Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> "At the turn of the century a couple of power plants a year might be connected ... new plants often using the same connections as old ones."

It's still generally true that the old grid infrastructure is re-used.

The UK has many closed coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants on or near the coast. When those plants are decommissioned or demolished, the grid infrastructure that was built for them (substations, transmission lines) is usually left intact.

New off-shore wind farms can now use those access points, which greatly reduces the cost of connection compared to having to build everything from scratch.

View on HN

A large proportion of the UK's coal power stations were clustered in the Trent Valley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Valley

Over the last few years, lots of renewable generation and storage projects have taken advantage of the grid capacity in this area, but all the low hanging fruit is gone now.

These days, it is not usual for projects to be given a connection date in the 2030s due to the requirement to reinforce the transmission network.

Which is a bit curious given how fast electrification originally happened.

Mainly due to NIMBYism and planning/environment laws becoming more complex.

E.g. to get a 132+ kV circuit constructed you need to go through the DCO/NSIP process which takes many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_significant_infrast...

The CEGB constructed the 400 kV supergrid in the space of 15 years during the 60s and 70s. A project of such magnitude today would most likely be tied up in the planning consent process for 10+ years.

Mainly due to NIMBYism and planning/environment laws becoming more complex.

I agree, but also think that outside of the nimbys, other processes could be vastly improved.

There should not be 30 agencies involved, or even 5. There should be 1.

And that 1 agency can cover all of this, run all studies in parallel, and be a single contact point.

It should take days or weeks. Not months or years.

> It should take days or weeks. Not months or years.

I don't see how? A single court challenge + inevitable appeal would alone take up over a year.

For NSIP projects, there's already a single government body (Planning Inspectorate) that is in charge of the process.

Agreed, the process needs to get a lot quicker for all infrastructure projects.

It really happened gradually, though, and with much less surrounding complexity. To give an analogy, OSes developed really fast, but any significant change in the kernel now will require lots of caution and scrutiny.

Also huge advances can have lots of things not "solved" - the first vehicles sucked majorly and were finicky as all get out, but compared to a horse-drawn cart they were so amazing as to excuse all the failings.

Modern cars are so good that any advancement is going to be incremental, and so it will take longer.

I suppose the capacity of that infrastructure was much lower than the requirements nowadays, and labour was dramatically cheaper back then.

No, there was simply much less red tape.

And early in electrification the whole local grid going down for awhile because who knows why wasn't a major issue, it was almost expected.

Some towns didn't even have power until near nightfall as a planned runtime; why bother with power during the day?

Now we're used to 100% always-available power at all times, and the demands on it are growing. Things like power walls may become nearly free as the grid maintainers try to flatten demand so they can run the grid closer to capacity for longer each day.

There's a good 3 part series from Guy Martin on Channel4 recently. Would watch far more hours and depth of this content though.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/guy-martins-great-britis...

anything by Guy Martin is great. He just seems an all-round wonderful person

In theory yes, but the locations in the UK don’t coincide.

The old coal plants were built nearer to consumption, most of which is in the South East of England. The planned wind farms are mostly in the North Sea, far from South East of England. It will cost billions to build the infra to connect the north with the south. It’s not a simple matter of reusing what exists.

Almost all the UK nuclear plants and oil-fired plants were built on the coast. (The only nuclear plant ever built inland in the UK was Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia)

In the case of nuclear, this was to ensure reliable supply of cooling water. In the case of oil, it was to make it easy to unload crude directly off ships. The oil-fired plants were often co-located with oil refineries, many of which have now also closed.

OK, but you left out the existing large wind farms, most of which were built right next to the south east of England, and presumably used the connections that OP was talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

£50 per UK resident provides several billion. If it’s important enough, a few billion over the next 5 years to secure electricity needs isn’t actually a hurdle.

You can't address every problem like that. Those £50 a time would quickly add up. Also that's several hundred pounds per household right out of discretionary income.

Building proper interconnect between the north and south isn’t “one of many competing interests.” It needs to happen to stabilize the UK grid, everyone accepts that it needs to happen, it has a multi-decade payoff time. So just figure out how to get it done now and accept that it’s not going to get cheaper. Then move on to things that are less critical and start pinching pennies there.

> everyone accepts that it needs to happen

This is the UK. Just because something is obvious doesn't mean that conservatives and NIMBYs are going to accept it until they, personally, are sitting in the dark.

The North-South interconnects are already happening. The Western HVDC became operational in 2019[1], and two separate Eastern HVDC links (Eastern Green Link 1 & 2) are pretty far along in the planning process, with EGL1 expected to begin construction this year and EGL2 in 2025[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_HVDC

And at that point, they'll blame the previous government ;)

Agreed, which is why the notion of important-enough comes in.

I think that stable and sustainable utility supply would fall quite high on the priority list for most households.

Oh sure, we have to do what's necessary by definition. It's another extra cost falling on households at a time when costs for everything are piling up.

Is there a RoI in terms of reduced energy costs for households?

As with everything, if it's actually important to the right people the money can be found. Businesses operating in Britain need reliable, affordable power as well. Putting the cost burden on retail customers is a political choice.

(and small businesses; the recent price hikes have been far higher than a mere £50 and have been putting restaurants out of business)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com