The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
archy.deberker.com
archy.deberker.com
Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that.
Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days.
It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly.
Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.
The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
But all the solutions are aimed at reducing the curtailment of wind. Rather than reducing the gas burnt.
If the money saved by building more wind (or solar) and not having to burn gas saves more money then who cares if more wind is "wasted"?
It would be nice to use every last drop, but I dont want to actually spend money to achieve that goal when it could be used to e.g. build yet more wind, and burn even less gas.
Something had to get built first, and I guess they picked the wind turbines. This seems like everything working as intended to me.
The article describes an entirely different problem than "oh no, it's very windy/sunny and we don't know how to use all of this energy" which is not solved with better distribution, but with storage and demand regulation.
And actually, the article is in complete agreement with you that we needn't be overly worried: curtailment isn't the end of the world, but we can solve it and it turns out that some of those solutions are cheaper than just building more farms, or would incentivize building those farms closer to where the energy is needed.
I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved.
Burning fossil fuels is a problem to be solved. High electricity prices are a problem to be solved.
Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power, which almost inevitably increases the amount of wind curtailed.
To repeat, curtailment is not a problem and does not need to be solved. It's a normal part of running a renewable grid. Any low cost renewable plan will have some predicted degree of curtailment, because it's the cheapest way to meet our energy needs.
See:
"Reframing Curtailment: Why Too Much of a Good Thing Is Still a Good Thing"
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/reframing-curtailment...
> Video Explains How Having More than Enough Renewable Energy Capacity Can Make the Grid More Flexible
Agree 95%. The only valid question involving curtailment is how much must occur at each individual turbine or farm to make it a bad investment.
You get all the revenue, and have zero wear and tear on your equipment. In an extreme scenario you could even be paid for not turning on non-functional equipment. What a fantastic deal.
With regards to fraud, doing this deliberately would be fraud (but good luck proving it). Building the equipment and then failing to maintain it, and failing to test it, that’s just bad management…
Obviously it’s a shitty deal for consumers. But they’re not investors.
That’s because curtailment does cost us money. Someone’s paying those wind operators to turn off the farms. We literally pay money to wind farms to explicitly make them produce nothing.
How do you reconcile these two statements?
> High electricity prices are a problem to be solved.
> I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved.
Curtailment cost money, you still need pay the wind operators to the energy you told them not to produce, plus pay someone else to produce the energy that’s now not being produced by wind. That cost ultimately ends driving up the price of electricity.
You want to reduce the cost of electricity, a good start would be not paying people for electricity that can’t be used.
> Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power, which almost inevitably increases the amount of wind curtailed.
Only if you can transport the energy. Otherwise you’re just building turbines that can’t be used, and paying for the privilege of not using them.
Why? What are the real costs? Isn't it just a simple disconnect switch? Why do the wind operators get paid for not delivering power? Is it a contractual issue?
On top of the above you want to make a profit.
Banks and investors lend/invest in things that are likely to succeed, and pay them back. But there’s no guarantee, and national grid sure as shit isn’t going to provide that guarantee, why would they take on all that risk?
The only guarantee provided to a wind farm by the grid, is that they’ll be able to participate in the market, and that the grid ensures they will take the power they sell in the market, or compensate them if they can’t (curtailment).
But there are no guarantees that there’s someone in the market to actually buy your power at the price you want to sell it. But as wind produces the cheapest electricity around, it’s a pretty reasonable bet that a wind farm can sell it energy for a profit.
Additionally the grid reserves the right to change how the markets work, within reasonable limits, and no doubt are required to take supplier and consumer issues into consideration. But if you don’t like the changes they make, your only recourse is to sue them, and prove they breached the contract. But there’s no guarantee you’ll win.
A smart bank/investor know all of these things, and will have a decent idea of changes that might impact the business model, and the likelihood of them occurring, and thus include those risks in their investment strategy. But absolutely nobody in this game goes in expecting a sure fire win, that’s just naive.
One of the big points in the article is that there’s a single energy market in the UK that doesn't consider location. So it’s possible for wind providers to sell energy from locations where it can’t be used. An obvious fix is to introduce multiple energy markets for different locations, so the price of electricity drops in areas where there’s excessive production, and not enough transfer capability.
Perhaps the system could be changed to be more like how you imagine it should work, or would prefer that it would work.
But not understanding how it does work and jumping off from there on the discussion means that folks end up talking past each other, rather than actually communicating.
I used to work for National Grid in the Miliband era; I worked, among other things, on theorizing a replacement to the 'circle diagram' for the (then thought to be) coming renewables regime.
> This isn't a real economic loss.
Perhaps I'm misinformed on what economic loss is. To me, paying for something and not getting it is a loss.
I go to movies, I buy popcorn, I spill popcorn. Movie theater says "tough noogies" to me that's a simple economic loss, and roughly the same. I paid for it, I didn't get it.
Worse still is paying for curtailment on both sides. From the article:
Consumers end up effectively paying three times for the power they’re getting: the original payment to the windfarm for the electricity, the payment to turn off, and then the payment to the alternative generator.
If this is true, and you're both paying a turbine operator for the power, and then again to not produce the power, well that's extra worse. That would be the initial economic loss (I paid for the thing and didn't get it) with an fee tacked on top.
I go to movies, I buy popcorn, I spill popcorn. Movie theater says "tough noogies" to me and doesn't replace the popcorn. They also charge me a fee for cleaning up the popcorn I spilled. That's worse from what I can tell.
Again maybe I don't understand what's going on here with respect to how precisely curtailment works. But it's hard to imagine that the situation
> So the grid has to pay them for electricity, even if they can’t use it.
is anything other than an economic loss.
> Claiming it is, is tantamount to saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance.
I see where you're going with the example. I don't think insurance is a good example though, because insurance is decidedly different, at least to my mind.
If you pay for insurance, you got insurance. You're not prepaying for medical treatment, you're paying a small fee to be made whole again if the trip goes sideways. If you paid for insurance and didn't need to use it, you still were insured and got the peace of mind that comes with knowing you either A) have a great time on your trip or B) don't pay for an entire trip that you don't get.
Paying for curtailment is directly paying for something that you directly don't get. No intermediaries, no risk model, no nothing.
If I'm failing to understand, well, OK then! Great! Please do inform me. You rightly stated that I called you misinformed without backing it up. If you're going to say that your original example is obviously correct, maybe try explaining it then?
A better comparison would be going on holiday, pre-paying for £100,000 of medical treatment at a hospital, and then never going to hospital. Then there’s clearly an economic loss, you’ve paid £100,000 of your real cash, and got no nothing in return. You haven’t even got protection from risk, because the hospital isn’t gonna help you if your luggage goes missing, but travel insurance obviously will.
The graph of the day they screenshot shows the curtailment stops as soon as people wake up and start using electricity. On many days there is no curtailment.
And... You can build wind in other places, like the offshore wind near Dogger Bank they show on the map and then forget about.
Building additional wind generation can never be more wasteful than the costs of its construction. If it were free, it would make sense to vastly overbuild.
In a simple model where there was only one company that owned everything from top to bottom across the entire electrical grid from all power plants to every single power meter and everything in between? Yes I agree 100%.
However that's not how the grid actually works, so a simple understanding of the economics of a marginal turbine isn't the same as understanding the whole system.
The original article is about just being able to move any amount of energy whatsoever to where it is needed. If you don't improve distribution then you hit the saturation point much faster and more often than in an intermittent peak power scenario. Seeing that the original article links to multiple pages by the energy regulator/distributor about this very issue should maybe give us a hint that they, the actual experts, do think this is important enough to merit attention?
I upvoted your original post when you said that "it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about" negative prices and curtailing, but I'm starting to wonder whether you may be the common factor in some of those unconstructive conversations you've had in the past :-) Respectfully, it's not helpful to contribute to the discussion with a robotic pattern matched "curtailment is great actually!" whenever the topic is mentioned, without engaging with the arguments that are put forth.
Timestamp: 1 minute 5 seconds.
If the NREL is specifically making videos to dispel unhelpful myths about a topic then it's worth at least watching their short video before continuing to spreading those very same unhelpful myths.
I still feel like you're failing to engage with the issue here:
* NREL, just like the UK grid operator, is worried about curtailment and is taking active steps to limit it, the only difference is that while some uninformed schmucks think that any curtailment is bad, grid operators think a little curtailment is to be expected and they just want to keep it within bounds with an awareness of the opportunity costs that you mention -- sometimes it may be cheaper to just build new capacity and not worry about it at all, sometimes not. See for example this 2014 report: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60983.pdf They're saying: "relax, a little curtailment is nothing to worry about, let us do the worrying", they're not saying it's a non-issue. If it's not an issue, why are new interconnections being built at all? Why is locational pricing being considered at all?
* unless renewables are already 100% of the energy mix at a given point in time then any kind of curtailment has to logically be due to either congestion or some other technical limitation (a hiccup in planning/projection or inflexibility of other generators) and strictly speaking cannot be due to overproduction; that said, the original article describes a situation where transmission capacity is not just insufficient for peak production (even if it could have been used) but may slowly get to the point where it's insufficient for average production... both are technically "congestion" but do you really not see the difference?
In their conclusion, from a decade ago, they suggest that in the future (i.e. now) with larger amounts of renewables curtailment will go up.
It's like people dying during heart operations. If the number of deaths go up because you are treating more people is that a good or a bad thing? If people come away with the idea that heart operations are too risky, when the science suggests we should be doing even more of them, because the vast, vast majority save lives is that good science communication?
The article is saying that if we built more transmission lines, or increased storage capacity, or had localized pricing, that more of the power generated would get used, and we wouldn't need to turn on the fossil-powered plants as much.
More wind wasted is precisely equal to more fossil fuel burnt right now.
Further, the article described why simply building more production doesn't solve things, because most of it would be built in Scotland, and we wouldn't be able to bring in any more power into the grid where it's needed then we do now.
If we store more wind power to reduce curtailment, then that power can be used later. I end up getting a larger fraction of my overall power through wind, so my neighbor can have more access to alternative sources of power that I am not using. Their neighbors now have access to more power as well, because my neighbor is pulling more from my now unused infrastructure.
The gas burnt at peak might not change! But out of peak the balance can change (at least until, say, Scotland is running 100% on wind I guess). The nice thing with storage (especially hydro storage, which sidesteps everyone's universal answer of "batteries are expensive") is that you get to actually hold onto the energy and be "smarter".
It isn't true, though, is it?
The curtailment payment is instead of the regular payment, not in addition to it. Possibly also instead of some tax breaks the wind turbines got contingent on being operational - but that's only shifting costs from the taxpayers to the electricity consumers, who in the large are the same people.
Paying twice is still not as nice as paying once, but it makes me wonder what other sleight of hand the author is employing in his argument.
https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Drax-LCP-Ren...
But it was missing the most obvious long term solutions for excess wind power: carbon capture and hydrogen generation. We cannot build enough excess wind power to ever have too much for those “sinks”.
Maybe not: "The Transport Secretary announced on 19 October 2022 that the Transport Bill which would have set up GBR would not go ahead in the current parliamentary session."
the franchising sysem won't be coming back
TPE is still under covid arrangements and Avanti West Coast is under a new style management contract as I described above
switching out top level boss doesn't suddenly improve underlying problems with the service
in the UK this is almost always the infrastructure, which has been nationalised since 2002
the government (DfT) had more control over the railways under the franchising system than they had when BR existed
almost all of what the hated "train companies" consists of is putting a driver in the cab, the rest is down to the DfT
[0] - interestingly his "RailNatter" this Wednesday was titled "How to fix Britain's broken railways". I haven't watched it yet, but it will certainly feature some good insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmKhVjw1xDA
Some of that is infrastructure (the cancellation of platform 15/16 at Piccadilly means the new Ordsall chord is basically useless, but they tried to use it anyway), I don't know enough about TPE to fairly attribute it, but with AWC it's franchise operation -- especially staff availability. Some of that is also government interference.
Why the left think a tory government would be any better running services than the train operators is anyones guess. When you dig down to it they seem to want more tax subsidies to big businesses (the ones who pay the £400 first class peak time returns on Manchester-London) and high income commuters (the ones with 50% discounts via season tickets who cause peak problems in the same way peak is a problem on the electric grid, and who typically earn far more than the average UK person who commutes via bus or van/car)
Fortunately the franchise system means many lines have significant competition, and you can choose based on journey time, price, and reliability.
Where privitisation does have its weakness is the financing of rolling stock.
The popular opinions I have seen are:
- “nationalise the railways”
- more frequent, reliable and cheaper services overall
As discussed, nationalising the railways isn’t necessarily the silver bullet many people think, but if you engage with those people and don’t insult/berate them they’ll come round easily. They're not hardline communists, hellbent on the destruction of private companies - they just want better train service somehow and may not fully understand how to get there. That's not to deny the existence of "tankies" and other weirdos, they're just a very very tiny minority.
HS2 should enable the “more frequent” part over the regions it covers. I don’t know how to make services cheaper or more reliable, I imagine subsidies come into it somewhere though, and this inevitably means that yes someone wealthy at some point will benefit from a cheaper rail ticket.
Nope, 10 years of plain simple facts and it doesn't help. It's still Richard Branson that's stealing everyones money, if only the west coast mainline wasn't run by him then it would be £20 return for Manchester to London. HS2 of course will apparently cost £600 return for every journey and nobody will be able to afford it or something.
HS2 should be cheaper than current trains, if there is the demand.
Currently to run 1000 seats London to Manchester return takes two 11 car trains, each with 3 members of staff (driver, manager, shop) on a 5 hour return trip. That's 10 hours of train and 30 hours of staff per return.
To do that under HS2 will be 2h30 return for a single train and not need a shop, so that's 5 hours of staff and train costs, so should be far cheaper operational costs.
Track costs should be far cheaper than maintaining 150 year old structure
Whether those lower train and staff costs translate to lower fares, lower subsidies, or more subsidies elsewhere on the network, is a political decision.
I fear the government is killing demand though - for 2 of my last 3 trips to London down the west coast I've hired a car and driven, and it wasn't terrible.
Network Rail sells access to the network to train operating companies, which are private (though often state-owned by other countries).
The network was originally built by private companies until nationalisation in 1947 (railway companies were bankrupt after WW2). It was private for a while in the 90s, then went bankrupt and renationalised in 2002. Seems to be quite the money pit!
It's just another example of the hubris of the Conservative party. We've seen it play out repeatedly over the last decade and even earlier in Thatcher's neoliberalism. Labour's lurch to the right resulted in displays of similar small minded arrogance. Their undermining of the NHS through piecemeal privatisation is nothing short of a crime.
Nope, the difference can be found in the profits made by the company that does in fact own and run the wind farms. The government could capture that should it wish to build them itself. This has been a hot topic recently with regard to fossil fuel energy generators who have been making large profits (in the billions) at the expense of people's energy bills.
There are a lot of details about... I suppose organizational theory? Which makes the decentralization nicer. But profits come from somewhere
Depends on what you mean by overproducing. The energy put into an electrical grid must be balanced by demand or bad things will happen. I think the second answer in the below StackExchange is a good description.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/117437/what-...
*also where you are would be interesting. There's a big difference say between Scotland and Croatia.
But seriously (author of article here) I think that agile tariffs and more demand flexibility are probably a big part of the solution
Edit: for those who are curious, here is some data on prices over the last month: https://agileprices.co.uk/
However, turning generation on or off isn't the only way the grid is balanced in the short term - turning up/down tends to be a big part of it too and most conventional generation can do that faster (sometimes a lot faster) than startup/shutdown.
Despite the insistence that Closed Cycle Gas Turbines can't react quickly, because they're by far the largest component that we could start and stop the UK does in fact very quickly increase and decrease output from the CCGTs. For example this morning 2.79GW at 0600 to 3.89 at 0700.
There are much faster options, batteries, import, even the pumped storage is seconds instead of minutes - if available, but CCGT is just not that slow to change compared to the weather. In that same period the wind power went from 10.9GW to 11.4GW. 500MW is a lot of power but it's not more than 1.1GW
A report from a few years back (which I'm afraid I've utterly forgotten the source) examined the data on this, and argued that as a result of this changed pattern of use, these CCGT stations were now not achieving nearly the kind of efficiency figures they were designed for, which from a carbon point of view is not good news - we might still be emitting lots of the stuff, but just not getting as much practical benefit from it as we used to.
Now, I'm not meaning to suggest that this is a disaster, or that is somehow invalidates the entire of concept of renewables, but it does point to the need to be careful about what we take to be a useful measure of progress - and that merely the quantity of supply to the grid in GWH isn't necessarily it.
And the article under discussion here is of course picking away at another strand of this same idea - when we connect these generators together, it gives rise to system-level effects, and we need to be thinking about the outcomes, both beneficial and harmful, in system-level terms as well.
(Edited for spelling.)
Wind turbine output, although variable, is also fairly predictable: so good modelling and scheduling should ensure that when CCGTs do operate, they can run as efficiently as possible and not be spinning up and down too frequently.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/national-gri...
In a certain sense one should expect lowering usage to inevitably lower efficiency, as a sort of inverse corollary to Jevon's paradox (which states that as efficiency rises, total usage does too).
The problem is that building wind turbines in Britain has opportunity costs.
For simplicity: assume a status quo of 100% gas. We are burning 100 units of gas for that per year.
Now assume by building a crazy amount of wind turbines we could satisfy 95% of the UK's power demand with renewable. However, for the remaining 5% we'd need to burn 50 units of gas.
In this scenario, efficiency of burning gas drastically plummeted, but so did overall gas use.
However now the question is: for the resources invested into building all those turbines, could we have gotten a better climate bang than 50 units of gas saved?
(All numbers made up, obviously. In practice, we can probably make the economics work. Though we might need to deregulate the grid. It's crazy to pay wind turbines for not running. At least mine bitcoin or smelt aluminum or something.)
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
... most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design)
to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once
or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated
power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
You could just keep it spinning nonstop without a load I suppose, but for anything but nuclear it's not gonna be economical.
The thing is, they don't really want to do it if they can save fuel by shutting down.
You'll soon end up with a burning/melted generator.
> "pump some water in a loop"
OK, but you're going to need huge pumps (1000+ MW!). Expensive.
> "or discharge through some resistors"
Again, you'll need extremely large resistors, and a way to dissipate an awful lot of heat. We're talking about a huge amount of energy here!
Could try also melting some salt on the side.
This is all predicated on the market operator actually having the systems in place to signal the need for curtailment effectively, of course. That’s a whole different question.
Could you at least mine bitcoin or something like that?
But operating a nuclear plant in this fashion pushes up the price per MWh considerably given their very high cap-ex and op-ex. And while fuel cost is negligible for nuclear, creating more nuclear waste per useful MWh generated is a further drag on costs.
So as a solution, it "works" if the nuclear plant does not have to compete in terms of price with other sources of electricity. But nuclear fails to compete on cost even if operated continuously - it's uncompetitive with cheap, quick to deploy, low op-ex, modern tech like CC gas turbines or renewables in most western electricity markets and can only survive with government subsidy[2].
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0703/ML070380209.pdf [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/19/biden-adm...
First, reactors are in a stable equilibrium when operating, so one will actually increase their power by increasing the rate at which heat is removed (and v.v.). Alas, that's workable only within some small range.
A reason[1] load-following with PWRs was originally difficult is that traditionally PWRs use boron concentration in primary loop to regulate power and that can be decreased only slowly. The reason it's done that way is that it's the easiest way to ensure that power is adjusted uniformly throughout the core; if instead some control rods were partially inserted, the top part of the core would operate at lower power (and thus lower fuel burn-up) than the bottom part, which would cause compounding control issues later on.
France is using their PWRs in load-following mode by (a) having additional less absorptive control rods ("gray rods") that can be inserted fully to adjust power by smaller increments (b) more complicated schemes to decide which combination of available actuations to use to change power. See https://hal.science/hal-01496376/document for a paper that tries to optimize control designs so that power changes are more possible (and describes how the control schemes work).
Note that the total heat capacity of even just the primary loop in usual reactors is quite large: in PWRs it usually requires ~0.5s of full power output of the reactor to warm it by 1degC, so this can easily cover, say, ~5% variations for something like a minute.
[1] Another is that reactors are not stateless due to xenon poisoning.
The big problem is that energy prices are set based on the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. Renewables do not tend to be that during periods of low supply, as low supply of energy in the eu market generally means sub-optimal weather conditions for renewables. It is going to be either fossil fuels, nuclear, or battery. If we take out fossil fuels then that leaves battery or nuclear. Neither is very economical without subsidies. Governments (and tax paying citizens) are however very keen on grid stability and thus willing to spend a lot of money to keep it running.
That is not a problem, it is the incentive to have supplies available so they can be turned on.
I therefore wonder if the market couldn't be structured in a better way which would still ensure that the fossil backup generators are adequately compensated but smoothes the extra cost over the remaining cheap GWh. Something like a meditating party which is aware of the production costs and buys up the daily power and sells it on at an averaged price. There are probably good reasons why this wouldn't work, but I am too stupid to figure them out.
It's worth noting there are some demand response initiatives and the like that are approaching this from the other side - they will pay a user to not use power at particular times of high load. If you don't want to pay a premium on power, I suspect there will be providers happy to oblige, so long as you are willing to forgo the 100% service guarantee.
At this point there isn't really any part of the energy grid that governments do not subsidize. They subsidize companies that provide grid stability. They subsidize renewables that provide capacity. They subsidize the customer who buy energy. They subsidize the grid infrastructure that transports the energy. They subsidize the interconnection between countries that enables trade between countries. They subsidize the cleaning up and associated costs from pollution.
It's called pumped storage.
We dont need as much storage as people think. Solar and wind anti correlate and a vast amount of demand can be time shifted.
It's because of this that there's a lot of talk about wild ideas like pressurizing abandoned mines and so on - there are a lot of mines around. But then we're back to the "proven technology" sticking point.
Nowhere is currently "well" provisioned for pumped hydro given a solar and wind grid coz while they existed for over a hundred years they have never had to store that much energy. Newer, larger ones are being built around the world. Australia will be well provisioned soon.
Go back in time 10 years when solar and wind first became economic and people made similar comments about how little of it there was (1% of total power!), ignoring the unit economics completely. We are at that exact same inflexion point with pumped hydro.
What's the longest period without wind and sun you're willing to provision for before you give up and tell the population they'll have to do without electricity for a bit? A day, a week, a month? Numerically, how much storage would that actually need? How many stations, how big? You'd need over a hundred Fengnings to power the UK for a week. Where would they go? I'm all for renewables + storage but you can't handwave these questions as FUD, it's a serious problem.
I suspect that if we committed to categorically eliminating fossil fuels, including peaker plants, the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants. Statistically, it'll happen at some point no matter how much storage you provision.
6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK.
It is well within the same order of magnitude.
>the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants
because why build a solar or wind farm this year when you can instead wait 20 years for hinkley c to be finished at FIVE times the LCOE cost?
it's absurd. the people dont clamor for nuclear power. only the military industrial complex does.
That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country at a lower latitude with different weather patterns and vastly more space to put things like onshore wind/solar farms without running into NIMBYIsm, not to mention more hours of sunlight just from spanning 4 timezones. 6 hours of storage is not even close to enough for reliable renewable power in the UK. It wouldn't even cover a single windless winter night.
And even if we take it at face value, the scenario you linked involves masses of overbuild, over the course of nearly 30 years ("by 2050"), and still leaves 6% of energy coming from carbon combustion. If we start building nuclear plants now, even if we accept your premise that they take 20 years to build (they needn't, especially with scale), then we can get to zero carbon almost a decade earlier - and with minimal land use.
It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
This is FUD.
You absolutely can if you are discussing orders of magnitude which we were.
Our fundamental disagreement wasnt about whether it was 8x fengnings or 6.5x but rather whether it was of the order of 65 or 6.5.
>It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
Not impossible, just at great expense and it wasnt worth it. In 5 years less of France's electricity will be nuclear than it is now while still spending vast sums on new plants. They're officially hoping renewables will make up the difference.
Alas, in the real world because of public opinion and political pressure, it's almost impossible to build new nuclear power plants. And those that get build are crazy expensive and overengineered, and invariable overrun their schedule and budget.
There's good reason why they are hard to throttle. For starters thermal contraction shortened lifespan; but also because the nuclear cycle itself doesn't lend itself to throttling safely - nuclear products create "retarded (?) neutrons" which are the cornerstone of a stable control system (as opposed to prompt neutrons) and also significant amounts of neutrons poisons which are normally "burned" at equilibrium steady state power levels but which accumulate if you throttle down (therefore be needing even more prompt neutrons).
My understanding is that the more you need to rely on prompt neutrons for your neutron balance the more unstable your reactor (starting them up, therefore, is delicate). Throttling the power upsets this balance by at least two different mechanism.
1.6 GW per reactor for the latest ones under construction (Hinkley Point C) and in development (Sizewell C). Each site has 2 reactors for a total of 2 x 2 x 1.6 GW = 6.4 GW.
Although this is largely just replacing the UK's existing fleet of reactors, almost all of which will have shut down by the time Hinkley Point C comes online. Of the current 5 operating UK nuclear power stations, only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028.
> "They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances"
One of the reasons offshore wind has been so economic & successful in the UK is they can usually plug in to existing, redundant transmission lines left behind by decommissioned coal and nuclear power stations, which are often on the coast. It's relatively cheap to connect to the grid when the infrastructure is already there waiting: you just need to build the cables from the turbines to the shore.
The start time is long but that does not say much about the overall operations.
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
and https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/power-plants-cold-st...
> In France, with an average of 2 reactors out of 3 available for load variations, the overall power adjustment capacity of the nuclear fleet equates to 21,000 MW (i.e. equivalent to the output of 21 reactors) in less than 30 minutes.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
Arguably, if cost effective, nuclear is best run at full output as consistently as possible, with other systems buffering that supply with demand (hydro storage, batteries, demand response, etc).
https://www.laka.org/nieuws/2022/so-how-flexible-is-nuclear-...
https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/french-report-nuclear-power-...
I think it depends on how you define unpredictable.
Wind power forecasting[1] is used pretty extensively as I understand it by all major windfarms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_forecasting#Uncerta... [2] https://www.cerc.co.uk/forecasting/wind-energy.html [3] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
What you are saying is that its possible to map out in the future when power is available for generation.
1. power available when you want it, and you can choose on the fly
2. power available when you want it as long as you know in advance
3. power available at a time that you don't choose, but you can predict
4. power available at a time that you can neither choose not predict
Moving generation up this hierarchy, or demand down it, is always going to give some benefit. Well designed power markets should make sure that there is some fair incentive for any such step.
Maybe if variable prices encourages energy intensive demand to shift to Scotland that will help, but that’s not quick either.
The UK is leading the world in grid interconnection and offshore wind build out (though all owned by none UK entities), so if they aren’t building quickly enough I don’t know anyone who is….
Nordstream 1 was 1222km, and Britpipe now, is 60km shorter.
Boston to Lisbon is 5100km. Churchill Falls (home of a giant hydro dam project in Labrador Canada which got screwed by Hydro-Quebec because the only via transit was through Quebec), would be just under 4000km subsea.
The transit contract expires in 2039 I believe...
It really doesn't make much sense to connect Europe and North America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?
And then there are pumped hydropower storage project like this one with a proposed storage capacity of 200 GWh and 1.5GW of power:
In the worst case, couldn't the excess power simply be used in electrolyzers to generate hydrogen? They may not be very efficient but it's better than throwing free energy away.
But the retail buyer doesn't usually see the negative/low electricity prices of high-supply+low-demand time periods for their "inefficient" uses that should still be economic.
There are electricity suppliers in the UK who offer prices linked to the wholesale price, including actually paying you to use electricity if the price goes negative. Quite useful for flexible loads such as EV charging!
https://twitter.com/DanielColquitt/status/139539635553586790...
why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?
I suspect NIMBYism is a big part of the explanation. Airborne AC links are efficient but ugly. Underwater AC links are tolerated by Nimbies, but inefficient. So you end up with underwater HVDC links.
The UK market maybe not, but the UK could make a truckload of money selling their wind power to France to aid their old, barely running NPPs.
Building any new transmission line through densely-populated England is extremely expensive. Even if you can secure the necessary land and wayleaves, nobody wants them running near their house and spoiling the views, so significant segments have to run underground in tunnels, greatly increasing costs.
Besides, the UK is not that small when linking England and Scotland. The proposed Eastern Green Link 2 (EGL2) is 440 km long: there are many existing HVDC connections much shorter than that around the world!
They are expensive things, and typically not something left to popular vote.
Because there are bottlenecks in capacity on the synchronous grid that restrict the amount of power that can be moved from north-to-south (or vice-versa).
It works out better/cheaper/easier to bypass those bottlenecks with efficient undersea HVDC links than to try and build more terrestrial AC transmission lines.
Absolutely. One HVDC link between Scotland and England (actually, Wales) has already been built:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link
And more are planned:
The article covers this and explains why it's not enough. Provisioning time for the links exceeds projected generation capacity increases in the Scotland.
Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
projected to begin construction in mid-2023
In January 2023, Sun Cable went into administration, the equivalent of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...
That's a shame, I wasn't entirely onboard with the logistics of crossing the massive fault lines along the route .. but I admired the ambition and scope of the project.
Be interesting to see if this is the end or just a pause waiting for fresh capital.
I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.
The incremental cost of keeping a gas generator working is very close to zero compared to all the other expenses involved in building the plant and buying gas to burn in it. We can keep all our gas infrastructure around and simply use it less often if we have more wind.
How is paying wind farms hundreds of millions of pounds to turn off wind generation not wasting money?
That's very different to wasting money in a way that actually uses up physical resources or people's time.
Something that is cheap can have some percent wasted and still be cheaper overall than more expensive options.
Focussing only on the waste without that bigger context is at best a false economy, at worst fossil fuel promoting propaganda.
Why would I want to pay for cheap wind energy I can’t use, and also pay for gas energy that I can use? Unless the cost of the wind is £0, paying for wind in addition to gas is just a waste of money.
Looks like $150-$198/MWh
This is needed anyway because it is already maxed out and demand will dramatically increase with the transition to EVs.
But doesn't wasting wind waste money if we have to pay so much for curtailment?
1) a lot of wind means there's too much power... that has to be used somewhere, that's why you have negative prices, to get someone to take that power off the grid and use it for something, sometimes useless, and someone has to pay for that
2) no wind means you still need gas, hydro, nuclear etc. powerplants, because you need power even when there is no wind and sun, so you need all the power generating capacity covered even without wind
You computer will be obsolete before you've made a return on investment.
The same problem applies to H2, etc, if the process is rarely used and the setup to do the process is expensive, then it's cheaper not to.
A plant that can produce H2 from electricity might be more expensive than the value of the power discarded.
> the National Grid pays the windfarms to turn off, and pays a (typically gas powered) alternative generator, closer to the demand, to turn on.
Curtailing wind means paying someone else to generate that energy in the “right” location, which usually means burning gas. So all the extra wind being built isn’t reducing amount of gas being burned, it’s just increasing the total cost of electricity.
> Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
We can build all the wind we want, but if connected to consumers by nothing more than a long extension lead that barely run a kettle, then it’s totally useless. The wind needs to be located so the energy generated can actually be transported to end users. Curtailment is basically a direct measure of the amount of wind we’ve built, that can’t actually be used. Building more isn’t helpful in the slightest.
The article certainly doesn’t advocate for reducing the amount of wind built, quite the opposite, they just point out we need it built in the right places so we can actually use the energy produced. Rather than built bunch of wind turbines that will forever be pointed out of the wind.
I explore this idea further in this blog post: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
I don't know what the current target is, but 6% is well below what it will eventually be. The article suggests building more physical infrastructure, but that comes with its own cost and environmental impacts, ironically.
An ideal market would produce the exact same result right?
Well not quite... And this is a classic example.
With the current policy of location-independent markets, wind producers build in the best spots, and don't care about the massive expense (to the grid operator) of moving the power south. That isn't the ideal solution.
With the new proposed policy of per-location markets, the grid operator 'makes money' by moving power from places of high generation (low prices) to places with high demand (high prices).
But wait... That isn't the ideal solution either. The grid operator has an incentive to maximize their own profits, and if they ship too much power from north to south, then the price difference will be lowered, and their profits will decrease. So they will underbuild deliberately.
But wait you say - this is an ideal market, so there is no monopoly grid operator. In this ideal market, there are many grid operators, each competing to move power from the north to the south, and if one operator deliberately underbuilds, then another will build more to capture that profit. The end result is cables will keep being added till the money to be made equals the cost of the cables...
And that is equal to the ideal benevolent dictator solution!
But... That assumes a cable costs a certain £ amount per MWH transferred. But real cables have efficiencies of scale - one large cable is more money efficient than many competing small cables.
And considering that, you're back to the single-cable-operator problem. In the market, they are a monopoly and will underbuild. If they aren't a monopoly, whoever has the biggest cable takes all the profit, and becomes a monopoly. And if you artificially force there to be 10 small companies competing, then there will be 10 small money-inefficient cables.
There is no perfect answer, except a (non existent) benevolent dictator!
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-chauffeur-the-leaked-tape-an...
Publicly owned old technology is very different to attempts to publicly develop next generation power, which tends to require brave entrepreneurs historically.
National Grid Electricity Transmission operate the transmission network in England and Wales. The transmission network in the south of Scotland is operated by SP Transmission; in the north of Scotland, it's SSEN Transmission.
Within the US grids, there's really subgrids with interconnection and bottlenecks, too, but those interior bottlenecks aren't brought up as often as say overnight wind production in Texas being over local demand as well as interconnect capacity.
Start to finish, the OP is a detailed analysis of why this is not true.
https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/r505_deemed_ra...
I do wonder how effective a "you get 0.5p off your bill if you can see a wind turbine from your house" rule would be against NIMBYism.
Consumers already pay per-unit electricity costs which are fixed over a billing period, regardless of whether gross prices exceeded the consumer price, or dropped below zero, for small intervals during that period. So it wouldn't really make any sense to charge different prices in Scotland and England, only for the periods when they actually diverged due to lack of transmission. And if this occasional discrepancy was averaged over a billing period, it would probably be much too small to really affect demand.
That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures.
Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y.
My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past.
I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power.
P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."
Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament this tendency has only accelerated.
[1] A charity that maintains stately homes and other historic artefacts
A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008.
1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot...
2. "UK productivity continues lost decade", 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195
3. "The UK is facing two lost decades on living standards", 2022: https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...
Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse.
Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
I guess there could also be accounting shenanigans, eg if you pay $x upfront and $y over several years, you could focus on $x if the project seems unpopular and focus on $(x+y) if the project shows a popular serious investment in a government policy.
But I’ve no idea about this case.
With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...
Imagine a global power distribution network, the entire world could be 100% solar & wind. Perhaps one day...
Edit: would have been. Looks like they lost funding. :(
Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out.
Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables.
I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.
Not really a new problem for the Netherlands whenever there is a problem the country tends to overreact with massive infrastructure spending. It hasn't been that long that brand new coal power plants had to be closed.
Lets do a little Math... A cable that moves 4GW of electricity 450 km is say +-1 million volts and 2000 amps.
Assuming we want no more than 3% losses in the cable at full load, then each conductor needs to be 40mm diameter aluminium, at a total material cost of $3.6M
To insulate a 1 million volt cable, we need 100mm of PVC - total cost $60M.
And we'll obviously need a few mm of steel + more PVC on the outside for protection from the environment.
And now add in the manufacturing cost, and the cost to get it into place...
They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both.
But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing.
But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.
However, I'm sure 'national security' will require the equipment be procured from a western world supplier with no expertise.
Your comment reminded me of "No Time on Our Side," a book about a submersible laying cable near the UK that sunk after a hatch failed during recovery operations. The author (who was a pilot in the submersible) details the incredible rescue effort to bring them back to the surface alive over a period of about 3 days.
A wonderful book and also one that made me appreciate how hard it is to lay cable (in some places).
It seems like there is a massive opportunity to purchase energy when it is cheap or even negatively priced, figure out some way of storing it, and then sell it back once the price is higher. Over time, this could stabilize the grid and encourage development and scale benefits in energy storage.
Where are these companies? Are the technologies not yet efficient enough, even when the price of electricity is negative? Or is this technology being deployed already?
EDIT: Well turns out this is covered in the article. Hoping there will be more development in this direction in the future!
My hypothesis is this being the issue.
Generating energy is easy (with renewables).
But I guess there are more things to consider than the energy in that decision.
It's so dumb that we have "smart" fridges that can tweet, but not smart to avoid their energy use during peak hours. It's a thermal battery!
I suspect that grid-scale electrolysis is near the very bottom of the economies-of-scale-S-curve and will have a promising future not just in power2gas2power, but also in producing the green hydrogen inputs needed for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for hard-to-electrify applications like aviation.
I in fact used to be somewhat optimistic about hydrogen as a long term storage mechanism for our excess renewables, until I saw models like these from NREL. Now I am extremely skeptical of any hydrogen from electrolysis unless it's from something like solar+storage facilities. (Which are actually being proposed now, which is very exciting!)
As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Orkney is trialling this.
Bitcoin on the other hand is just a waste of energy
Some people think clothes driers or Christmas lights are a waste of energy, but it's not for them to decide how other people spend the energy they've paid for. Some people think those things are worth the energy cost and so they pay for it. That's their choice to make.
Bitcoin has one of the highest % of renewables of any industry i.e. solar, wind, hydro etc.
As an absolute value the amount of energy it consumes is less than 0.1% of global energy consumption.
Those two things taken together mean that Bitcoin contributes what amounts to a rounding error in total global CO2 emissions.
And that's not even mentioning its GHG emissions reducing effects on the capture of methane, which could turn it CO2eq negative emissions.
On top of that it has an important role to play in balancing grids by consuming excess energy that the market doesn't want or need, or can't be stored.
And the utility of Bitcoin? Well, some people see value in a form of money that can't be arbitrarily debased, is open to all on a global and neutral network that can't be changed or controlled by any central or corrupt authority, and that is censorship resistant.
You might not see value in that, but many people do.
Maybe you see more value in Christmas lights which consumes more energy than Bitcoin.
https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1512493813218123786?s=2...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...
> a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions Except if it is wind power.
Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.
Right now, investment in infrastructure needs to be made to move power from Manapōuri to the North Island.
As to why we are not replacing the 1.8m tons of coal we import from as far away as Indonesia with wind or solar in the North Island? I don't know.
Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal.
There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south.
https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and...
Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island.
10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
Unless there were plans for major new hydro schemes in the South Island there's no particular reason not to just build new generation in the North. There is ample wind and geothermal in the North Island.
This would all change if the Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter were to close as that would leave a huge amount of generation that would need to go north to be used.
There is a very high bar for building infrastructure accross the Cook Strait due to environmental concerns.
The problem is a lot of our power is far south, not center of the South Island, and our costs to build are likely multiples of what is costs overseas.
But I think the bigger issue is that due to the amount of wind that has already been built, peak demand happens on cold still nights in winter. Building more wind without storage doesn't help there, and that's when they're forced to fire up all the gas and even coal turbines at Huntly.
So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.
There are many places already using it for this. Bringing Bitcoin miners to a place at this point is just shipping a container.
A company will do whatever is most profitable (build transmission or build generation). Which is fine, given the bad things (e.g. coal) were taxed out of profitability.
bitcoin vs coal
One of them is responsible for a significant percentage of global carbon emissions and the other is not.
I don't favor bans, but at least that thought experiment should indicate which one to go after in some way (e.g. taxes).
Which is more _wasteful_? I would argue Bitcoin, and dangerously so, because its upper bound of potential energy usage is infinite.
Coal, on the other hand, is not wasted (burning coal without using the heat would be stupidity).
Even when coal is phased out, Bitcoin may still be there, causing unnecessary strain on the infrastructure. Bitcoin will find the cheapest energy and set it on fire, if the price is right. And the heat produced by the equipment also wasted as byproduct due to convenience/commercial factors. I can imagine it already contributes to energy poverty, alongside other issues, in developing nations.
The problem (simplified) is that vast amounts of energy from the Sun fall daily across the globe.
An amount of that energy generates a great deal of heat at the land surface and ocean layer.
Much more heat by magnitudes than humans create.
Some of that heat warms the land, water and lower atmosphere, a great deal of that heat radiates outwards toward space ..
A balance was struck that's been more or less "just right" on average for some 200K years.
We have altered that balance by increasing the insulating properties of the lower atmosphere via increased CO2 (with worse flow on effects from increasing methane and water vapor).
This additional trapped energy is causing more powerful atmospheric events and increased mean tempretures.
But the cause is insulating in very large amounts of energy, not generating small amounts of energy (at the appropriate relative scales).
Power is also sold (ok, not sure about the UK) at the market price. So the most expensive generation needed to meet demand determines the market price. So even if gas is a small portion of the generation it could still determine the price.
If for example you had a cheap source of gas when others put their price up, it would reward you making that info public.
Short term global fuel price spikes are a weak point, though.
Electricity prices in the UK (and most other places) are set by the marginal unit, which is the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. All other generation for that time period gets paid the same price. The marginal unit in the UK is usually gas, hence the sensitivity to gas prices
As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?
However, notice two further considerations:
1. Such contracts eventually expire. Exactly when varies. But the wind farm is still there, just now the energy price all goes to the operator.
2. Older government subsidies were not CfD. Ten years ago if you built a wind farm you got a direct subsidy. The CfD schemes come into existence from about 2014. They're one of a small number of good ideas the Tories had. They're in line with Tory ideology, but they also actually make sense in the world that actually exists.
It's claimed that another type of market would cause companies to speculate with their sell offers and thus generate less electricity. It would be interesting to see how this kind of market would work in reality, though.
Suppose we insist we'll pay less than the price you agree to sell for. Obviously that's not a sale, that's robbery. This problem arises even if we agree to pay everybody the average, because some suppliers didn't bid average, their bid was higher, but we still claimed their electricity, so we are stealing from them.
OK, suppose we decide we'll pay all accepted bids at their bid price regardless of the marginal unit cost. If we do this the supplier is incentivised to guess the bid we will accept, so as to collect the difference between their actual price and the price we're willing to pay. If they're very good at this, we pay exactly the same as now, but, regardless of whether they're good at it the grid is significantly destabilized by the increased uncertainty due to lack of efficient price signals.
What other ideas do you have ?
So the short answer is I have no idea, but I doubt we currently live in the best of all possible worlds.
It seems an odd pricing scheme which isn’t working well as gas becomes less desirable and renewables are a bigger part of the mix.
What you describe as paying at the bid price sounds like a free market to me - if you’re going to have a market mechanism perhaps it should use the market to efficiently discover prices, not impose a very odd pricing structure - if imposing nationwide prices, why have a market at all?
There are many possible alternatives:
Allow prices to float in a completely free market, and force suppliers to hedge (which they do anyway to some extent, but they could be required to).
Nationalise the national grid and energy production
Build interconnects and hydro storage to reduce reliance on gas plants and reduce the problem.
Set prices in regional markets to bring production closer to the areas with peak consumption.
Set prices by energy type (separate markets per type like fusion solar etc taking into account externalities).
Set prices by energy use (baseload, fluctuating, peak)
Defining pricing mechanisms is not robbery it is why we have a regulator!
Alas, England doesn't allow on-shore wind power, and there's not sufficient capacity (in terms of HVDC lines) to transfer enough power from Scotland down to England to move all of the excess energy.
In theory this is what we want: the windfall profits on cheap power during periods of expensive energy are supposed to attract the market to build more of these plants and chase those profits, thereby accelerating the green transition. But it's possible what we saw last year was too much, and that the damage to the economy (nothing strangles economic growth like expensive energy) does more harm than this incentive does good. People are talking about renegotiating power agreements in Europe to pay fixed prices for renewables so this wouldn't happen again, but I haven't heard how likely this is to succeed.
So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
I am in the 95th percentile for income (though not wealth) in the UK and here's my energy bill for December:
Daily grid charges £20
Energy used @ market price £315
Truss govt unit price subsidy -£98
Johnson govt flat subsidy -£67
Total bill before VAT £170
(I recently asked the same question!)
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.
And yeah that was a long time ago
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9...
- pay $x for y joules of wind
- pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x
I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?
The windy part of Texas is not the part where most people live. The western part of the state and the panhandle are windy but also pretty dry. Most of the people live more toward the central or eastern part of the state where it's greener but less windy.
Pricing incentives may just not be enough to overcome that.
Storage can come in many forms including at a customers residence via batteries or thermal storage. Not all of these options need to be cycled daily to make financial sense. In the U.S. we have an insane number of people that maintain days worth of storage as fuel for their generators only to be used infrequently when the power goes out.
Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power?
May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy.
Energy buyer of first and last resort.
And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc.
It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business.
However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight.
Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
The core business of national grid plc is massive transmission projects
Your ignorant hate for something you haven't taken the time to understand is cancerous.
So no, I won't stop.
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
(I know this isn’t storage, jk)
HVDC links are a good thing, but why is storage not the first step?
This isn’t news though and the reason why Germany is returning to goal despite of having installed 130 GW of wind and solar generation capacity.
UK has an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation. There is a project to re-forest the north coast to coast. Then these trees can be also burned for energy as biomass.
Just look it up.
We know from comprehensive aerial photographs of the UK taken by Germany in the 1930s/40s that the UK has much more forest coverage now than it had then.
The UK switched to coal beginning in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth because of the lack of forests providing a source of wood. The current reforestation projects have nothing to do with "an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation". There isn't any recent deforestation - just the opposite in fact.
The fact we can’t just make and throw up a bunch more pylons and cables alongside existing routes, for anything less than £££bn, is just depressing.
Distributed on demand load for distibuted excessive energy production.
You can by prev gen mining equipment dirt cheap.
I'd love to subscribe and see what else the author has, but oddly their blog has no RSS feed. Oh well!
Your statement answers the question, "why is long distance transmission price high?"
Years ago, renewables opponents kept making baseless claims that no grid would be stable with large amounts of renewables. It's now end of 2022 and for this year we've seen on multiple occasions power grids running perfectly fine on very large amounts of renewables with very little gas.
Success, I guess.
And brown coal.
Without a baseload power source a modern economy just can't function. That is why intermittent sources like wind and solar must be a minority of the energy supply.
In Germany they don't have access to hydro and have chosen to dispense with their nuclear capacity. That leaves gas. Without Russia that is becoming hard and expensive. That leaves coal. Germany had enormous deposits of coal.
In the UK, curtailment seems needed due to power transfer capacity issues.
In Sweden it is purely due to grid stability reasons. As wind does not work as a baseload power source this becomes problematic as too much wind power generation can then negatively affect profitability for nuclear and hydro which are baseload power sources.
I would be interested to see how stable wind power production is across all hours and throughout the year in the UK. I imagine it's better than here, but is it good enough to support an industrial nation?
It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
But then wind power can only be part of a mix of energy sources, with a strong supply of baseload power backing it.