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Comment by kinnth | Hacker News Reader

The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind!

These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.

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From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.

They've (the right wing government) underfunded the government so much there aren't sufficient staff to run the beaucracy. The recent (failed) rocket launch from the UK was massively delayed because of slow government processes

They also price energy in a way that props up fossil fuels

The market for wind in the UK is unusually profitable due to a quirk of the UK electricity market.

Specifically, the power price across the UK is the same everywhere. However, there isn't infinite transmission capacity. So, if you generate power in one place, but the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it, but you still get paid, and you get paid compensation on top.

You know what's better than producing power... being paid to produce power, paid extra compensation, and then not need to actually have those wind turbines spinning (so much reduced maintenance too!).

The government is delaying lots of permits till they can figure out how to change these perverse incentives... Needless to say, the wind industry isn't happy about the fact they might no longer get paid such large amounts, so they're demanding the old scheme be kept in place for existing producers for 25+ years, and having the new pricing rules only apply to new builds...

UK need to divide the country into cost regions based on the bottlenecks and it will work like international power connections. The political problem is making Scotland its own separate region.

Have a look at the regions in for example Sweden which face similar bottlenecks in transmission capacity from north to south.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

There are lots of wind businesses dependent on the old market rules. There are lots of multi-decade power delivery agreements using the old single-price market as a benchmark. If you change the rules, you have to give everyone compensation, or run the risk of being seen as a 'bad place to invest'.

The CFD scheme UK has employed works just as well when introducing regions.

Yes, or indeed Australia.

https://www.aemo.com.au/Energy-systems/Electricity/National-...

Copying the Australian power market with it's >$20k mWh price swings, negative energy prices and brown outs on hot days is not something anyone sane should do.

Australia and California are the poster children of why renewables are terrible for an electricity grid once they get past 10% of generation.

Those price swings are reflecting the economic reality of a product which there is very limited capacity to store and for which both demand and supply can vary rapidly. In practice energy consumers and generators are both limited in their exposure to them through financial instruments like CFDs.

"brown outs on hot days" is straight up propaganda.

And at least having different pricing regions means that it's not investing in building useless generation where there isn't the demand or transmission capacity to move it to where it's required!

>"brown outs on hot days" is straight up propaganda.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/energy-shortage-explainer-...

You're right. They just had to nationalize the market last year. The brownouts were the year before that.

Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".

The last major power outages to do with the grid were a couple of years ago here in Queensland when a large coal unit (Callide C unit 4) literally blew up, instantly taking a a bit over 800 MW of generation off the grid. Took like three hours to get large parts of the state back on. A year or so before that there was some minor load shedding in Victoria when two coal plants were down for unexpected maintenance over a heat wave (and I think another one or two tripped out in the heat) - and actually solar and wind from other states helped minimise that. Then there was the big one, where massive storms in South Australia took out transmission lines and a bunch of generators (including some wind farms) tripped off. Of course, despite being caused by the storm destroying transmission lines, the right wing did blame the wind farms for it...

> Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".

I was a quant for one of the top 3 largest electricity retailers in Australia. A wonderful market where you take everyone's money as long as you call it green. It was shocking to see the liberal government tell the truth about renewables while labor and the greens are lying/in denial about them.

"Nationalize"? No, they suspended the market-based dispatch mechanism, in accordance with the rules to which the market participants had agreed, and used centrally directed dispatch for a couple of weeks.

The market failure which required this extraordinary action was primarily the interaction of a particular cap price with two problems, both fossil-fuel related: the large increases in price of natural gas and coal due to the Ukraine war, and coal supply problems at several generators due to widespread east coast flooding resulting under the influence of La Niña . Most Australian gas and black coal is exported, so the domestic market is exposed to the internationally traded price. The gas prince increase in particular was so severe that the short-run marginal cost of gas electricity generators was above the administered price cap value. The widespread flooding also, somewhat ironically, constrained the output of some hydro generators as well, because there was no capacity downstream for more water release.

Certainly there are strong market design lessons from this, but they're around price caps and bidding behaviour. They're unrelated to the regional or nodal pricing concept which this thread was about (and there isn't really a renewable energy angle on this either).

Still don't know what brownouts you're referring to, and I follow the NEM pretty closely.

Bullshit. The Australian example best demonstrates that selling off production and networks to private companies, whilst trying to create an artificial market that constrains a monopoly chokehold on a product with inelastic demand is very difficult to pull off.

(Most of) Australia's problem is that the government stuck its head in the sand for a decade and pretended that renewables weren't happening. Consequently minimal groundwork was done by preparing the grid with suitable transmission and storage. Now it's being overtaken by the inevitable: renewables displacing coal/gas because they are cheaper to build and run. There will be a period of pain whilst the missing groundwork is done but it will get there.

I say "most of" as South Australia is showing how it can be done, with over 70% of its energy coming from renewables whilst not being blessed with hydro [1].

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-grid-with-the-mo...

> Consequently minimal groundwork was done by preparing the grid with suitable transmission and storage.

You mean like putting in the worlds largest battery?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve?useski...

You're reaching levels or reality denial I've only seen in republican administrations projections about peace in the middle east.

As noted in your link Hornsdale Power Reserve is in South Australia, which is what the parent used as a good example of preparation.

Yes, and it had enough backup to run the grid for 5 minutes, at the low low price of $200m. Now you'd only need another $50,000,000 to have enough storage to run it overnight.

> the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it

I know I just don't understand the details but I'm always kinda confused about how hard it seems to be to dump excess power off the grid. Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?

It is starting to come. People already schedule their car charging when it is cheap. But it does not get built over night.

But, due to the lack of transmission, and the 'single price' scheme, this power isn't cheap. It's expensive, but there is too much of it in one region only.

> Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?

It's just easier to not produce it. The issue with building up the grid is investment, but there is little marginal cost to turn off an existing plant.

That makes sense. You'd think they'd have prioritised this and have it done by now though. Both the new payment system and extra transmission capacity.

It seems absurd to me that spending $10B on a transmission cable from Africa to the UK is more sensible than spending that amount to make a much shorter cable to southern Europe and increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way (including within the UK). That takes a lot more cross-governmental cooperation, of course.

> Increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way

This would presumably amount to building a slightly shorter but nevertheless very long cable on/under land. And I think it's much easier to just drop a cable under the sea than it is to dig and bury it under the ground or build pylons to carry it above the ground.

This is true. In my experience constructing additional pylons is always a bottleneck.

Not necessarily. The shortest maritime path crosses at least one country maritime economic exclusive area, that will have to agree on that, without reaping any meaningful benefit. Plugging by land is easier to negotiate, maintain and finance, as the connection can also be used by those countries. I'd guess the reason this isnt being done that way is both because the UK left the EU and the whole Gibraltar debacle. I may be wrong on this, but the whole thing just looks like UK being UK - trying to solve their problems while ignoring the rest of the world exists.

I think building new subsea power transmission is cheaper per mile than building over land.

If you need to upgrade most of the links along the way, then building the longest possible cable at sea makes sense.

There might also be plans to tap off this cable to feed into portugal, spain, france and ireland along the way - that allows the cable to also take the role of some of the local transmission grid

The UK has built a huge amount of offshore wind generation - in fact it had the most in the world until quite recently, and is currently second only to China. This just isn't a complete solution because wind is intermittent, and in particular it tends to drop off to nearly nothing during the coldest parts of winter when energy demand is at its highest. All of the solutions to this are about as speculative and questionable as this proposal.

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