GB National Grid Status
gridwatch.templar.co.uk
gridwatch.templar.co.uk
At first I thought the increase in traffic, while noticeable, didn't look particularly impressive on those graphs, but then I noticed that those diurnal traffic patterns looked a bit strange, which is when I noticed the log scale!
It shows energy sources for all of the countries in Europe on a map, import/export, prices and CO2 intensity.
That whole website is a nonsense, what's the point in visualising imaginary data and pretending it's real...
https://www.electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard
My favourite for showing many country's grids around the world, and the power flowing between them through interconnectors:
I'm curious if other people have interesting use cases here and how accurate is the data? Is this all people putting different layers on top of one source of truth for data - or patching together various sources?
Ok wow.
I assumed solar would be the thing that takes over, and In Spain that's probably true. But here it seems wind is going to be a win.
Anyway I still need to work out how to spend my declining years - how to write software for renewable energy farms ... wind or solar.
(Not saying it does go the other way in capacity though, I don't know.)
This is because large parts of the north sea are shallow/have banks that very large offshore wind farms can be built on.
No terrain to get in the way, no people to object about it being close to their house.
Scotland is also windy and not that populated and so has quite a few onshore farms.
Eg see.
https://orsted.com/en/media/newsroom/news/2022/08/2022083155....
I'm not sure whether this MP was in the pocket of gas, coal or nuclear interests or whatever but he successfully rounded up residents to NIMBY what would have been the biggest wind farm to date even though it would have barely have been visible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm
I was bitter before. Doubly so now electricity prices are through the roof.
Electricity prices would still be through the roof. The prices are all set on the international markets.
Only to the extent that electricity can be imported and exported via international connectors, which are of course limited in their capacity.
Prices are not set internationally, but domestically. Energy is not a tangible, stored commodity like coal which is internationally priced.
If what you said was true then America's electricity would be priced the same as Europe's, whereas it is way cheaper.
Therefore building out additional electricity production in the UK could well lower prices, depending on matching of demand and supply, agreed prices in contracts, length of contracts, etc, and of course whether additional connectors are deployed.
I note that the successful argument was based on the imagined impact to the tourism industry, rather than the visual effect per se.
Even if you didn’t believe in man-made global warming, surely the idea of cleaner Scottish air would be a bonus.
Clearly due to the nature of grids and shared generation nobody can guarantee that all electrons used came from wind power (nor does anyone care!?!) but Scotland is an exporter of energy and at times its entire needs could be met from its renewable generation.
Not sure which part of Scotland producing lots of renewable energy you find difficult to cope with, but renewable production is here to stay, cheaper than other sources and a growing part of the mix.
About end of the Stone Age ~15,000BC you could still walk from UK to Europe - there is I believe evidence of civilisation and villages down there still.
In the Mediterranean area, while there is more prevalence of solar, it's not a clear winner either. For instance in Italy there is quite an aggressive law on usage of agricultural space for big solar farms. Solar will win in the decentralized, domestic space, an area that I'm highly interested in. At scale, Wind seems to offer a better ROI, especially on country on the coast line (or other favourable morphological characteristic)
I'm heavily looking to switch to work on the space (from more traditional consumer products), but it's a more full stack space: software is written as a byproduct of the hardware. unfortunately I haven't found any Electrical engineering interesting in doing something in the space. Shameless plug if there is someone out there interested.
At the same time they are thinking about allowing wind on land again (probably because it will no longer be the cheaper option).
Given their links to fossil fuel interests it comes across as delaying tactics.
That's actually changed as of this week https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63880999
ie if you have a solar panel on your roof and mostly use it to reduce the power you take from the grid, all you will see in the national numbers is lower demand, not increased production.
( The suns out! Put on the washing machine/dish washer etc ).
Bottom line - not all the local solar production is measured at the grid level - much of it results in demand reduction which can't be directly attributed.
I think this will only increase - either due to local batteries, or more electricity driven heating systems ( heat pumps for example ).
And this isn't just homes - if you have a farm and have a big water reservoir which you fill by pumping water - and you had some solar panels - you'd just run the pumps when it was sunny - there is no particular need to run them at particular times ( same if you had a wind driven pump ).
We can forecast the embedded generation in real-time, but it’s only post event once the meter data has been accounted for that we know what actually happened.
I think the estimate is that maybe as much as 5GW of UK wind nameplate capacity is unmetered, so it's a minority of wind power, but it's a big minority.
There's no central register of unmetered power generation, the assumption used is that if on a windy day mysteriously we're buying 25GW from the grid across the country, while on a similar but calm day it was 30GW that suggests 5GW of electricity is not being purchased when it's windy, implying 5GW of unmetered electricity supply from wind.
And there are presumably other embedded systems making up some of that 5GW estimate. Farms just seem obvious because 1) I've seen farms with wind turbines 2) They're industrial scale electricity users, often occupying terrain very suitable for a wind turbine
(this is one reason why the amount of storage required for an all solar/wind grid is usually vastly overestimated).
If you look at graphs of the wind and solar production in winter vs summer, the correlation is obvious. On a day-to-day basis, much less so, but on average low wind does tend to come along with higher sun.
This only happens in the designed operating window ( too light you get nothing, too strong you need to shut down ).
So one question is what window have your tuned your farm for?
Air density matters as well - the denser the more power - ie the colder the more power.....
So whether it's anti-correlated might a local feature depending on the local factors driving the weather?
Perhaps stronger correlation would be that air movement ( wind ) is the thing that drives the weather changing. ie no wind, means slow change ( though the opposite isn't necessarily true - if you are in the centre of a cyclic weather system which isn't moving you could have wind and not much change ).
> how to write software for renewable energy farms ... wind or solar.
Basically this means working for Siemens. I don't think they have a huge number of software engineers, it's mostly MechE.
Solar in the UK is highly seasonal. A ~4kW installation that generated 500kWh in June might only produce 50kWh in December [1] - whereas a ~4kW install in Spain might generate 700kWh in June and 200kWh in December [2]
So if you want power output in December, Solar in the UK isn't the best choice :)
[1] https://pvoutput.org/aggregate.jsp?id=43099&sid=39381&v=0&t=... [2] https://pvoutput.org/aggregate.jsp?id=91812&sid=81184&v=0&t=...
The data shows pretty clearly that combined-cycle gas turbines are still THE type of power stations that are used to balance the supply and demand, but solar is already helping a lot during the day.
French data shows gas power stations produce up to 9GW (~13%), and without solar they would be used to produce 12.5GW (~19%).
https://gasdata.nationalgrid.com/
The network is used for short term storage to even out supply and demand.
https://umm.nordpoolgroup.com/#/messages?publicationDate=all...
It's the notifications for all production and transmission in Europe coming online and going offline with power and dates.
For all the coal rolling, capital knows when there's a good deal going.
U.K. National Grid status - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092321 - July 2014 (55 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Initially, this was much more expensive than fossil electricity, but the price of turbines has dropped and the price of fossil electricity has grown, so now existing wind turbines are lowering the price consumers pay for electricity.
New wind farms have achieved CfD rates of less than £0.04 per kWh, which is not a subsidy for the wind farm operators, but rather a subsidy for electricity consumers as this electricity is far cheaper than market rates.
While not nearly efficient as using the electricity directly, it's more efficient than throwing it away.
Also the offshore farms sit in a pool of the raw material ( water ).
There is also value in the ability to store the energy - not as efficient as something like using water to store potential energy ( ~75% ), but there is value there.
I'm not somebody who thinks it will be hydrogen everywhere - frankly electricity is easier to distribute and we already have a good infrastructure - but that's not to say it doesn't have a role.
Any imbalance between the agreed price and the reference price is sent to the LCCC (Low Carbon Contracts Company, part of the government).
The LCCC then re-charges any CfD payments or surplus funds to the electricity suppliers. This should eventually work its way into an increase or reduction in household energy bills. So the end consumer should get the difference between the wholesale and CfD price, in theory. This is also taken into account when the OFGEM price cap is calculated.
To answer your question about who benefits from high electricity prices - mostly fossil fuel producers, but also fossil power stations, legacy renewable generators with direct subsidies rather than CfDs, and electricity market traders exploiting the volatility.
I think that also clarifies something I'd found confusing: that the spot price is currently effectively determined by the price of gas, and yet the UK consumer is benefitting from the presence of wind generation (which generates much cheaper power than gas)
If I've understood your post correctly, this is because the electricity companies don't directly pass the spot price onto consumers. Instead when the price to consumers is calculated, the part attributable to wind is taken account of at the lower price.
So effectively the marginal price to consumers is actually affected by the average cost of generation (which is turn, from an economic point of view is arguably undesirable, because it means consumers don't have sharp enough incentives to save electricity at the margin)
In general, electricity suppliers don't literally pass the spot price on to consumers. It used to be that a supplier could price electricity however they liked, including passing the spot price on. However, for the past few years, suppliers are required to buy futures, and price their supplied electricity on that basis, because of the domestic price cap. If they didn't they would run the risk of going bankrupt like Bulb. Futures bring stability, and in an efficient market with perfect information buying futures would be the same as buying spot. But the market is not efficient and with perfect information, so that assumption doesn't apply. Notwithstanding that, you were correct, the part of electricity generation attributable to wind should be taken account of at the lower price.
For most consumers, their marginal cost of electricity is identical to their average cost (ignoring the standing charge) as they are on a fixed rate tariff. It would undoubtedly be more efficient to charge consumers the actual marginal cost at the time of consumption, and then refund the CfD payments in a monthly payment later, but that's not how it's done sadly.
If you use wind to generate electricity and use that to synthesize natural gas which you store and use to generate electricity the whole thing costs about £80-90.
You can see a lot of them here: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/bitmaps
Nuclear: 5.25 GW
Wind: 3.84 GW
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines: 23.31 GW
Solar (Estimated): 0.35GW
Installed Wind Capacity (onshore + offshore): 25 GW [0]
Installed Solar Capacity: 13.4 GW [1]
Total installed Wind/Solar: 38.4 GW. Total produced: 4.11 GW
Lots of you are cheerleaders for "renewables". They seem like a transitional technology to me. If hydrocarbons are ever going to be retired from use, nuclear sure does seem like the only option.
It seems to me like humanity's only hope is a breakthrough in our understanding of the laws of nature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_King...
edit: formatting & added combined 11% total for wind/solar
More long distance transmission / interconnects
Vehicle-to-grid
Grid scale battery storage
Domestic and commercial battery storage (Powerwall etc)
Seasonal thermal storage - large insulated tanks or ground source heat pumps
Most regions can get by with no storage using that one change.
Even so, the available solar energy in the UK in December is ~1/5 what it is in June: https://www.viridiansolar.co.uk/resources-1-2-seasonal-varia...