UK Wind Farms Are Overstating Their Output
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Your insightful comment is much appreciated.
Many thanks for sharing your research
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/25/octopus-buil...
It does make me wonder why the National Grid can't keep up. We can all see how BT has a massive conflict of interest with OpenReach, which is why AltNets are thriving. But what's stopping National Grid?
> Former UK Energy Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg said [...]
JRM was Energy Secretary for 2 months in 2022. I'm not sure that justifies this comment. Is there a greater link that the article doesn't express?
That obviously doesn't mean there's any substantive link between his politics and the Bloomberg study (and he denies being a climate-change denier and supported other policies aimed at encouraging the expansion of renewables anyway) but the context might be helpful to people who don't know who Mogg is
It's very reasonable to take anything he says or implies with a massive grain of salt.
Here's a short documentary about him[0]. Highlights include:
* Being the subject of a French television documentary when he was 12 years old[1];
* Campaigning against abortion (which itself is weird in the UK outside of Northern Ireland) while investing in abortion pills; and
* Campaigning for election in one of the most deprived areas of the UK, while accompanied by his nanny (as in, the person employed by his parents to raise him when he was a child) so that she could iron his shirts.
He has been described as a 'real life Dickensian villain' and a 'haunted Victorian pencil', and is frequently referred to on Reddit as 'the honourable member for the nineteenth century' (prior centuries are often substituted). He is also responsible for the first recorded use of the word 'floccinaucinihilipilification' in Hansard (the official transcript of Parliamentary proceedings).
Also on UK broadcast satire, though I can't remember off the top of my head if I'm thinking of Have I Got News For You or The News Quiz. (Possibly both?)
There's currently 30GW of wind in the UK (offshore + onshore), plus an ambition to get another 35GW of offshore installed in the next 6 years. I'm not sure whether that will be met, but I would project at least another 20GW of offshore wind will come online based on in construction/approved projects by 2030.
At that point we'll have 55GW of wind, plus a huge amount of solar (probably 25GW minimum, potentially a lot lot more).
UK electricity consumption is very low per capita and it is falling rapidly with not much sign of this changing.
I think we are going to be in a position where we have (way) too much power at least 50% of the year.
Some will be able to be used for storage, and some potentially exported via HVDC, but I fear the generation on windy + sunny days will be pretty enormous.
This would all get sorted out by 'the market' but CfD contracts basically pay to keep producing whatever the price (I believe some of the contracts may have changed slightly on this). Which really distorts the market.
Consider a small CNC routing enterprise running 4 machines. Each machine averages 25kW, with extraction, air supply etc contributing another 50kw. Heating the space in winter (CNC routers lock out if the ambient temperature drops below 18c) is incredibly inefficient, because when the extractors are running you're emptying the workshop of air (that you paid to heat) multiple times an hour.
Pre-covid the hourly electricity run rate would be in the region of £45/hr (0.27p / kWh)
At the worst of the energy price crises, the run rate was > £180/hr (I know of one shop that was paying 111p/kWh for a period).
Now we're paying 0.38p / kWh or £70/hr. That's a baseline increase of >£10k a year...
SME workshops have died because their pricing model just couldn't flex to accommodate that.
STABLE energy pricing is equally important as CHEAP energy pricing.
If variation is a significant and long term then grid sized storage will buy low and sell high.
I think half the problem of this is people signing terrible business energy deals and not switching aggressively enough.
A more elaborate system can use predicted rates and thermal mass with heat pumps to dramatically reduce energy costs while also shifting demand to peak production periods.
I know I cut back on my electric because it costs 28p per kwh, which is crazy high.
I'm thinking of hooking my house up to it to take advantage of those periods of crazy cheap electricity.
I think we're so used to electricity being the same price all the time because we all emerged from the coal world that it blinds us to the options available to shift demand.
Considering how critical the cost of energy is to the economic success of a country, it was a really dumb move to let anyone bolt compulsory extra charges onto the cost of energy.
Edit; Oh, I see, I need a smart meter to get Tracker. I’m a renter so not sure about the process for getting a smart meter there
Paying approx 15p/kWh for electricity and 4p/kWh for gas, which is about half of the price cap rates.
This seems ridiculous to cite as a problem, at a time when people are facing record high bills, but perhaps some time between now and then the subsidy can be tapered a bit.
If we have guaranteed a £50/MWh CfD to a wind or solar producer, and we have too much power on the grid , then you need to pay them ~£50/MWh to shut off (otherwise they'd just keep producing).
If we had for example 20GW surplus capacity on the grid at any one time paying £50/MWh for curtailment costs £1m/hr which then billpayers have to pay. This is highly simplified but hopefully gets the point I'm trying to make across.
(The whole "overstating your forecast" thing sounds a lot like LIBOR)
Curtailment payments are an incentive for the grid operators to build out transport capacity and for grid consumers to invest into dynamic load control.
The tides are constant, unlike wind and sun.
The UK has a lot of coast and a lot of tides.
Once we work out how to do that in a cost effective way the UK is in a brilliant position. But until then it is an active area of research.
They always run into Nimbys who don't understand that sea birds etc are far more threatened by the direct effects of climate change than by projects that affect their habitats in a designed way.
That's incredibly dismissive of genuine environmental concerns about immediate effects on coastal ecology
The majority of tidal flow is during relative short periods of only a few hours. In order to harvest tidal energy, truly enormous volumes of reinforced marine concrete have to be deployed. The environmental consequences are massive.