The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
wastedwind.energy
wastedwind.energy
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
So you see, the market was supposed to correct that.
But profit laid with cheap gas turbines to backstop wind and buying from france ;)
The mandatory EDI platform to interact on German market is also a bit annoying, though it's in details theory is theoretically /s solid
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
Is that NIMBYism?
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
Times are tumultuous but potential exists all around us.
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
Scum.
Lovely turn of phrase. I'm going to work it into my next tech talk.
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
In this drawing, you can see the area in the map and it is not 120m wide along the trench: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download. For scale, the grid squares are 1000m.
A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).
(Re rail lines — if you build power lines over existing rail lines you could also electrify the rail route at the same time, and get rid of the diesel locomotives).
Roads also go to places with buildings and have junctions, plumbing, foundations and are generally hard to dig past. But there are places where they do follow motorways: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M6_motorway,_northbo... (also canals).
Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.
Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.
Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/undergrounding/
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible
If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot
The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.
Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.
On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…
What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?
I mean it is a big pile of interests that needs to be optimized. One option is to expose it to the market and let the supply and demand optimization process have a go at it.
If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.
On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
> Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue...
Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
You'd open them because of plenty of customer demand.
I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling.
If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.
Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...
It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).
Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus...
> The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances.
We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect.
It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
I'd say the lion's share of time was spent seeking planning permission, writing environmental impact documents, planning the route, building the justification for any compulsory purchases, consulting with interest parties, etc. Some of that would be NIMBYs, but I don't think there was a sustained campaign to hold back EGL2, it just took a lot of bureaucracy, and effectively "death by a thousand cuts". A project gets to be 5 years late one day at a time.
See the timeline and some of the documents here: https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date
And Nimby is politics, so I don't see a distinction between Nimby and 'purely politics'.
You used a fine phrase there, "red tape", which describes all the bureaucracy over and above localised objections to national infrastructure. NIMBYs can certainly use the red tape to hold you up, but there's also NIMBY-free red tape that holds you up anyway.
[Aside: If you want a word for "globalised" NIMBYs, those are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), the sorts of people who weaponise the environmental impact assessment. Some examples are https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-doesnt-america-build-thi... and https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui... -- it seems especially galling that "environmentalists" don't want a train line that could replace 100% of air travel between LA and SF, because it might affect their specific piece of the environment, meaning that the planes just keep on flying, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, warming the planet, and contributing to the increasingly severe weather that leads to massive destruction of their nearby environment via wildfires and such]
Under "politics" I'd include NIMBYs and red tape... and also political will. The project was proposed in 2015 and didn't really start until 2020. That's politics -- convincing the appropriate people in power that they can and should do something, and commit to funding the project, assigning the appropriate governmental bodies to begin work on it, and in this case engage the companies responsible for electricity transmission and get them to work on it too. Only then do they start planning the route, applying for planning permission, compulsory purchase, holding consultations, hearing objections, etc.
Getting the project going took 5 years, it could have been 0 years if the political will was there.
I've mostly voted Green all my life but for the last 5 or so years I remain satisfied at their losses, as they're somehow unable to understand why people are moving away.
(My comment's a little bitter, but I do hope they figure this one out.)
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
I’m not a programmer, it’s all fairly easy to do.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
E.g peak solar is around 2pm, peak demand is around 7pm
Grid storage (including EVs and smart heat pumps) absolutely help with this second problem
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
I agree on the popularity, but you'd absolutely see an effect even without anyone buying new appliances
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
It's like how there's a substantial portion of the population that counts the best commute time ever as their commute time, and are perpetually late. "How can it take 30 minutes to get to work, one time it was only 15!" - ignoring the reality of traffic, subway delays, etc.
No it doesn't. The customer has low risk appetite and would rather pay a premium for predictability.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
So maybe -30 is difficult but it wouldn't be that hard to have the existing temperature range on new models be dynamic based on electricity pricing
For small sizes, yes it is.
But also, capex vs opex. Even if it's twice the cost, you only pay it once.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
> With Rate Flex D, you can save quite a bit of money, since most of the time in winter, you’ll be charged less than the base rate, except during occasional peak demand events, when you’ll be charged more than the base rate.
[1] https://www.hiloenergie.com/en-ca/ [2] https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
Everyone imagines that consumers would change their behaviour if they were given price information. In my experience, I've yet to see any good data showing that on average consumers save electricity due to smart meters.
In New Zealand, I think the power companies design their consumer products to be unhelpful (what's the equivalent term here for dark patterns in marketing?). I believe few consumers watch their instant usage or review their hourly usage. Personally I changed away from a plan that used spot prices (after seeing the debacle from snow in Texas, and realising the rewards were low and that judging/managing the risks was hard).
Plenty of grids had started paying consumers for excess solar generation exactly in this manner.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
A lot of thermostats support it
The problem here is
1) the excess power is not near the demand
2) the cost of electricity near the excess power is no lower than where there's no excess
3) nimbys prevent the extra interconnects being built which equalise power availability and power demand
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
WTF showering for one hour? That's a great way to quickly become persona non grata in my house.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
Are these the same people who refused to let Clarkson open a pub because - and I quote - "it would be too popular"?
> A spokesperson for Cotswold District Council said: "We absolutely refute that any of the officers or councillors involved in working with Jeremy to realise his vision for the Coach and Horses had 'absolutely nothing positive to say' or were awkward."
> They added: "There were in fact several positive meetings between Jeremy and his team, and willing officers and councillors at Cotswold District Council.
> "These discussions explored how challenges to renovating this pub could be overcome, as part of the pre-application stage of this project. A planning application was never submitted.
> "Upon deciding not to pursue purchase of the pub, Jeremy sent an email via his planning agent thanking the council for being 'so open and supportive', and for trying to find solutions to some of the hurdles needed to overcome renovation of the pub. He stated that 'the march of time and the feasibility of getting this done within a window that works for television' had been the project's undoing."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3ql38yk11o
Clarkeson is an entertainer whose goal is to tell a compelling story; often one that bears little resemblance to the truth.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
Correct?
See Fig 2 here[1] for just how spiky the market became after the price hike.
Also bear in mind that Norway does most of its residential heating with resitive heating, precisely because electricity has historically been so cheap. Heat pumps are getting more popular, and burning firewood got very popular during the price hike, but basically no-one heats with gas, as there's no infrastructure to support it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
The anger is completely out of proportion, IMO, as the net effect is probably very positive. 1. Hydro is typically state owned and taxed at a very high rate 2. 50% of the price difference between markets is pocketed by the public grid operator (reducing grid fees) 3. We also import power when needed and typically at a net profit.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
If the transmission capacity is limited you need to expose that signal to the market, not attempt to hide it.
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
If you can store the energy, your energy cost goes down (but storage is not free of course, though getting cheaper).
Amortizing the fixed cost will mean the 'fossil' power is more expensive per kWh indeed, making it more and more attractive to buy storage as to bridge the gap between windy/sunny periods that do have cheaper electricity.
Some electricity markets have or a re looking at capacity mechanisms, they pay simply to have the capacity to generate power at any given time, even if not generating, eg. to be a backup. Eventually, that will be the business case for any fuel-powered power plant I suppose
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.
That would be a stupendously bad idea.
It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)
> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation
Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
Best of luck =3
Generally, bio-fuels proved more practical using fermented alcohols or fat transesterification into B100. A genetic engineering solution for salt-water tolerant fuel crops or microbes is highly probable.
If I recall correctly, methanol powered vehicles would get significantly lower mileage per tank of fuel, and tended to damage petrol engines. =3
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Ring-fence constraint payments and convert them into a build mandate: every £1 spent curtailing in a zone next year becomes £1 of capex allocated to relieving that exact bottleneck (HVDC, transformers, phase shifters).
Pair it with a fast-track permit for projects that follow existing transport corridors and bury through parks/towns only when the cost of delay exceeds the cost premium.
Sweeten the deal locally: automatic bill credits or rooftop/heat-pump grants for residents along the route.
If we’re going to socialise the waste, we should socialise the upgrade-and make the "do nothing" option politically expensive.
This week the northern-ish parts of europe are hitting one of the highest price point for electricity in recent time, with prices going for around $0.5 per kw/h. Calm weather in combination with low production from solar is creating a shortage in production, at the same time as the weather is getting colder.
There is a lot of money on the table to get energy produced at the right time and right place. Having energy produced at the wrong time and in the wrong place is not worth anything.
Stops the power being wasted ( though obviously hydrogen generation is less efficient than direct use ), and also creates a stored form of the energy for less windy days.
BTW also not suggest a hydrogen everywhere energy economy - use it centrally to augment/replace gas powered backup.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
Which claims curtailment is about 10%
That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business. If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
So maybe storage can make some sense.
But before you go expand the grid or add batteries, it's probably fine to over build or curtail some more :)
Okay, I honestly don't know. Because this comes down to the numbers -- it's really just an economics exercise.
I guess my point is: scary absolute number of money spent on curtailment, makes a great headline, but doesn't mean anything.
Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".
Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
What's the possible demand drop, 20%? More?
It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.
https://www.coireglas.com/project
The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.
Yeah, I like pumped hydro and even with its lower efficiency, it's cost effective... but I live in the Fens and I'm looking at solutions that work everywhere. Local storage is going to be more important once a significant portion of the country has an EV and heat pump.
Short-term profits and for-profit policy lobbying are utterly incompatible with building intelligent, robust, future-proof infrastructure.
Even food distribution?
Food is a bad counter example here, as retailers are not prevented from adjusting their prices the further away you choose to live off major population hubs. OTOH electricity in many cases costs the same in the entire country (incl. UK.) This means that energy consumers are not incentivized by these expenses to consider the real costs of the grid. They will rather build a new factory/etc close to London where they might expect to have access to better workforce pool instead of in Scotland right next to the overproducing turbines.
NIMBYism against new grid infrastructure would also largely disappear overnight if the market actually made economic incentives (in a form of reduced electricity prices/fees) for people to accept infrastructure bringing that electricity to them. The way things stand today – when electricity costs the same to everybody in the country – of course you wouldn't want any works in your vicinity.
It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)
Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies
If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.
Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not forerunners for wind power, with Bavaria's governing party being downright hostile. They are not increasing subsidies, that's for sure.
My best guess is that this refers to either differences in subsidies between the states - Lower Saxony has lower to no subsidies because building wind turbines is popular and profitable there without additional funding. Bavaria meanwhile probably lacks experts and has to bring them down from Lower Saxony or NRW, increasing building costs even at locations just as suitable as in Lower Saxony. So yeah, they might still have state subsidies, but not because they want wind power where it's infeasible. You wouldn't find an operator for that.
Another guess is that maybe this about the process for bidding on subsidies. This is a method where for large-scale projects operators can bid on executing projects not just with money but also by the amount of subsidies. For off-shore power, that subsidy often goes negative now, i.e. it's practically a license cost now. That does indeed mean that less desirable projects, which are probably less ideal for power generation, receive more subsidies, but that's a far cry from building wind power in "infeasible" locations.
https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...
> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.
Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.
There's no malicious encouragement to build wind power where it does not make sense.
But why are there subsidies anyway? Well, all forms of power are subsidised, nuclear power the most, and renewables and coal about to the same tune (in Germany). Also, the electricity price is very low in Germany. Often lower as in France. You know, neither coal plant operators nor wind power operators profit from the extremely high consumer price point. So even though wind power is the cheapest form of energy to produce (in Germany), even it can't break even all the times, which is a scary prospect for investors.
German household prices are highest in EU https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And industrial ones in top 5. All this despite EEG subsidies. Without them the price would be about 6ct/kwh higher
> Wind power is so cheap
Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)
France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
> France has lower electricity prices
France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).
If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).
When you say Germany can't just build nuclear plants now you are right. But the solution can't be to expand solar and wind, while destroying coal and nuclear plants - which is what they do. The last minister for these matters had the unironical idea to shutdown industry when the renewables don't produce. The idea was to move from a demand driven industry, to a supply driven industry. Total madness. The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
You're also mixing the status quo with your (unclear) desire of how the world should be. Germany spent the last 80 years to build up an energy grid built on coal – nuclear peaked at 30%!. Of course they emit more CO2 today compared to the French!
But if anything, that's an argument for why Germany should start agressively building out renewables (aggression there was abandoned 20 years ago by the Merkel admin).
> 3 trillion or more till 2045
Looking at decades is a surefire way to get big numbers. But depending on your starting points (I guess 1999 during SPD/Greens coalition), that's just €60 billion per year. A lot of money but not exactly shocking.
> The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
Even the state of Bavaria - not exactly known to be mad for wind power - classifies more than half of its area as containing locations suitable for wind power. Of course that's nothing compared to Lower Saxony, but that's why they aim for total installed capacity of just 6 GW by 2050 (source for all that is the Bayrischer Windatlas issued by the, again, very sceptical of wind power, CSU government of Bavaria).
You're really just decade old fud against renewables. Do you really think that in the whole of 70 thousand square kilometres of Bavaria there are no points where the wind is strong enough 150 m above ground to produce power profitably? Because that's just not true. And 6 GW, by the way, are just one to four thousand modern turbines. Across the largest state of Germany. There's nothing mad about that at all.
In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer
You can check out today how nicely is that investment performing https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)
You could consider nationalization a subsidy(albeit it wasn't) but that was a one off 9bn payment. Germany spent double of that last year alone on EEG ren subsidies and still had highest household prices in EU.
German wind gets about 70€/MWh.
New french nuclear CFDs aren't clear. Fla3 doesn't have cfd and has a prod cost of 90-120€/MWh. But that's a failed project which got delayd and had supply chain issues. If EPR2 will have the same problems - yes, it'll cost similarly. Otherwise it'll be cheaper, like eg building a unit in 10y instead of 20
Or alternatively merit order data https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.
Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.
Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7
New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.
Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
e.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...
From wiki:
> Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy
But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/
It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml
16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore
To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.
Except you can't because there's a law saying the price of electricity has to be the same everywhere in the country. You can be right next to a wind turbine that's turned off, and they're not allowed to sell to you for less than the price they'd sell to the other end of the country, even though they're also not allowed to sell to the other end of the country.
Of course, this law was probably a reaction to a previous time where the price differences were excessively huge. A law like this doesn't exist for no reason. There is a balancing act, as both extremes were already found to have problems. It can be that the "stupid can't sell law" is actually considered good because it makes investors build new supply at the other end of the country or to build more transmission lines, instead of building where you are and trying to sell to you locally.
That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.
You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.
Oh well.