy energy produced from fossil fuel then that country is responsible for the pollution. No amount of exporting clean energy will erase the pollution. Its there, it is being generated, and the customer who pays for it has a distinct responsibility.
Sometimes I wonder if it would make more sense for individual properties to have their own powerwall type devices to soak up the oversupply during those windy days but in reality the cost of getting one installed is so high that I can't imagine enough people ever doing it, let alone the organization and co-ordination that would be needed from the energy companies.
Rather than wondering how we can store all the excess capacity it's probably more cost effective to wonder how we can shift demand.
Aluminum smelters in Germany use gargantuan amounts of electricity, for instance, but they can use 3x as much on Friday when power is cheap than Monday when it's not with relative ease.
Using a powerwall to keep production steady would be a ridiculous waste of money.
Storage heaters need to make a comeback, as well.
I really hope these kinds of things start to increase in popularity, but I think it needs more government intervention for it to happen.
It would probably help if they mandated smart electric storage heaters on new builds but beyond that I'm not sure you need to do much more.
You can rely on people's self interest to buy a new washing machine that saves them money, for instance.
Also, since green tech often saves fewer actual dollars from a consumer's pocket than the "real" cost of the externalities saved, subsidies and/or eco-friendly certification would also be good.
The obvious solution to this is grid frequency. It's already a requirement for solar grid tie invertors for example.
The company I work for has two plants near each other, where one is run in winter, and one in summer, each producing a different product. The workers alternate between which plant they work at depending on the season. The other plant is shutdown for maintenance. By replacing the conveyor belt every year we ensure production never shuts down unexpectedly while people are working, and this more than makes up for the cost of a factory that is idle half of the year.
We have a lot of factories. The above two plants are not the foundry where we pour iron which I talked about in a different thread.
It clearly doesn't matter what percentage of the input cost is energy to whether the plant is profitable. So long as that percentage is non-zero there will always be an energy cost at which the total cost to produce is higher than the market price to sell (ask any industry in Texas).
Clearly there are other factors too, in your example it seems like labour costs are very high or perhaps contractual demands on output mean down time is unacceptable.
The reason an idle machine is bad is because you have to pay interest on the loan (write downs and all that complexity). You also have to pay rent (taxes) on the building they are in. You need to do basic maintenance (HVAC so they don't deteriorate). You need to ensure the machine operator (which might be a rare skill) is available when you put it back to work, which might mean paying the operator to do nothing just so he doesn't find a new job while laid off. All of these raise the input cost of restarting after a long period of being idle - sometimes you are better off scraping the machines and buying new if you need them.
Against that you have demand and ability to store the finished product. Some things can be stored up (just in time calls this bad, but it isn't always a bad thing), while others degrade quickly. Some things your customers will order well in advance so you can plan around demand, while others you get an order for "yesterday" (if only you had a time machine).
Depending on how all of the above work out idle factories have different economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
One of the potential strategies for dealing with grid storage in Europe is to turn Norway into a battery:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/experts-respond...
Very neat engineering.
I'm not saying it isn't neat, but it doesn't scale to as much storage as we need.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/abandoned-mine-shafts-energy-s...
I'm a sucker for these back-to-basics engineering projects. High tech batteries be damned, let's just use potential energy for storage!
Here is a German article about it. As far as I remember, the real issue is that pumps/generators with the required powers are very expensive. https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/lageen...
Only if you don't look at all available solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas "P2G is often considered the most promising technology for seasonal renewable energy storage"
I dunno why this is such an unknown technique, natural gas storage is a very old and proven technology. Yet it is ommitted from almost any discussion about the subject...
Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.
If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed. That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here...
Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane with CO2 neutral variants.
> Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.
Which is why there are proposals to go purely via hydrogen and reversible oxidation cells. That way you can get up to about 70-80%.
But again, we are talking about long term storage. ALL other options of energy storage are more expensive when you reach the "weekly to monthly" storage timeframe. At that timeframe, the low efficiency becomes irrelevant, as storage cost ($/kWh) is dominating, and we are talking about renewables anayway.
We do have a rather good idea. There are several studies and large test facilities both in Europe and the US. Specifically in the area I was mentioning (salt caverns). From wikipedia on hydrogen storage: "Underground hydrogen storage is the practice of hydrogen storage in caverns, salt domes and depleted oil and gas fields. Large quantities of gaseous hydrogen have been stored in caverns by ICI for many years without any difficulties." "Another study referenced by a European staff working paper found that for large scale storage, the cheapest option is hydrogen at €140/MWh for 2,000 hours of storage using an electrolyser, salt cavern storage and combined-cycle power plant."
There is more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
You can also turn CO2 into synthetic oil (Methane, gasoline, Jet fuel, motor oil - your choice of what you want) via known processes. Again the process isn't very efficient, but when the inputs are free who cares. The sum of is carbon neutral.
In order to convert elecricity to methane you first have to REMOVE CO2 from the enviroment. If you subsequently burn that gas, you arrive back at the CO2 level you had before the P2G process.
That of course only works out to net zero when you use co2 that was recently captured, like from waste-biogas or trees.
The big problem with fossil fuels is not directly that they release CO2, it is that they release CO2 that was captured over millenia in the comparatively short timespan of decades.
You can avoid that problem entirely with P2G systems.
The utility keeps the battery charged, uses the power during times of peak load for the grid, and the homeowner can use the battery as a backup power source.
Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to the grid at all times and neither will all their stored energy be usable.
Batteries aren't the silver bullet many imaging them to be. The real solution is expanding transmission capacity, building more renewables and supplementing that by nuclear or hydro.
If electricity is going to be so cheap then we can just extract lithium from seawater.
Plus dead lithium batteries can of course be used as a high grade ore.
Assuming lowest demand is at night, that means that building just 3 more batteries you could power the whole state for an hour at night?
A storage battery is not a viable means of balancing demand and supply over a time period longer than minutes.
What's needed is not more batteries but better transmission, more hydro where possible and where hydro is not possible, more nuclear.
And I agree. I worked in solar and storage for a while. It's not a replacement, it's just an extension.
It works out ok for a battery system for a building but anything larger they just don't last long enough
South Australia's population is small, under two million and it's demand fluctuates between 400 - 3000 MW. For comparison, the Canadian province of New Brunswick has a comparable peak demand but fewer than a million people.
The goal of Australia batteries was to normalize short production/consumption fluctuations, not as general universal battery storage to deal with renewable uneven production.
When you come to resell an electric car, the condition of the battery is going to be significant in resale value too.
There would presumably be a zip code lottery element here too - would some areas of a given country make much greater demands of resident's privately owned car batteries than others?
Just set the price at which you are willing to sell so that you make a profit overall.
Are there any examples of pilot schemes that have used cars in this way?
Not to mention I don't think the local grid to houses can support loads of cars suddenly getting charged at once, which is what you want for big wind spikes.
Additionally you could program cars to feed into the grid when the price goes high enough to justify the cost of cycling the battery. This would help deal with unexpected events.
I'm not sure if you can call it a crisis. A problem, yes, but one that will sort itself out over time. Negative prices are a huge incentive to any form of flexible demand. And by 2030 there will be millions of electric vehicles on UK roads, representing hundreds of GWh of flexible storage. Free fuel by charging at the right time, handled automatically by your smart charger / app? Or even paid to charge? That's a pretty powerful incentive to soak up excess supply.
> "And we are still going need masses of gas backup"
We already have masses of gas backup. But it will become less important in the future as more diversity in renewables, more interconnections, more storage, more nuclear, etc, come online. We'll still need gas for the foreseeable future, but the less it is used, the better.
The actual figure for the UK grid (there is no separate Scotland grid) is just over 40% of net electrical energy demand supplied by renewable sources. If Scotland was severed from the grid it would require fossil fuels and nuclear just like the rest of the UK.
The 97% figure is arrived at by taking British renewable energy that happens to be in Scotland and subtracting that against Scottish energy use. This is in no way accurate and ignores time - there are many periods of time where Scotland's wind turbines aren't spinning and the region is drawing power from the rest of the UK grid.
Scotland could have generated 300% of daily energy demand from wind one some days. And zero on others. The reality is that one cannot be subtracted from the other to claim that net consumption is zero precisely because there is a time when that is not true.
Electrical energy is not like balance of trade i.e. it is not fungible. There is a further complication here - the assumption that there is a ready sink of generated energy. If that stops being the case, then suddenly those days of 300% demand being generated are no longer possible.
The headline is a mischaracterisation and is misleading.
To be specific, from https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pr...
"Great Britain saw 80 hours of negative pricing in the first nine months of 2020": nine months is 6570 hours. So about 1.2% of the time.
As the government announced that sales of new ICE vehicles will be banned in only 9 years and most car manufacturers start unveiling their EV range in earnest I think we're going to see the shift to EV happen this decade. If so extra electricity production needs to happen now.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk...
Ireland is a good example of this. One of the reasons that Ireland has not been able to increase wind farms is because they don't have the ability to export it rapidly. The last time the interconnect with GB was cut, they had to shut down a bunch of wind farms. There was big news a while ago about building a new interconnect to France which should allow for more wind farms in Ireland while relying on french "nuclear batteries"
Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks.
While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035.
At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now.
Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...
Economically, it's not clear that economically you'd want to run PWRs this way though since FuelEx is only a small part of the LCOE of a nuclear plant.
You actually can. All remaining six German nuclear power plants can operate in load-following mode and vary their output power by 10%-20% within minutes.
It just makes no sense to reduce the power on nuclear plants as they don’t emit any CO2 and you don‘t save much Uranium when you reduce power.
or alternatively a more old school view, with analog dials!: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Today for example renewables have been >50% of total generation. And I've seen sometimes for as long as a week it's not broken 10-15%. Very interested as to how the grid maintains excess capacity to make up for low wind generation...
(I'm joking, I think, but maybe this would actually work)
Having to pay wind producers to power off seems like we've combined the operational flaws of both - admittedly, at a much lower price point and without the waste/accident issues.
Having prices vary minute by minute depending on supply will create powerful incentives for users to shift their demand. As I've written here many times, there are many many ways people can shift their demand.
Such as running the hot water heater only when electricity is cheap. Charging your electric car battery only when cheap. Etc.
Yes. And this is often touted as "renewable now cheaper than..."
But those decreasing prices are not actually a sign that renewable energy is cheaper to produce, but that it is actually useless and thus worthless at certain times.
Now that may entail some business opportunities, but it's not that simple. For example most industrial applications can't easily be turned on or off as the wind blows and the sun shines.
And they are a huge opportunity for every electricity user who can time-shift consumption: every refrigeration device, every thermal device, battery chargers, data center UPS banks, you name it.
The problem here is not negative electricity prices - those are the opposite of a problem. The problem is the grid needs to re-adapt.
You „can” stop generating power using wind.
Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.
An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year how much they will make and so for the investors it works out.
For the utility they need more green energy in the mix, and so they are willing to sign the contract even though sometimes they will buy electricity and they pay someone to take it on the spot market. They also know how much wind they expect to get, and so those times wind is negative are made up by times that wind is blowing when they would otherwise have to buy much more expensive peak plant power. So for the utility over the course of the year the wind power is profitable even though at some moments it is unprofitable.
The problem is in the above separation the windmill owner is paid for all power produced, and so if they shut down there is no money for them. (or they have to agree with the utility on a fair payment)
If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.
I wish everyone thought that way, all I hear in Canada is "oh the jobs, oh the jobs, what will happen to the jobs...???"
"How to create 25 million jobs by decarbonizing the economy" - https://www.fastcompany.com/90533448/how-to-create-25-millio...
But the good news is that we can move that fast! We now know exactly what needs to happen (electrify everything) and in what timeframe (2035) to stay below 2 degrees and doing that will not only solve climate change but also create jobs, save us money, make us healthier, and improve our quality of life.
> Canada doesn't have to take such an American view of capitalism, and we often haven't in our history.
Canadian identity is a lot weaker in the west. I don’t think anyone really cares how “central” Canadians feel.
That's your corporate control of mainstream media, I would think.
And not only is there lots of work in renewable energy, but we've just gone through a year in which many large economies simply "bankrolled" a large unemployed fraction of the population, and the sky didn't fall: Prices didn't shoot up, no runs on banks, nothing like that. So the Canadian state, had it so wished, could back the transition with some money-printing if push came to shove. ... if it were so inclined.
Canada's economic influence in the world is fairly strongly tied to Oil to the point where over the last 30 years it's correlated with the buying power of the dollar, and certainly the economic veracity of most Alberta.
It also fundamentally alters the surplus/deficit scenario - it's a 'major component' (though not nearly like Norway).
iPhones and many foreign cars in Canada are about 25% more expensive than they were a few years ago for example.
Environmental issues aside, there is a lot of downside - it's not just like all that industry can be shifted from one part of the economy to the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Scotland%27s_oil
You can argue whether it is Scotland's or the UK's but I live in the US and it is up to Scotland and the UK to sort out independence and their place in the EU.
Alberta will unfortunately not be able to turn those Oilsands dredgers into windmills.
The windmills will probably be made and installed by totally unrelated entities.
If I were the King of Alberta I would play all my cards on some kind of carbon capture tech because it's not entirely infeasible. Maybe not for cars, but for installed engines and there will be plenty of demand for fuel if it can be used without CO2 emissions especially.
There is a concentration of oil infrastructure in Scotland and oilfields which would be in English territorial waters are serviced from Scotland.
Yep. But the planning for it has to be done, because this change is visible on the horizon. If it isn't planned for, the shift will be forced, happen rapidly, and most of the ill effects will hit those least able to handle them. (I mean, it probably won't be, or at least not even close to the level it needs to be, and only thing most people can do is vote...)
I'm from the north of England, and the economy of the region has, as long as I've been alive, been depressed. Heavy manufacturing leaving the area (leaving the UK...): that's a major cause. But coal mining used to be central -- it was dying for a long time but it was really put to the sword in the 1980s. It was inevitable that it had to happen, just as I think this is, but the way it happened devastated the region -- and that's translated into several decades of damage, and has had hugely detrimental effects, particularly social. The idea was that retraining would happen, the economy would be shifted, but they were mostly empty promises (why do people of a certain age hate Thatcher with every iota of their beings? Well...).
Most of my family are from or live in the north of Scotland, and it's gone from the majority of them being employed in oil industry or oil industry-adjacent jobs to...not in the last 10-15 years. It's biting hard there (though there are jobs in renewables: not enough, but much better than situation was in NE England)
Also, I think Scotland has it easier than other places due to the low(ish) population density, which makes wind-farming less problematic. And being on an island in windy seas.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-ca...
Also Scotland exported 20.4 TWh (and imported 1.1TWh) of electricity was this renewable? or was the 'dirty' power being exported.
It's an achievement for sure but it's like the Marlboro Man boasting he's quit smoking while still selling cigarettes to everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station?wprov...
Here's an example of someone's experience installing and using a "mini-split" heat pump for their house: https://www.sustainablelafayette.org/single-post/home-electr...
They do have some problems with extreme cold (not really an issue in Scotland or most of Europe for that matter) but even in such a case should still be used together with plain resistance heating. But that kind of cold has very few people living there anyway (think -30c or colder)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
Models made for cold climate work to around -30c. Wikipedia has okish writeup about their functionality in cold climates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_source_heat_pump#In_cold_c...
Don't really have any good sources in English for this (most reading I have done on this is in Finnish)
For example here are some excerpts from a report done by VTT (the Finnish governments research center)
https://www.scanoffice.fi/vttn-testiraportit-ilmalampopumppu...
If you scroll down you can find some pics "lämpökerroin" is COP and "ulkoilman lämpötila" is outside temperature.
From that you can see that the combo of Mitsubishi Electric MSZ-LN25VGW + MUZ-LN25VGHZ still holds a COP of 2 at -30c. On the models not made for such climate/cheap ones you can see it drop to 1 (or below)
The average UK household uses about 3,800 kWh per year.
Yeah many are just growing a layer of fat and hybernating. Hence the obecity rates
And yes, the article is only about electricity, not heating.
You do realize the Scots mostly don't live alone in little cabins in the mountains like in the movies, don't you? Most of the population lives in the (densely populated) Central Belt:
FFS, we don't all live in isolated homesteads and frolic with sheep.
And what does the "sparse" (which implies thinly distributed, FYI, hence the person who replied to you specifying that it's actually quite dense in a localised area) population have to do with hydro or not?
Amount of hydro power capacity per capita in Scotland is much higher than say in Wales.
> pretty much every country has some geography conducive to hydro
This is simply not true. Availability of hydro in Switzerland is much better than for example in Lithuania.
Is it? Because most of Wales is mountainous. And nearly all of its inhabitants don't live in the mountains. Still confused about why the population distribution is important, especially as Wales and Scotland are part of the UK electrical grid, so per-capita is ultimately meaningless unless both declare independence and sever that grid connection.
> This is simply not true. Availability of hydro in Switzerland is much better than for example in Lithuania.
I did say "some geography". I also said "coastal lowland countries of Europe" which would include Lithuania also, yeah? It's coastal, it's highest point is 294m ASL, which is pretty lowland in my book.
And 20% of its generation capacity is from hydro.
So yeah... obviously not all countries are going to have the same hydro capacity, but it'd be damn hard to find one that has geography that prevents any hydro capacity.
It's hard to me to say right now mountainousness of these two countries compare (but looking at the map, looks like Scotland has more and higher mountains https://maps-for-free.com/).
But Wales population density is three times as low as in Wales.
So even if mountain availability would be the same (which I claim it is not), then hydro power capacity is three times lower in Wales.
> Still confused about why the population distribution is important
Distribution is not important, density is.
> per-capita is ultimately meaningless unless both declare independence and sever that grid connection
If it was meaningless, we would not discuss the BBC article in the first place.
> it'd be damn hard to find one that has geography that prevents any hydro capacity
Well, technically one can build hydro power plant virtually everywhere where there are rivers, but in many places (with only few mountains) building hydro power plants is prohibitively expensive and leads to too much land wasted for water storage.