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Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and someti

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunny, windy and lower demand in the summer). Last year had more time than ever in negative, and the UK has another 10-20GW of commited offshore wind in construction. Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide (right now it peaks over 50% regularly). There is approx 5GW of HVDC (with 1-2/GW a year more planned over the next while), but it won't be enough to export all of it outside the UK (and when it is windy here, it is likely to also be there, so they won't want it either). This is going to end up with very negative prices for a lot of the time. Considering ~15% of UK supply is made up with nuclear, this is a real problem. You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas. So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack. This may spur innovation in storage, but we are talking enormous quantities required in a very short period of time.

eldaisfish 6y ago
spot on. Every time this comes up, it's the same BS. The actual figure for the UK grid (there is no separate Scotland grid) is just over 40% of net electrical energy demand supplied by renewable sources. If Scotland was severed from the grid it would require fossil fuels and nuclear just like the rest of the UK. The 97% figure is arrived at by taking British renewable energy that happens to be in Scotland and subtracting that against Scottish energy use. This is in no way accurate and ignores time - there are many periods of time where Scotland's wind turbines aren't spinning and the region is drawing power from the rest of the UK grid.
- AdmiralGinge 6y ago
  This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.
- batpangolin 6y ago
  I don't see the problem with this number. Scotland (seen as a separate energy economy) sometimes exports energy to England and Wales, sometimes imports it. Scotland's production of renewable energy, considered in total MWh, represents 97% of its consumption of all electrical energy. Clearly, in dollar value, the number is smaller since they usually export at times of low prices and import at times of higher prices. That isn't the comparison that's being made.
  - eldaisfish 6y ago
    Electrical energy is always in balance. Saying that 97% of Scotland's electrical energy needs were met by renewables is highly misleading because it ignores the most important piece of context - time. Scotland could have generated 300% of daily energy demand from wind one some days. And zero on others. The reality is that one cannot be subtracted from the other to claim that net consumption is zero precisely because there is a time when that is not true. Electrical energy is not like balance of trade i.e. it is not fungible. There is a further complication here - the assumption that there is a ready sink of generated energy. If that stops being the case, then suddenly those days of 300% demand being generated are no longer possible. The headline is a mischaracterisation and is misleading.
    - batpangolin 6y ago
      The claim that 'one can be subtracted from the other' is a straw man. The words 'Equivalent of 97%' are right there in the headline.
bjelkeman-again 6y ago
I think the solution is keep building those continental grid connections. Norway can with its substantial hydro work as a battery, for example. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-looming-energy-sector-builds-new-links-europe https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-loom...
aclelland 6y ago
Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an uphill fight with locales/environmentalists. Sometimes I wonder if it would make more sense for individual properties to have their own powerwall type devices to soak up the oversupply during those windy days but in reality the cost of getting one installed is so high that I can't imagine enough people ever doing it, let alone the organization and co-ordination that would be needed from the energy companies.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  Electric cars are perfect for this. Connect them to the grid and the internet, and they’ll charge but also feed back as needed.
  - eldaisfish 6y ago
    Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still. Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to the grid at all times and neither will all their stored energy be usable. Batteries aren't the silver bullet many imaging them to be. The real solution is expanding transmission capacity, building more renewables and supplementing that by nuclear or hydro.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      For the comparison, average nuclear power plant produces 1000MW around the clock. The goal of Australia batteries was to normalize short production/consumption fluctuations, not as general universal battery storage to deal with renewable uneven production.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If only there was a ready trading partner nearby. Maybe Canada needs power.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  "Maybe Canada needs power." Maybe mars needs power, but neither of them is going to get any of it from britain. Laws of physics take precedence over 'free trade'
  - detritus 6y ago
    I think OP was being quite dry with those two last lines. At least, that's what I upvoted them for.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    This was a joke about the UK not getting a good brexit deal and instead trying to get a deal like Canada, and therefore not being able to sell its excess electricity to somewhere closer, like the EU.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      Exactly. The "super canada" concept. Anyone who thinks Canada is in any way comparable to Europe as a UK trading partner doesn't know much about geography. Maybe if Britain hadn't had a hissy fit they could now be selling that extra power across the channel.
      - JetSetWilly 6y ago
        Well I believe the UK and EU are working on the agreements necessary for cross border trading of electricity: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electricity-with-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electrici... There's no reason to believe that something won't be worked out in time. So if by "hissy fit" you mean the people of the UK looked at the pros and cons of EU membership and narrowly decided that the cons can be lived with then.. yeah sure.
realreality 6y ago
If the UK commits to their plan to convert everyone to heat pumps and electric cars, that'll take care of any excess renewable capacity. In fact, they'll be in an impossibly large energy deficit...
mytailorisrich 6y ago
One thing to also keep in mind is that it is forecast that the UK's electricity production needs to increase by 70% by 2050 just to meet demand from electric vehicles. It is said to be equivalent to 6 extra nuclear plants. [1] As the government announced that sales of new ICE vehicles will be banned in only 9 years and most car manufacturers start unveiling their EV range in earnest I think we're going to see the shift to EV happen this decade. If so extra electricity production needs to happen now. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk-electric-vehicles-need https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk...
IAmEveryone 6y ago
What’s with the quotes around “exported”? Excess power is exported, which happens to be one way to manage it, reducing the need for storage.
- martinald 6y ago
  Because Scotland isn't its own grid, it's on the UK national grid, it was to differentiate that from HVDC export.
  - Mvandenbergh 6y ago
    Nitpick: it's the GB national grid, Ireland has an all-island grid which is separate.
pojzon 6y ago
Serious question, why not simply stop generating energy by wind istead of stopping nuclear stallar ? You „can” stop generating power using wind. Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.
- martinald 6y ago
  Of course, but the government has commited prices (>£100/MWh) for wind. You have to pay them at least that to compensate, otherwise they won't stop producing. Which is going to get extremely expensive quickly.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- bluGill 6y ago
  You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all. An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year how much they will make and so for the investors it works out. For the utility they need more green energy in the mix, and so they are willing to sign the contract even though sometimes they will buy electricity and they pay someone to take it on the spot market. They also know how much wind they expect to get, and so those times wind is negative are made up by times that wind is blowing when they would otherwise have to buy much more expensive peak plant power. So for the utility over the course of the year the wind power is profitable even though at some moments it is unprofitable. The problem is in the above separation the windmill owner is paid for all power produced, and so if they shut down there is no money for them. (or they have to agree with the utility on a fair payment)
  - pojzon 6y ago
    This sounds like the issue railways had in UK 100 years ago. Solution was to nationalize the infrastructure. If the nation would own the wind-farms and nuclear plants, both can be managed to the benefit pf the nation. If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.
megaman821 6y ago
There are other useful things you could do with excess energy and seawater. Either a desalination plant or a hydrogen plant. If the energy price is 0 those could operate economically.
pydry 6y ago
>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust. Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Sadly these 'negative' prices aren't available to regular people. Only a select few who can trade on the spot market can use them. If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.
  - rolivercoffee 6y ago
    This is starting to happen: https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ I imaging more suppliers will start offering this soon. (I'm not in anyway associated with Octopus btw, just interested in this sort of thing)
  - bluecookeh93 6y ago
    Octopus Agile makes them available to regular consumers. Last summer people regularly got paid to charge their electric cars during the night!
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Here in Texas a lot of people could get access to spot prices and it didn't work out as well as they'd hoped.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Most people have too much depend that is fixed for spot prices to make sense. If you have two meters putting one on spot might make sense - but that only works if there is something is stopping you from changing what meter is active.
Reason077 6y ago
> "There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices" I'm not sure if you can call it a crisis. A problem, yes, but one that will sort itself out over time. Negative prices are a huge incentive to any form of flexible demand. And by 2030 there will be millions of electric vehicles on UK roads, representing hundreds of GWh of flexible storage. Free fuel by charging at the right time, handled automatically by your smart charger / app? Or even paid to charge? That's a pretty powerful incentive to soak up excess supply. > "And we are still going need masses of gas backup" We already have masses of gas backup. But it will become less important in the future as more diversity in renewables, more interconnections, more storage, more nuclear, etc, come online. We'll still need gas for the foreseeable future, but the less it is used, the better.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
The difference in price, and negative prices, can make things like generating hydrogen or other energy storage more economic.
circlefavshape 6y ago
Better batteries may not be the answer. Possible other options - electrolysis of seawater https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589299120300537 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912... - scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere directly https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-method-converts-CO2-graphite/97/i9 https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-meth... Neither of these is energy-efficient, but if the energy is negatively priced they don't need to be
- lkbm 6y ago
  These tend to be capital-intensive, though. The big problem with most of our solutions is that you spending $50MM on a hydrogen plant and then leaving it idle half the time costs you $25MM amortized over the lifetime of the plant, so you need to be saving that much on your power bill. It's likely more economical for you to just run it on full all the time, regardless of the hourly energy prices. We do this some with aluminum smelting, but it's not as free as it initially appears. You need a high energy usage to capital cost ratio for it to be economical. (Ideally, you'd also be able to ramp up and down somewhat quickly as-needed. IIRC, there's a big aluminum plant in Germany that can do this, but it's unusual.)
codeulike 6y ago
Instead of paying wind producers to stop, take the excess electricity and use it for bitcoin mining, then use the bitcoin to buy electricity when there's not enough. (I'm joking, I think, but maybe this would actually work)
lkramer 6y ago
The next step is to massively ramp up Power to X where excess electricity gets converted into more tangible products, such as ship/aircraft fuel, or put into storage.
seanalltogether 6y ago
> So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack. Ireland is a good example of this. One of the reasons that Ireland has not been able to increase wind farms is because they don't have the ability to export it rapidly. The last time the interconnect with GB was cut, they had to shut down a bunch of wind farms. There was big news a while ago about building a new interconnect to France which should allow for more wind farms in Ireland while relying on french "nuclear batteries"
codeulike 6y ago
Negative energy prices shouldn't really be a crisis, but what you're saying is, the way the whole grid works is changing due to the way that renewable energy is variable whereas traditional energy generation is constant. So this is just about "Change", and Change is awkard in the short term but can be handled in the medium term. Maybe we need new types of fossil power station that can be turned on and off faster. Maybe we need more intra-grid trading. Maybe we need more storage, or maybe we need more 'useful' things that use a lot of electricity that can be turned on to use the excess (seawater desalination, etc). The contracts with the wind producers will also need to change over time, obviously. The problem here is not negative electricity prices - those are the opposite of a problem. The problem is the grid needs to re-adapt.
jliptzin 6y ago
You have to be really unimaginative to consider a surplus of renewable energy a crisis.
- ryathal 6y ago
  Everything exists in a Goldilocks Zone, too much power can be just as bad or worse than too little power. It's far more likely that the excess power causes damage or other negative results than anything good coming from it.
belorn 6y ago
It not only misleading, it is intentionally mixing of fungeable and non-fungeable goods in order to turn something obvious dirty as being clean. If Scotland exports of wool exceeded the amount of imported cotton, then we can pretend that the cotton import never existed. Cotton and wool is pretty interchangeable as textile fibers. This then allow us to purchase cotton that is produce by child labor, because the cotton didn't actually exist because look, wool production exceeds the demand for textile fiber. It pure silliness. If a country buy energy produced from fossil fuel then that country is responsible for the pollution. No amount of exporting clean energy will erase the pollution. Its there, it is being generated, and the customer who pays for it has a distinct responsibility.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  So the producer of the pollution gets off scot free? Or are you going to count the pollution twice?
  - belorn 6y ago
    I would rather count pollution twice than zero, but in the example of abusive labor, we definitively do count it twice. Companies should be called out if they buy products produced by forced labor camps, child labor, and conflict diamonds, and sweatshops. At the same time, the companies that actually do the forced labor or employ people under abusive conditions are very much also guilty.
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
PWRs actually can ramp their power up or down and the French run a number of theirs in this mode. I don't think AGRs can in quite the same way since thermal stresses on the graphite need to be avoided. Economically, it's not clear that economically you'd want to run PWRs this way though since FuelEx is only a small part of the LCOE of a nuclear plant.
aardvark179 6y ago
Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.
- qayxc 6y ago
  France has different problems, though. Nuclear power stations need to shut down in summer when temperatures get too high and cooling is insufficient (this is done mostly to avoid killing plants and fish in the rivers). Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks. While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035. At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now. Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...
cbmuser 6y ago
> You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas. You actually can. All remaining six German nuclear power plants can operate in load-following mode and vary their output power by 10%-20% within minutes. It just makes no sense to reduce the power on nuclear plants as they don’t emit any CO2 and you don‘t save much Uranium when you reduce power.
hristov 6y ago
Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices. There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power. So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power. Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly. Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.
- ThomPete 6y ago
  As long as the powersource isn't reliable it's a problem. A problem that doesn't have any solutions in sight that are closer than something like fusion which would be the preferable solution rather than unreliables like wind and solar.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    > "something like fusion which would be the preferable solution" The preferable solutions are ones that actually exist.
pjc50 6y ago
> increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices To be specific, from https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pricing-more-than-double-in-2020-across-europe https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pr... "Great Britain saw 80 hours of negative pricing in the first nine months of 2020": nine months is 6570 hours. So about 1.2% of the time.
krona 6y ago
I assumed the UK's very ambitious hydrogen strategy was in part to address these issues?
mpweiher 6y ago
> crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices Yes. And this is often touted as "renewable now cheaper than..." But those decreasing prices are not actually a sign that renewable energy is cheaper to produce, but that it is actually useless and thus worthless at certain times. Now that may entail some business opportunities, but it's not that simple. For example most industrial applications can't easily be turned on or off as the wind blows and the sun shines.
WalterBright 6y ago
This sounds like consumer electric rates are fixed 24/7. Fixed prices always lead to gluts and shortages. Having prices vary minute by minute depending on supply will create powerful incentives for users to shift their demand. As I've written here many times, there are many many ways people can shift their demand. Such as running the hot water heater only when electricity is cheap. Charging your electric car battery only when cheap. Etc.
vijayr02 6y ago
A really good view onto Great Britain's electricity grid is here: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ or alternatively a more old school view, with analog dials!: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Today for example renewables have been >50% of total generation. And I've seen sometimes for as long as a week it's not broken 10-15%. Very interested as to how the grid maintains excess capacity to make up for low wind generation...
deleted 6y ago
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yodelshady 6y ago
If the flaw with nuclear is that private investors won't bite unless there's a very predictable return (£90/MWh, apparently), the flaw with wind is that private investors won't cover the (at least one) order of magnitude of excess capacity needed to meet a cold snap. Having to pay wind producers to power off seems like we've combined the operational flaws of both - admittedly, at a much lower price point and without the waste/accident issues.
ocschwar 6y ago
Negative electricity prices are not inherently a problem. They can mean a nuclear plant paying a wind farm to curtail production so that it can ramp its own production slowly, but there is nothing inherently bad about that. And they are a huge opportunity for every electricity user who can time-shift consumption: every refrigeration device, every thermal device, battery chargers, data center UPS banks, you name it.
moonbug 6y ago
Use it to make methane, store, burn later in existing ccgts. Carbon neutral.

eldaisfish 6y ago

spot on. Every time this comes up, it's the same BS. The actual figure for the UK grid (there is no separate Scotland grid) is just over 40% of net electrical energy demand supplied by renewable sources. If Scotland was severed from the grid it would require fossil fuels and nuclear just like the rest of the UK. The 97% figure is arrived at by taking British renewable energy that happens to be in Scotland and subtracting that against Scottish energy use. This is in no way accurate and ignores time - there are many periods of time where Scotland's wind turbines aren't spinning and the region is drawing power from the rest of the UK grid.

AdmiralGinge 6y ago
This is something that never seems to come up in discussions on Scottish independence interestingly enough. I guess it'd be like Ireland and Northern Ireland where both jurisdictions use a common electricity market, unless politicians on either side throw their toys out of the pram which is highly likely in my opinion.
batpangolin 6y ago
I don't see the problem with this number. Scotland (seen as a separate energy economy) sometimes exports energy to England and Wales, sometimes imports it. Scotland's production of renewable energy, considered in total MWh, represents 97% of its consumption of all electrical energy. Clearly, in dollar value, the number is smaller since they usually export at times of low prices and import at times of higher prices. That isn't the comparison that's being made.
- eldaisfish 6y ago
  Electrical energy is always in balance. Saying that 97% of Scotland's electrical energy needs were met by renewables is highly misleading because it ignores the most important piece of context - time. Scotland could have generated 300% of daily energy demand from wind one some days. And zero on others. The reality is that one cannot be subtracted from the other to claim that net consumption is zero precisely because there is a time when that is not true. Electrical energy is not like balance of trade i.e. it is not fungible. There is a further complication here - the assumption that there is a ready sink of generated energy. If that stops being the case, then suddenly those days of 300% demand being generated are no longer possible. The headline is a mischaracterisation and is misleading.
  - batpangolin 6y ago
    The claim that 'one can be subtracted from the other' is a straw man. The words 'Equivalent of 97%' are right there in the headline.

bjelkeman-again 6y ago

I think the solution is keep building those continental grid connections. Norway can with its substantial hydro work as a battery, for example. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-looming-energy-sector-builds-new-links-europe https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/18/brexit-loom...

aclelland 6y ago

Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an uphill fight with locales/environmentalists. Sometimes I wonder if it would make more sense for individual properties to have their own powerwall type devices to soak up the oversupply during those windy days but in reality the cost of getting one installed is so high that I can't imagine enough people ever doing it, let alone the organization and co-ordination that would be needed from the energy companies.

IAmEveryone 6y ago
Electric cars are perfect for this. Connect them to the grid and the internet, and they’ll charge but also feed back as needed.
- eldaisfish 6y ago
  Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still. Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to the grid at all times and neither will all their stored energy be usable. Batteries aren't the silver bullet many imaging them to be. The real solution is expanding transmission capacity, building more renewables and supplementing that by nuclear or hydro.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    For the comparison, average nuclear power plant produces 1000MW around the clock. The goal of Australia batteries was to normalize short production/consumption fluctuations, not as general universal battery storage to deal with renewable uneven production.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If only there was a ready trading partner nearby. Maybe Canada needs power.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"Maybe Canada needs power." Maybe mars needs power, but neither of them is going to get any of it from britain. Laws of physics take precedence over 'free trade'
- detritus 6y ago
  I think OP was being quite dry with those two last lines. At least, that's what I upvoted them for.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  This was a joke about the UK not getting a good brexit deal and instead trying to get a deal like Canada, and therefore not being able to sell its excess electricity to somewhere closer, like the EU.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Exactly. The "super canada" concept. Anyone who thinks Canada is in any way comparable to Europe as a UK trading partner doesn't know much about geography. Maybe if Britain hadn't had a hissy fit they could now be selling that extra power across the channel.
    - JetSetWilly 6y ago
      Well I believe the UK and EU are working on the agreements necessary for cross border trading of electricity: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electricity-with-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electrici... There's no reason to believe that something won't be worked out in time. So if by "hissy fit" you mean the people of the UK looked at the pros and cons of EU membership and narrowly decided that the cons can be lived with then.. yeah sure.

realreality 6y ago

If the UK commits to their plan to convert everyone to heat pumps and electric cars, that'll take care of any excess renewable capacity. In fact, they'll be in an impossibly large energy deficit...

mytailorisrich 6y ago

One thing to also keep in mind is that it is forecast that the UK's electricity production needs to increase by 70% by 2050 just to meet demand from electric vehicles. It is said to be equivalent to 6 extra nuclear plants. [1] As the government announced that sales of new ICE vehicles will be banned in only 9 years and most car manufacturers start unveiling their EV range in earnest I think we're going to see the shift to EV happen this decade. If so extra electricity production needs to happen now. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk-electric-vehicles-need https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-much-power-will-uk...

IAmEveryone 6y ago

What’s with the quotes around “exported”? Excess power is exported, which happens to be one way to manage it, reducing the need for storage.

martinald 6y ago
Because Scotland isn't its own grid, it's on the UK national grid, it was to differentiate that from HVDC export.
- Mvandenbergh 6y ago
  Nitpick: it's the GB national grid, Ireland has an all-island grid which is separate.

pojzon 6y ago

Serious question, why not simply stop generating energy by wind istead of stopping nuclear stallar ? You „can” stop generating power using wind. Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.

martinald 6y ago
Of course, but the government has commited prices (>£100/MWh) for wind. You have to pay them at least that to compensate, otherwise they won't stop producing. Which is going to get extremely expensive quickly.
- deleted 6y ago
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bluGill 6y ago
You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all. An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year how much they will make and so for the investors it works out. For the utility they need more green energy in the mix, and so they are willing to sign the contract even though sometimes they will buy electricity and they pay someone to take it on the spot market. They also know how much wind they expect to get, and so those times wind is negative are made up by times that wind is blowing when they would otherwise have to buy much more expensive peak plant power. So for the utility over the course of the year the wind power is profitable even though at some moments it is unprofitable. The problem is in the above separation the windmill owner is paid for all power produced, and so if they shut down there is no money for them. (or they have to agree with the utility on a fair payment)
- pojzon 6y ago
  This sounds like the issue railways had in UK 100 years ago. Solution was to nationalize the infrastructure. If the nation would own the wind-farms and nuclear plants, both can be managed to the benefit pf the nation. If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.

megaman821 6y ago

There are other useful things you could do with excess energy and seawater. Either a desalination plant or a hydrogen plant. If the energy price is 0 those could operate economically.

pydry 6y ago

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust. Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.

londons_explore 6y ago
Sadly these 'negative' prices aren't available to regular people. Only a select few who can trade on the spot market can use them. If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.
- rolivercoffee 6y ago
  This is starting to happen: https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ I imaging more suppliers will start offering this soon. (I'm not in anyway associated with Octopus btw, just interested in this sort of thing)
- bluecookeh93 6y ago
  Octopus Agile makes them available to regular consumers. Last summer people regularly got paid to charge their electric cars during the night!
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Here in Texas a lot of people could get access to spot prices and it didn't work out as well as they'd hoped.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Most people have too much depend that is fixed for spot prices to make sense. If you have two meters putting one on spot might make sense - but that only works if there is something is stopping you from changing what meter is active.

Reason077 6y ago

> "There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices" I'm not sure if you can call it a crisis. A problem, yes, but one that will sort itself out over time. Negative prices are a huge incentive to any form of flexible demand. And by 2030 there will be millions of electric vehicles on UK roads, representing hundreds of GWh of flexible storage. Free fuel by charging at the right time, handled automatically by your smart charger / app? Or even paid to charge? That's a pretty powerful incentive to soak up excess supply. > "And we are still going need masses of gas backup" We already have masses of gas backup. But it will become less important in the future as more diversity in renewables, more interconnections, more storage, more nuclear, etc, come online. We'll still need gas for the foreseeable future, but the less it is used, the better.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

The difference in price, and negative prices, can make things like generating hydrogen or other energy storage more economic.

circlefavshape 6y ago

Better batteries may not be the answer. Possible other options - electrolysis of seawater https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589299120300537 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912... - scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere directly https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-method-converts-CO2-graphite/97/i9 https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-meth... Neither of these is energy-efficient, but if the energy is negatively priced they don't need to be

lkbm 6y ago
These tend to be capital-intensive, though. The big problem with most of our solutions is that you spending $50MM on a hydrogen plant and then leaving it idle half the time costs you $25MM amortized over the lifetime of the plant, so you need to be saving that much on your power bill. It's likely more economical for you to just run it on full all the time, regardless of the hourly energy prices. We do this some with aluminum smelting, but it's not as free as it initially appears. You need a high energy usage to capital cost ratio for it to be economical. (Ideally, you'd also be able to ramp up and down somewhat quickly as-needed. IIRC, there's a big aluminum plant in Germany that can do this, but it's unusual.)

codeulike 6y ago

Instead of paying wind producers to stop, take the excess electricity and use it for bitcoin mining, then use the bitcoin to buy electricity when there's not enough. (I'm joking, I think, but maybe this would actually work)

lkramer 6y ago

The next step is to massively ramp up Power to X where excess electricity gets converted into more tangible products, such as ship/aircraft fuel, or put into storage.

seanalltogether 6y ago

> So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack. Ireland is a good example of this. One of the reasons that Ireland has not been able to increase wind farms is because they don't have the ability to export it rapidly. The last time the interconnect with GB was cut, they had to shut down a bunch of wind farms. There was big news a while ago about building a new interconnect to France which should allow for more wind farms in Ireland while relying on french "nuclear batteries"

codeulike 6y ago

Negative energy prices shouldn't really be a crisis, but what you're saying is, the way the whole grid works is changing due to the way that renewable energy is variable whereas traditional energy generation is constant. So this is just about "Change", and Change is awkard in the short term but can be handled in the medium term. Maybe we need new types of fossil power station that can be turned on and off faster. Maybe we need more intra-grid trading. Maybe we need more storage, or maybe we need more 'useful' things that use a lot of electricity that can be turned on to use the excess (seawater desalination, etc). The contracts with the wind producers will also need to change over time, obviously. The problem here is not negative electricity prices - those are the opposite of a problem. The problem is the grid needs to re-adapt.

jliptzin 6y ago

You have to be really unimaginative to consider a surplus of renewable energy a crisis.

ryathal 6y ago
Everything exists in a Goldilocks Zone, too much power can be just as bad or worse than too little power. It's far more likely that the excess power causes damage or other negative results than anything good coming from it.

belorn 6y ago

It not only misleading, it is intentionally mixing of fungeable and non-fungeable goods in order to turn something obvious dirty as being clean. If Scotland exports of wool exceeded the amount of imported cotton, then we can pretend that the cotton import never existed. Cotton and wool is pretty interchangeable as textile fibers. This then allow us to purchase cotton that is produce by child labor, because the cotton didn't actually exist because look, wool production exceeds the demand for textile fiber. It pure silliness. If a country buy energy produced from fossil fuel then that country is responsible for the pollution. No amount of exporting clean energy will erase the pollution. Its there, it is being generated, and the customer who pays for it has a distinct responsibility.

kwhitefoot 6y ago
So the producer of the pollution gets off scot free? Or are you going to count the pollution twice?
- belorn 6y ago
  I would rather count pollution twice than zero, but in the example of abusive labor, we definitively do count it twice. Companies should be called out if they buy products produced by forced labor camps, child labor, and conflict diamonds, and sweatshops. At the same time, the companies that actually do the forced labor or employ people under abusive conditions are very much also guilty.

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

PWRs actually can ramp their power up or down and the French run a number of theirs in this mode. I don't think AGRs can in quite the same way since thermal stresses on the graphite need to be avoided. Economically, it's not clear that economically you'd want to run PWRs this way though since FuelEx is only a small part of the LCOE of a nuclear plant.

aardvark179 6y ago

Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.

qayxc 6y ago
France has different problems, though. Nuclear power stations need to shut down in summer when temperatures get too high and cooling is insufficient (this is done mostly to avoid killing plants and fish in the rivers). Whenever there's a maintenance or refuelling operation, comparatively large amounts of power generation goes offline for weeks. While this can be dealt with through careful planning, the elephant in the room for France is the age of their nuclear reactors. The vast majority or reactors is 40 years old or reaches the end of their design-life within this decade. Even with ten year extensions, about more than half of all French reactors will have reached EOL by 2035. At the same time there's only a single new reactor under construction right now. Given that it takes about a decade for a nuclear reactor to go from start of construction to commercial operation, France should really start building about a dozen new reactors within the next 5 years...

cbmuser 6y ago

> You can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas. You actually can. All remaining six German nuclear power plants can operate in load-following mode and vary their output power by 10%-20% within minutes. It just makes no sense to reduce the power on nuclear plants as they don’t emit any CO2 and you don‘t save much Uranium when you reduce power.

hristov 6y ago

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices. There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power. So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power. Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly. Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.

ThomPete 6y ago
As long as the powersource isn't reliable it's a problem. A problem that doesn't have any solutions in sight that are closer than something like fusion which would be the preferable solution rather than unreliables like wind and solar.
- Reason077 6y ago
  > "something like fusion which would be the preferable solution" The preferable solutions are ones that actually exist.

pjc50 6y ago

> increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices To be specific, from https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pricing-more-than-double-in-2020-across-europe https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/instances-of-negative-pr... "Great Britain saw 80 hours of negative pricing in the first nine months of 2020": nine months is 6570 hours. So about 1.2% of the time.

krona 6y ago

I assumed the UK's very ambitious hydrogen strategy was in part to address these issues?

mpweiher 6y ago

> crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices Yes. And this is often touted as "renewable now cheaper than..." But those decreasing prices are not actually a sign that renewable energy is cheaper to produce, but that it is actually useless and thus worthless at certain times. Now that may entail some business opportunities, but it's not that simple. For example most industrial applications can't easily be turned on or off as the wind blows and the sun shines.

WalterBright 6y ago

This sounds like consumer electric rates are fixed 24/7. Fixed prices always lead to gluts and shortages. Having prices vary minute by minute depending on supply will create powerful incentives for users to shift their demand. As I've written here many times, there are many many ways people can shift their demand. Such as running the hot water heater only when electricity is cheap. Charging your electric car battery only when cheap. Etc.

vijayr02 6y ago

A really good view onto Great Britain's electricity grid is here: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ or alternatively a more old school view, with analog dials!: https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ Today for example renewables have been >50% of total generation. And I've seen sometimes for as long as a week it's not broken 10-15%. Very interested as to how the grid maintains excess capacity to make up for low wind generation...

deleted 6y ago

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yodelshady 6y ago

If the flaw with nuclear is that private investors won't bite unless there's a very predictable return (£90/MWh, apparently), the flaw with wind is that private investors won't cover the (at least one) order of magnitude of excess capacity needed to meet a cold snap. Having to pay wind producers to power off seems like we've combined the operational flaws of both - admittedly, at a much lower price point and without the waste/accident issues.

ocschwar 6y ago

Negative electricity prices are not inherently a problem. They can mean a nuclear plant paying a wind farm to curtail production so that it can ramp its own production slowly, but there is nothing inherently bad about that. And they are a huge opportunity for every electricity user who can time-shift consumption: every refrigeration device, every thermal device, battery chargers, data center UPS banks, you name it.

moonbug 6y ago

Use it to make methane, store, burn later in existing ccgts. Carbon neutral.