New UK record for wind power set today – 21.81 GW between 0900-0930 GMT | Hacker News Reader

New UK record for wind power set today – 21.81 GW between 0900-0930 GMT

grid.iamkate.com

140 pointsscrlk166 comments

VikingLink turns up Dec 29, which will bring 800MW of clean wind energy to the UK from Denmark until transmission work in Denmark allows for the full 1.4GW link capacity to be utilized.

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/viking-link-worlds-largest-i...

https://www.viking-link.com/

And it's going to get better:

"Ørsted is to press ahead with developing the world’s largest offshore wind farm in the North Sea after the UK increased financial support for the sector in a big boost for the Danish group after a string of setbacks."

https://www.ft.com/content/4d3cc6d4-f479-4607-9574-63e320af8... https://archive.is/Rm9Hi

It's great to see how the usage of the North Sea have shifted over time, and it still remains as useful as before. We've always fished there, and I remember my grandpa being involved with some oil/gas engineering there, he used to have some maps of the North Sea with planned stations or something, and now the wind farms getting expanded to provide cleaner energy.

Has there been any study that if we populate the say 20-30% of North Sea with Wind Turbine, how much electricity could that provide?

Offshore:

https://windeurope.org/policy/topics/offshore-wind-energy/

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/north-sea-countries-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235248472...

https://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/attachments/present...

Onshore, Europe has enough wind potential to power the world.

There's a David McWilliams podcast episode about how Ireland has enough wind potential to meet their entire energy demand and be a net exporter. Interesting listen https://shows.acast.com/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast/episode...

Thanks for sharing this. Northern Ireland just retired their last coal fired generator at the end of September 2023 and the Republic of Ireland has a 2025 phaseout target for the remaining generators.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231004055500/https://www.bbc.c...

https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/

Not a direct answer to your questions, but there's some nice data here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...

Currently we have 14.7 GW of operational off-shore wind gen. Another 13 GW is in the planning stage and 46 GW more in the "early planning" stage.

There's currently 14 GW of on-shore wind gen.

Denmark is a by a small margin a net importer of electricity, highly dependent on wind and imports. The total wind production seems to be about 6 GW on the best days, and quite tiny on the worst days, so it seems nice that the european grid can replace up to 25% of the the missing wind from the UK.

I got paid to use electricity this morning: https://agileprices.co.uk/

Didn't know this site existed. Way better than the Octopus app.

There's also a handy twitter account for predicting slightly further ahead: https://twitter.com/agilepredict

“Octo-Aid” is great if your on iOS.

Nice time to turn on a bitcoin miner.

Is there an API to monitor prices?

Octopus do have an API: https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

How have your energy costs looked, overall, over the past 2-3 years? Getting cheaper or more expensive?

I ask because I frequently see posts like this one, but then also that Europeans are paying more than ever etc. Hard to figure if we are putting a dent in anything.

I've been on Agile for about 6 months and my average energy price is around 0.22p/kWh which is significantly less than the standard tariff most people get which is around 0.36p/kWh. There's been a few weeks where prices have been higher but it balances out so far.

I have octopus agile for electricity and octopus tracker for gas. Been on both since February when my last fixed rate ended.

It has worked out great so far, some days when there isn’t much wind can be painful but overall it works out better. Even if it didn’t, I’d rather pay a fair amount than have energy companies rip me off.

Over the last year, my overall average rate on the agile (time of use) tariff has been about £0.19/kWh. It's significantly cheaper than on the standard tariff, which would have been somewhere between £0.28/kWh and £0.35/kWh approx.

Do you still pay the same standing charge? That's where a lot of the cost seems to have shifted (on my non-variable tariff at least).

For some reason the standing charge is a bit less too.

The higher the standing charge as a percentage of the final cost, the less motivation there is to respond to the price signal, which is part of the point of providing varying prices to the end user.

UK could obviously be a wind / wave energy super power. Despite multi-decade mismanagement by government, we can be bullish about UK prospects, especially now Scottish Independence is receding from the conversation

Why would Scottish independence matter? Are they gonna take their wind with them?

There are a considerable number of existing wind farms in Scottland

Well, yes, Scotland has many of the best sites for wind turbine generation in the UK. In all likelihood my country would be able to sell energy and water to the rest of the UK when Scotland finally leaves (I am still certain it will happen in my lifetime).

Not really, most offshore is off the coast of England now, not Scotland.

And this is probably exactly because of Scottish independence concerns in the past...

I don't think there is a huge difference in output of English vs Scottish territorial water wind output.

There is a massive shortage of Scottish -> England transmission though. So it's a lot better to build them closer to where the power is needed.

However, there is nearly 10GW of HVDC in the pipeline to transmit power from Scotland to England (look up national grid eastern link 1, 2, 3 and 4).

Just to back that up:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-locations-of-constru...

That's from 2010. This is a more up to date one, but still probably outdated: https://www.windenergynetwork.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/...

One of the major limitations of wind power in England is that new onshore wind farms are very difficult to construct if not totally illegal in England. This is probably part of the reason for the situation another commenter noticed: most UK offshore is currently in England's territorial waters. But another reason is due to shortfalls in the physical interconnection between the Scottish and English power grids. UK must construct additional pylons.

There's also major potential for wind farms in Wales, although it's been controversial since some of the sites are on top of peat bogs or scenic hills.

>Scotland finally leaves (I am still certain it will happen in my lifetime).

Scotland could aim for a Channel Islands-type arrangement where they still enjoy an economic union without an administrative one. That would be similar to the situation that existed before the Acts of Union. Of course, they're quite a bit bigger than Jersey, so it could be tricky.

But are you then implying that once the UK left the EU, all power transmission wires were cut as well? Because I don't see a reason why England wouldn't still enjoy low prices for wind energy even if Scotland were independent -- if Scotland has overcapacity, they'll have to sell at any price anyway to avoid disrupting their power grid.

Besides, the European electricity grid is much larger than the EU, it spans all the way from Ireland to Turkey, and from Finland to Morocco.

This

UK government pays for energy projects in Scotland to help Scottish economy. Scotland makes up 7% of UK economy. Scotland claims 100% ownership after independence. Genius SNP.

The big wind projects aren't "owned" by the UK/Scottish governments, they are private* assets built under a government license. Most likely an independent Scotland would continue to license these wind farms and the energy trade with the rest of the UK would continue under very similar terms.

* Actually, many of them are owned by non-UK governments.

Isn't it the other way around? British gov sells licenses for windparks for billions. It then guarantees electricity price to a certain degree. This would be presumably paid by the Scottish gov.

They would take the Scottish coast with them.

Scottish independence is directly linked to energy. If Scottish independence is in the news then the amount of oil in the North Sea vanishes overnight. Luckily it all comes back when independence talk dies down.

I thought I read that wave/tidal was basically not worth the investment and ecological impact for the power it generates.

Seawater ain’t no joke.

I remember reading a few papers about essentially underwater turbines in tidal estuaries. Where you have natural flow of water that you can just tap. If I recall correctly impact on local wildlife (seals iirc) was lower than expected.

Main argument I could see was that water had 1000x the density of air so 1000x the amount of power for a rotor with the same swept area. Of course fluid speeds are lower so it’s not quite that easy. But much more predictable. They did some fancy optimisations in the blades and came up with decent efficiencies. It’s a great little series of papers by Batten and Bahaj et. al from 2006.

I assume the art has progressed since then.

But yeah, anything with moving parts in seawater is a nightmare as far as I can tell.

Tidal energy is not renewable! We'd be tidally locked to the moon in 1000 years if we used Tidal for 1% of our energy consumption.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/pdf/tide.pdf

That article is based on ridiculous assumptions of future energy consumption growth, and was probably created as a joke. Which backfired since it got seriously quoted in so many places.

They have a 2% increase in energy use each year for 1000 years, currently 10^12W

That would mean we’d be well into the type 1 civilisation about 10^19W a year and we’ll be on the way to a type 2 civilisation.

Sunlight hitting Earth is around 10^17 W, so that civilization would be rather toasty.

In theory if you used the power and radiated it to space (via laser, RF, etc) you’d be ok. You could even use also use that energy to put into rotational energy to increase the earths rotational speed

Lasers can't radiate heat, as a laser beam has no entropy. Ditto for coherent radio waves.

Fire a 1GW laser at the moon and you will transfer the best part of a billion joules of energy from the earth to the moon every second.

You have to be very careful of Maxwell's Demon when it's a question of entropy: how efficient is that laser? How does the efficiency change when it is in a heat bath of X kelvin?

There may be some neat tricks, this is an area I know I'm not good at, but you have to be very careful.

Sure. And you will transfer no entropy, so this cannot be used to cool the Earth.

SF authors (like David Brin) have screwed up on this very topic.

Lasers can be used for cooling, by shining a laser on a target carefully set up so that anti-Stokes scattering carries away entropy. The light scattered is quite incoherent, though.

>I assume the art has progressed since then.

Not really, no. Even if you completely solved the issue of corrosion (which we absolutely haven't), you'd still have to deal with biofouling - anything you leave underwater will rapidly become covered in algae, seaweed and invertebrates. We have antifouling coatings, but a) they're quite toxic, for obvious reasons and b) they need to be regularly renewed.

That would be enough of a problem, but you've also got the cost and difficulty of maintaining underwater infrastructure. It's inherently dangerous, very slow and often made impossible by tidal or weather conditions.

Offshore wind turbines are already much more expensive to build and maintain than onshore, but tidal generators are on another level entirely.

The Rance tidal power station [1] in France has been operating since 1966 so I don't think that there are technical issues, at least with this type of tidal power generation (ie. a dam across a tidal estuary and good old turbines to produce electricity). That specific power station doubles as a much needed road bridge, as well.

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

It has been operating - but it was a research project and it's not like tidal has proliferated since then. Not quite a dead end yet - people are still working on submerged tidal kinds of things. But close.

It wouldn't be legal to build Rance in the EU today, because of the enormously disruptive effects on the local ecosystem. It's not something that bothers me personally, but it's a total dealbreaker in a country like the UK where wildlife activists hold considerably more political sway that climate activists.

Yes, that's what I was thinking.

There was a project to build a tidal lagoon in Cardiff [1] that was eventually abandoned, and I don't know about the environmental impact. But it had the merit of being ambitious.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-41213528

Copper does not foul. It is widely used in aquafarming applications. As I understand the environmental impact is nil.

I understand the use of wave in this context like hydrogen fuel cells in NA. It's amazing to hear that our governments are still giving money to what is clearly a bad idea (hydrogen). I think, like in the case of tidal power, you could chalk it up to doing something to sate special interests.

Hydrogen will probably fill a niche for seasonal grid energy storage. In general pumped storage > batteries > hydrogen for cost/efficiency, but hydrogen has the advantage that it's cheap to store for weeks or months at a time while pumped storage/batteries are suited only to smoothing out daily or weekly variations in solar and wind output.

It's more useful for getting from 90%/95% to 100% green energy than from 0% - 90% though, and it's more expensive than natural gas performing the same function so we likely won't see it used in anger for a while.

> but hydrogen has the advantage that it's cheap to store for weeks or months at a time

Where did you get that idea? Hydrogen is extremely hard to work with and really really wants to escape from any containment vessel you put it in. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage

Your article talks about it positively.

Yes, but look at the loss rates for some of the storage methods.

I had a friend that lived in the Outer Hebrides (Northwest coast of Scotland).

He said it wasn't unusual to have gales in the winter, with >100Km/hr winds.

Seems to be a rich local resource.

Wind turbines have a max windspeed beyond which they stop generating, as it's too risky to let the blades spin that fast.

Cut off wind speed is typically around 25m/s steady, so almost 100km/h. Beyond that indeed they stop producing.

iirc newer, bigger turbines are rated for higher windspeeds and dont have this problem.

    Despite multi-decade mismanagement by government

I disagree. Exactly this post shows much much progress the UK has made. Can you share some specifics of "multi-decade mismanagement by government"? Can you compare that to other highly developed countries?

    especially now Scottish Independence is receding from the conversation

Can you explain why this matters? I assume the UK minus Scotland has enough onshore and offshore locations to fully power itself with wind and solar.

- Mismanagement

UK response to GFC was amongst harshest austerity policies in Europe, leading to infrastructure neglect, local government bankruptcy, degrading of the military and lack of investment in education, healthcare and the rest. This set the scene for Brexit, a policy which increased trade friction with the country's most important trade partners whilst also _increasing_ the immigration it was supposed to reduce.

- Scotland Independence

Indy movement argument for economic viability was access to wind / wave energy around the cost of Scotland. Over half of UK total wind energy comes from Scotland.

While impressive to be boring electricity use was about 30GW but direct heating by gas and oil consumption was another 150GW or so. Heat pumps might reduce that in theory but still quite a way to go...

If I understand it correctly a heat pump would have produced the same heat with 1/3 the energy?

Yeah a long way to go but considering we are only really at the beginning of the green energy revolution this is all great news. It affirms that we can do it.

Yes, and a heat pump tends to run at lower output for longer periods of time versus traditional fuel fired boilers so the peak power demand would be even lower still.

Can confirm that in my 1920s house, now with heat pump, my energy use is now a fraction of what it used to be, since replacing boiler with heat pump.

Before: Jan 600kWh electricity, 3300kWh gas = 3900kWh

After: Jan 1580 kWh electricity, 20kWh gas (cooking hob)

So in total, 41% of previous amount, and for heating, 30%.

So yes, for crappy uk houses heat pumps are totally fine.

Adding in solar pv, and a time shifting battery, and the bills are maybe £2k per year lower than they would be.

A super cheap wholesale price on a windy day like this.

Past year average: £97.90/MWh Right now: £5.99/MWh.

Better transmission and storage tech or better ways to scale demand at different times will be a game changer here.

It was once said that nuclear fission would be too cheap to meter. Turns out, that promise will be met with fusion at a distance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924 (citations)

(edit @ oezi: wind power is solar power)

Solar alone won't cut it in the winter. We need wind as well.

While I prefer a mix of sources to avoid correlated black swan failures, technically you could power the world just fine with distributed PV and a sufficiently fat[0] wire connecting everything.

[0] 1m^2 cross section if it's aluminium

Hopefully they'll use plasma conduits instead and all the years of binge watching Star Trek and Stargate will pay off.

Or with hydrogen storage.

Ammonia.

You can store hydrogen underground. I don't think that would work as well with ammonia.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2901403A/en

https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/1...

https://www.nj.gov/dep/njgs/enviroed/infocirc/StorCavsIC.pdf (Control-F "Repauno Works")

TLDR It is a superior long duration liquid energy storage system vs hydrogen.

Conceded! Except for round trip efficiency.

No worries, we are all learning together.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02219

Why hydrogen? Aren't fuel-cells are notoriously low density storage medium for power?

Fuel cells don't store energy at all, so your point there makes no sense. Also, large scale hydrogen storage for the grid would likely use combined cycle power plants to convert the hydrogen back to electrical energy, not fuel cells.

Hydrogen is cheap for long term storage because underground storage caverns can be extremely cheap (solution mined in salt formations), less than $1 per kWh of storage capacity. This is how natural gas is often stored, after all. There are alternative e-fuels but they have various problems. Ammonia is touted a bit below this comment in these responses.

Wind and solar are terrible solutions. Another 10-20 years and people will be complaining about cost of power as all the wind and solar need to be replaced and repaired. And the discussions on irreversible damage it’s done.

Lucky us we are past that already with nuclear, those plants never need replacement, neither heavy subsidies upfront, or also afterwards to dismantle and clean up.. why humans so stupid? Did I forgot that they also never need maintenance, as all the other tech? Except gas and coal plants, which are also maintenance free, and we can even make profit on the resources they consume!

Not sure how this is possible, when it’s already cheaper in many places to build new wind and solar than to burn coal in existing plants. What kind of “irreversible damage” do you have in mind?

Cheaper to build yet the cost of power has gone up significantly.

Citations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762113

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap...

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

I got it! A huge fan that blows a lot of wind when demand peaks!

Literally importing the wind from one place to another. What a time to be alive!

At that price resistive heating would be cheaper than nat gas.

And the appliances are inexpensive too.

I was thinking district heating systems are probably a bad fit for heat pumps because they use steam. But if electricity prices have a tendency to go negative retrofitting them with resistive heaters could be a win.

Are there a lot of steam district heating systems in the UK?

I was thinking low cost retail electricity would be quickly absorbed by anyone not yet on electric (or district) heating buying cheap electric heaters (and they ARE cheap).

I think in Nordic Countries and places like Germany and Russia.

My opinion if you get regular periods where electricity prices drop to zero or negative someones going to move to take advantage of that.

Awesome. With increasing capacity they'll keep on breaking records. Now can we start sharing links to storage projects too? Because not every day is windy

On 9 August 2019 there was a significant power cut due to lack of inertia. This duration was significantly reduced because of batteries [1]. Since then, gas turbines have been repurposed to provide inertia without generation [2]. Check out the documentary series "Guy Martin's Great British Power Trip" [3] for more national grid facts.

[1] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/08/09/9-august-2019... [2] https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/deeside-power-station-b... [3] https://www.channel4.com/programmes/guy-martins-great-britis...

For everyone who doesn't know Guy Martin, I initially know him as a superbiker and first heard of him in the context of the Isle of Man TT[0][1], so I was a bit surprised to see he's now doing docuseries about power grids :D

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmNXCJt7K3Q

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

I am not even aware that any are planned at scale. I think their plan is to keep using LNG to offset.

There is an absolutely enormous amount of battery storage in the pipeline. There's been major problems with transmission capacity though which National Grid is seemingly finally getting on top of - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/07/uk-grid-operator-stre....

This link and the other websites where I tried to find the numbers quote the capacity in GW, which is very curious because that's not a battery capacity unit. I have the feeling that when they quote 10GW, they mean 10GWh. If it is the case those batteries are peanuts. On a typical year you often have episodes of several days if not a couple of weeks with low to no wind.

It's not about the capacity of the batteries themselves, it's about the _grid_ capacity they can cover. GW isn't a mistake, they care that it can deliver 10GW of instantaneous power, not 10GWh.

National Grid don't want these storage projects to allow us to tide over for days of no wind / no solar, but to add grid balancing.

At the moment if a large power supplier disconnects (e.g. a 1.2GW Nuclear plant) then to handle the drop in supplied power over a period of seconds/minutes before a standby gas turbine generator can fire up they currently rely on the "spinning" mass within the system - literally the intertia of the spinning steel within all the remaining nuclear, gas, coal, biomass power plants. As the grid is being decarbonised this spinning mass is being reduced (Unfortunately wind turbines don't have enough mass for this) and they need to add more responsive balancing.

ok but then we are back to my point that there is no large battery capacity to deal with the volatility of wind. From what I can tell from gridwatch, LNG is what they fire up when there is no wind.

Yes, there's no plan to resolve that as far as I know. The interconnects are meant to mitigate it a bit (i.e. import cheap green power from other countries when the winds not blowing, export it when it is blowing), but most of the plan is that there needs to be enough gas electricity generation for when there's zero solar and zero wind.

Grid scale storage on the order of days isn't really viable yet.

My personal guess is something like hydrogen will take this place eventually.

In the not so distant future I think we will see a lot of sharply negative pricing on windy days, given that we will probably have ~70GW of wind capacity installed for perhaps 50GW of demand by 2030.

Then on non windy days (especially at night with no solar), somewhat higher prices - not sure how high but there is going to be a big delta between the two.

That means there will be a lot of aribitrage to be had and money to be made to store and shift that power.

My guess is H2 will work quite well for this, as even if it's really quite inefficient the fact your input power is free/negative negates a lot of that. It really will come down to how cheap hydrogen electrolyzers can get.

I would like to think the best way for Storage isn't a a giant battery somewhere ( although we could certainly do that with Hydro Dam ), may be something like a Tesla Powerwall that could work 20-30 years minimum, minimal to zero fire risk. All the homes could then install their own and take advantage of the cheap electricity price at night or in other hours. It would ultimately serve as the biggest buffer to any surge in energy usage.

A buried flywheel storage system would accomplish this, they're just prohibitively expensive at the moment. Vehicle-to-grid will be big once it catches on and consumers get over the idea of adding cycles to their vehicle batteries.

Why? You lose the diversification effect. You would have to size the battery to each house's max consumption.

The grid is still a big bottleneck across the board, from production (can't connect wind or solar farms) to deliver (can't connect charging stations, etc).

Easy: get an EV and allow bidirectional charging; done.

My ev has 100kWh, just the bi directional is not yet working

Which EV is that? I know Tesla doesn't support bidirectional and most other EVs top off at 75-80kWh.

i have a ford mustang mach-e with 100kWh. But i did wrote in my original comment, that mine can't do the bi directional yet, but its not a phsyical issue.

How many cycles is the battery good for? Do you want to use up half of them running your house loads to save $2?

yes of course. With one discarge cycle for a day or two, i still have 998 left.

Only if you actually believe my Batterie has only 1000 cycles.

You can easily charge and discharge EV Batteries a lot more times if you do it slow and controlled. 1000 also only means reduction of load to 80% (in theory/worst case).

And no i'm not doing this for $2, i would assume that i would consume 50kWh per day for heating, which is already nearly $20 and its about grid stability.

Here's the storage solution project I'm working on: https://vortical.io

Flywheel storage (which is not new), but we sacrifice some efficiency and energy density so we can do it for cheap.

Unfortunately the linked page has zero info on how their flywheels differ from current tech.

Waiting for patents to file before public disclosure of the tech, but I can give you a basic overview. We use mass instead of speed to store energy. This is slightly less efficient but way less expensive; speed requires magnetic bearings and operating in a vacuum and many other expensive design constraints. Other flywheels operate in the 7500 - 100k RPM range, and we spin at 2000.

If you forego magnetic bearings and vacuum, the energy drains within hours, no?

Bearing and windage losses scale down drastically with lower speeds, so only slightly worse than other flywheel systems. They are best for daily cycles or multiple-daily cycles. Things like load shifting, peak shaving, frequency regulation, etc. They are not well suited for storage beyond a few days.

Storm Pia is passing over the UK today, and it is a very windy day [1]

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/warnings-and-advice/uk-...

No great loss without some gain!

Imagine how much windier would it be, if they didn't extract that energy with wind farms.

Probably not measurable

Was lying in bed last night listening to the wind, thinking 'I wonder how much energy that's generating', checked this morning and wasn't disappointed. If we could sort renewable energy storage out, we'd be laughing energy prices wise. We're a windy little island, after all.

Yes, storage is the bottleneck that not many people talk about. The transition to renewable energy is still young and already we're seeing negative spot prices. My company is working on affordable, lithium-free storage for the grid to address this.

Well, I wish you and your company the very best of luck and hope you succeed! It's going to change the game completely once that problem's addressed

Germany today (massively rainy and windy day) had a peak of over 50GW. Surprisingly we still had 2GW solar peak even today with the worst possible weather and over 9GW just two days ago.

Ireland is generating 75% renewable today also!

https://www.eirgrid.ie/grid/real-time-system-information

I understand 75% is the current "limit", I guess for grid stability: https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/eirgrid-and-soni-recognised-rene... (aiming for 95% by 2030, pending ROCOF related upgrades)

The forecast is to beat the record peak 4610MW for wind today too.

Looks like a peak of 4517MW from wind today, just shy of the record.

Not surprised as it knocked my outdoor Christmas tree down...

I'm not surprised, there are wheelie bins all over the place, it's like a warzone out there.

the storms only ever pass on bin day, I'm seeing the pattern

every day is bin day somewhere in your region

It's a wheelie bad situation (sorry, couldn't help myself) - got woken up at 0600 when the recycling bins lined up on my street started to topple over, scattering cans and bottles everywhere.

See also: https://theconversation.com/britain-is-a-net-electricity-exp... (" Britain is a net electricity exporter for first time in 44 years ")

Seems the links to/from rest of europe are working out fairly well. Is there some web source that would show the "trade balance" on eg monthly basis?

You can see a live map there: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Maybe I'm missing something but there doesn't seem to be import/export angle shown there?

In the live or 24h view it can show the utilization of individual cross-border connections but even that disappears when you select a longer timescale.

Part of the reason we were a net export last winter was the gas pipeline’s to continental Europe were at capacity, so we were burning the LNG here and then exporting the electricity instead

Since then Germany has increases it’s own LNG capability and gas storage in Europe was filled much sooner

I’m not surprised, it’s like Lord of the Rings outside right now!

If anyone doesn't know it - Gridwatch is fun

http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk

Interesting that they too omit total import/export, like electricitymaps. And also total production, showing only total demand.

Caveat: I have gleaned bits and bobs from across the web, but I do not work in the UK power industry.

I believe there might be a lot of wind power, but the UK grid doesn't yet have the capacity to transfer it, with London and the SE being a key user of power. Until then a proportion of wind power needs to be curtained, and gas power generated near the South East.

A coming link from Scotland to Norway should allow power to be exported, in addition to the England Norway link.

The main issue I believe is the Scotland to England link, a second interconnect, this time on the Eastern side of the British isles is being built.

Batteries can only soak up only so much extra wind power, and currently there isn't much call for desalination plants in Glasgow.

Lovely. Can we have lower bills yet?

No, they are going up in the new year.

Its already pretty cheap right?

Checking Octopus it seems to be averaging about £140 a month on my account.

That’s menaingless without saying what your consumption is

If you have a smart meter, yes. My electricity rate today is 15p/kWh.

As per other comments, I will likely net profit today from maxing out usage during negative pricing via octopus agile.

It's particularly impressive to me given the stormy conditions. I remember about twenty years ago when my area got a huge wind farm and they used to "turn it off" if it got a bit too windy which always seemed amusing to me.

Look further at the 'past day' stats on that page, 61% of power came from wind in the past 24 hours and 78.5% from 'zero carbon' sources overall (also including hydro and nuclear). This is fantastic progress.

Great Scot! 21.81 Gigawatts!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fzuO9wHrvGg

On the solstice, too, when solar production will be relatively low. It's a good anecdote in the conversation about the renewable mix.

Wind often increases when solar energy decreases and vice versa, which is why they are deployed together when possible.

Robin Hawkes GB Renewables Map is great for looking at wind farms and how much energy they’re producing

https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#5/55/-3.2

I did think it was very windy today.

It's a pity it was really low when it was really cold in early Dec.

Really cold weather doesn’t have much wind. It’s metrology. Without long term storage, wind power during the winter in the northern hemisphere is just meh. Same with any variable renewable energy source. Instead of celebrating the few times renewable energy actually produces energy when it’s needed we should celebrate every time a new Nuclear power plant comes online.

The constant 15% that everyone forgets. And the U.K. is still importing French nuclear energy today.

Generally speaking extreme temps don’t coexist with wind for very long. Wind, after all, convects air around, and fundamentally you’ll have the extremes mixed with non-extreme air.

Like a heat dome, for example, is only possible when there’s no wind to push the dome away.

Only downside is it's taken loads of public transport offline

If only someone had planned ahead and added some redundancy to the lines running out or Euston to Manchester.

Oh wait.

There's usually 0 redundancy on trams

This would explain why yesterday evening and this evening Octopus Energy's electricity price is negative (I'm on their agile tariff). My olar batteries will be going on forced charge during that time and my electric water heater (usually unused - we are on gas) will automatically come on.

Yeah it's pretty windy out.

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