23 ms·

The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

441 points by RobinL 4y ago

nerdbert 4y ago
I don't live in the UK nor work anywhere near the energy sector, and yet I found this a really fascinating, clear read that opened my eyes to many issues I'd never considered before. Thanks.
nateguchi 4y ago
One thing that I find hard to understand is how the electricity prices in the UK have gone up so dramatically (blaming gas prices) when a large amount of the electricity is not generated from gas. Is the price being artificially inflated?
- anamexis 4y ago
  I would imagine that as gas prices shoot up, demand dramatically increases for electricity.
- foota 4y ago
  A couple possibilities. It could be competition from other countries with a different mix (e.g., the price in the UK has to compete with other countries or it'd be exported to the degree possible) Power is also sold (ok, not sure about the UK) at the market price. So the most expensive generation needed to meet demand determines the market price. So even if gas is a small portion of the generation it could still determine the price.
- cjcartlidge 4y ago
  The price of electricity in the UK is linked to the most costly supply in the entire mix. So if gas is the most expensive then we pay all other power-producing suppliers, regardless of means of generating, the wholesale price we'd pay for gas. It's a strange system.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    It makes sense to extract honest bids. The lower you bid, the more likely you are to be paid. So in the long term, it leads to cheaper prices. If for example you had a cheap source of gas when others put their price up, it would reward you making that info public. Short term global fuel price spikes are a weak point, though.
- archydeb 4y ago
  Author of the article here Electricity prices in the UK (and most other places) are set by the marginal unit, which is the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. All other generation for that time period gets paid the same price. The marginal unit in the UK is usually gas, hence the sensitivity to gas prices
  - ta545 4y ago
    My understanding is most wind was bought at a guarenteed price by the government at the time of construction, so a wind farm producing 1MWh gets paid say £40 regardless of the cost of electricity on the grid - even if marginal cost was £20/MWh As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?
    - RobinL 4y ago
      See here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      The government. The mechanism is called Contracts for Difference, and as the name implies they work by ensuring the difference between an agreed strike price and the actual price - in either direction is paid However, notice two further considerations: 1. Such contracts eventually expire. Exactly when varies. But the wind farm is still there, just now the energy price all goes to the operator. 2. Older government subsidies were not CfD. Ten years ago if you built a wind farm you got a direct subsidy. The CfD schemes come into existence from about 2014. They're one of a small number of good ideas the Tories had. They're in line with Tory ideology, but they also actually make sense in the world that actually exists.
      - youngtaff 4y ago
        Even suppliers who sign CFDs can delay the start of the contract - Orsted are doing this for one of their recently commissioned wind farms
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The whole system as detailed in the article seems pretty artificial and not great. For some reason prices appear to be set at the national level, ignoring the fact that Scotland has an excess of wind energy. If consumers could see that the price difference on their end, I guess there’d be more incentive to upgrade the infrastructure and get it down to England more efficiently.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    If gas is setting the price as the most expensive form of energy, then it acts as an incentive to build cheaper forms of energy because your margins are that much higher. Alas, England doesn't allow on-shore wind power, and there's not sufficient capacity (in terms of HVDC lines) to transfer enough power from Scotland down to England to move all of the excess energy.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      That seems like a good way to spur early development. I wonder, though — if consumers could actually see the cost benefit of the wind power, might gas have been just priced out of the system by now? (Or relegated to some backup status). (Supposing the transmission infrastructure were upgraded to allow for the higher flow, or England changed its laws to be more in line with economic realities).
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  The marginal price of electricity (i.e. the price of the most expensive source) is what drives the retail cost, because it's a liquid commodity that can't (to a first approximation) be stored. Imagine 90% of your electricity comes from wind and the last 10% has from gas because there is nothing else - the price of electricity is going to equal the price of gas because the wind providers can raise prices until they're just under the price of gas, since there are no other options. The most expensive form of electricity sets the price until it isn't needed anymore and is booted off the grid entirely, but once you cover that last 10% with wind then the price falls dramatically. In theory this is what we want: the windfall profits on cheap power during periods of expensive energy are supposed to attract the market to build more of these plants and chase those profits, thereby accelerating the green transition. But it's possible what we saw last year was too much, and that the damage to the economy (nothing strangles economic growth like expensive energy) does more harm than this incentive does good. People are talking about renegotiating power agreements in Europe to pay fixed prices for renewables so this wouldn't happen again, but I haven't heard how likely this is to succeed.
  - grey-area 4y ago
    Sounds like a dysfunctional market that would be better nationalised and run for the public good.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  You can't base your electricity prices solely or even mostly on an unpredictable source of generation, which is nearly absent one day and generates more power than is needed on another day. Efficient storage is a long-term fix for this, but it ain't here. Natural gas is the most flexible source of on-demand power, so it (disproportionately even to its share of 1/3rd of all generated power) affects consumer electricity rates.
- simongray 4y ago
  The way it works in the EU—not sure if the UK participates in this market still?— is that every energy source is priced according to the most expensive energy source until demand is covered by supply. So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
- walthamstow 4y ago
  Funnily enough the price the consumer pays right now is much lower than the price of energy because of badly thought out government subsidies I am in the 95th percentile for income (though not wealth) in the UK and here's my energy bill for December: Daily grid charges £20 Energy used @ market price £315 Truss govt unit price subsidy -£98 Johnson govt flat subsidy -£67 Total bill before VAT £170
- RobinL 4y ago
  It's quite complicated, but there's a good explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 (I recently asked the same question!)
- balderdash 4y ago
  No, first understand the concept of market clearing auctions[1], then understand that the there is a dispatch stack (that looks like something like this [2]), and that gas plants are the marginal producer required to balance the market, as they are not baseload (nukes) and not intermittent (renewables) but are dispatchable (ramp up/down capacity as need to balance the market). [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912045570/g153251bci061.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  There's a couple reasons. A small amount of electricity may be generated from gas, but that small amount is often crucial and in a lot of demand. Furthermore, peaker plants will produce less and less electricity as more renewables reduced their duty cycle. But the overhead cost of maintenance remains: reducing a gas plant from running 10 hours a day to 2 hours a day does not result in a 5x reduction of cost.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Curtailment, like negative prices, seems like something that it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about. Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment. Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
- benj111 4y ago
  But that presupposes we can actually supply enough electricity to where it's needed. We already hitting the limits, thus the curtailment and burning gas. Adding more capacity unless it's in the right place doesn't solve the issue.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    The example given was christmas day, when most industry stops, when the wind was blowing strongly. (UK heat is mostly gas, not electric). It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that. Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days. It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly. Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
    - ta545 4y ago
      At some point there will be more bang for buck to increase the north/south capacity. The price they're talking seems to be very low compared with other infrastructure. Sure it takes 6 years to build two 2GW links, so build 4 or 6 in parallel. What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.
pleb_nz 4y ago
So does NZ.... Man this place blows especially in Canterbury where I am. Nearly every single day it's windy enough that it annoys and sometimes ruins being outside. I must say 3 to 4 times a week 'f** this windy hole' to someone. Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  The reason that all or almost all of the power you use is renewable. Adding more renewable generation in the South Island won't help the coal generation in the North Island. Right now, investment in infrastructure needs to be made to move power from Manapōuri to the North Island. As to why we are not replacing the 1.8m tons of coal we import from as far away as Indonesia with wind or solar in the North Island? I don't know. Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal. There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south. https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data/consolidated-live-data https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and...
  - ta545 4y ago
    It looks like there's just one HVDC interaliand link capable of sending 1.2GW, and dating back to 1964. Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island. 10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-per-capacity-and-length-for-HVDC-options-The-cost-of-two_fig7_284359690 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
    - morepork 4y ago
      The current HVDC link has had a lot of upgrades from the original 600MW to 1200MW now, and there are proposals to upgrade it further, but not nearly to the scale you suggest, as there just isn't the need for such levels of transmission. Unless there were plans for major new hydro schemes in the South Island there's no particular reason not to just build new generation in the North. There is ample wind and geothermal in the North Island. This would all change if the Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter were to close as that would leave a huge amount of generation that would need to go north to be used.
mariambarouma 4y ago
this is a remarkable achievement in itself. Years ago, renewables opponents kept making baseless claims that no grid would be stable with large amounts of renewables. It's now end of 2022 and for this year we've seen on multiple occasions power grids running perfectly fine on very large amounts of renewables with very little gas. Success, I guess.
- mikaeluman 4y ago
  Did you look at the situation in Germany? The foremost country on renewables... And brown coal.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Ok so what’s the difference ?
    - mikaeluman 4y ago
      Doesn't seem to be a difference. UK just has better access to gas, for now I presume. Without a baseload power source a modern economy just can't function. That is why intermittent sources like wind and solar must be a minority of the energy supply. In Germany they don't have access to hydro and have chosen to dispense with their nuclear capacity. That leaves gas. Without Russia that is becoming hard and expensive. That leaves coal. Germany had enormous deposits of coal.
xiphias2 4y ago
One more thing that can be used for soaking up rarely generated free energy are cheap old inefficient Bitcoin miners. There are many places already using it for this. Bringing Bitcoin miners to a place at this point is just shipping a container.
- socks 4y ago
  This sounds great, but in reality, this concept is also a curse. Moving Bitcoin miners is much easier than building transmission lines - potentially discouraging funding for the infrastructure needed to move the energy where it is more useful. I remember reading of BTC mining companies moving their infrastructure right next door to remote coal fired power plants, getting extremely cheap rates, which otherwise might have been completely decommissioned due to transmission costs.
  - TheDudeMan 4y ago
    Carbon tax fixes this.
    - socks 4y ago
      I don't believe it does. The same phenomenon can occur with a renewable energy source. Remote renewable energy source (solar, hydro etc), not grid connected, could attract the same sort of Bitcoin mining system and even claim to be 'green' - when in fact they are reducing the commercial attractiveness of building the infrastructure to move the energy to the grid, so it might be a net-negative environmental benefit (or at best, negligible, assuming that the mining equipment was originally connected to a dirty grid, rather than new equipment) (and would not be subject to carbon tax).
      - TheDudeMan 4y ago
        > they are reducing the commercial attractiveness of building the infrastructure A company will do whatever is most profitable (build transmission or build generation). Which is fine, given the bad things (e.g. coal) were taxed out of profitability.
davedx 4y ago
I know quite a bit about most of the things discussed in the article from having worked for a renewables company and yet I learned quite some new bits I didn’t know about, for example the intra-UK submarine HVDC connectors (and their eye watering cost). Not a very long article but packed with clearly written and valuable information. Great stuff
- vardump 4y ago
  We need to figure out how to reduce long distance power transfer. Imagine a global power distribution network, the entire world could be 100% solar & wind. Perhaps one day...
  - Atheros 4y ago
    Imagine someone invents low cost high temperature superconductors which enable fusion reactors, to much fanfare. Until everyone slowly realizes that we can use those same conductors to balance low cost electricity globally for less money.
  - Dma54rhs 4y ago
    Not going to happen for geopolitical reasons ever, unless we have a one king for the whole planet.
    - Atheros 4y ago
      Why couldn't countries just keep dirty coal generators and coal delivery infrastructure mothballed such that if power delivery from the other country is cut, just spin up the coal plants for a while until it gets sorted out. The cost of all of that may be less than the cost savings of importing electricity from a far-away country.
  - davedx 4y ago
    For sure. This will be very cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link Edit: would have been. Looks like they lost funding. :(
londons_explore 4y ago
If the UK were ruled, and all decisions made, by a benevolent dictator, then the solution to this problem is easy. Consider every option of where to build the wind turbines, and where to build power cables, add up the cost of every option, and choose the cheapest (environmentally and/or monetarily) that gives everyone the power they need. An ideal market would produce the exact same result right? Well not quite... And this is a classic example. With the current policy of location-independent markets, wind producers build in the best spots, and don't care about the massive expense (to the grid operator) of moving the power south. That isn't the ideal solution. With the new proposed policy of per-location markets, the grid operator 'makes money' by moving power from places of high generation (low prices) to places with high demand (high prices). But wait... That isn't the ideal solution either. The grid operator has an incentive to maximize their own profits, and if they ship too much power from north to south, then the price difference will be lowered, and their profits will decrease. So they will underbuild deliberately. But wait you say - this is an ideal market, so there is no monopoly grid operator. In this ideal market, there are many grid operators, each competing to move power from the north to the south, and if one operator deliberately underbuilds, then another will build more to capture that profit. The end result is cables will keep being added till the money to be made equals the cost of the cables... And that is equal to the ideal benevolent dictator solution! But... That assumes a cable costs a certain £ amount per MWH transferred. But real cables have efficiencies of scale - one large cable is more money efficient than many competing small cables. And considering that, you're back to the single-cable-operator problem. In the market, they are a monopoly and will underbuild. If they aren't a monopoly, whoever has the biggest cable takes all the profit, and becomes a monopoly. And if you artificially force there to be 10 small companies competing, then there will be 10 small money-inefficient cables. There is no perfect answer, except a (non existent) benevolent dictator!
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  You really don't see any middle ground here? I feel like a rationally and centrally planned infrastructure not based on market incentives is not that hard to imagine, whatever your political beliefs are, why resort to some kind of philosophical thought experiment of the dictator?
Zamicol 4y ago
TL;DR: "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" because of high long distance transmission costs.
- singhrac 4y ago
  That's not an entire summary, I think. The lack of local (or nodal, as it's often called in the US) pricing means that there's comparatively little incentive to build new transmission. The UK is not a large country, and we routinely build much larger transmission lines (if I'm not mistaken, the UK is the geographic size of Texas, where the exact same problem is being solved effectively).
  - Zamicol 4y ago
    My comment was somewhat of a critic of the terse headline. Adding a small amount of information to the cryptic headline removes a lot of perceived mystery. Your statement answers the question, "why is long distance transmission price high?"
bhewes 4y ago
The UK grid needs spot instance pricing like the cloud.
jayelbe 4y ago
A very interesting and well-written article. I'd love to subscribe and see what else the author has, but oddly their blog has no RSS feed. Oh well!
- archydeb 4y ago
  Sorry about that! I gave up on RSS with the death of Google Reader. A Twitter follow is your best bet :)
ed25519FUUU 4y ago
California is facing a similar issue dealing with its solar duck curve[1], where prices essentially go negative during periods of peak solar generation. As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap. 1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-how-address-over-generation-solar-energy https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
- sh1mmer 4y ago
  If only there were some actually useful use of excessive energy that weren’t mining bitcoin.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    One example is producing hydrogen from water with excess power. It can then be added to the natural gas network, or used by trucks or trains, or stored for a power plant. Orkney is trialling this.
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    Charging cars, heating water in a well insulated tank
    - cwalv 4y ago
      It's great when we can use off peak energy for things like this, but they're not as easy to locate onsite as bitcoin miners .. and difficulty with transmission is a big part of the problem
      - youngtaff 4y ago
        Electric cars have utility as we can use them to transport us from one place to another. Bitcoin on the other hand is just a waste of energy
deleted 4y ago
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dclowd9901 4y ago
I have a tangential question (and I truly do not mean to be provocative with it, just curious): Has anyone put any effort into figuring out how much impact we have on air movement in general with windmills? Like, is there a scenario where we could negatively impact the environment by capturing "too much wind"?
- grey-area 4y ago
  This is an interesting study in that topic, I would have thought the answer is no to your question, but possibly a very large wind farm could change wind velocity/temp and thus have a knock on effect. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101
fiftyacorn 4y ago
I was hearing one of the things they are doing is pumping water up the hills at hyrdo powerstation's to reuse at peak periods
- seb1204 4y ago
  Yes this is what is commonly referred to as pumped hydro or often only hydro
jl6 4y ago
That 70% energy loss in round trip conversion to hydrogen doesn’t look so bad if the alternative is 100% loss by not running the turbines.
- epistasis 4y ago
  That really depends on the capex of the hydrogen equipment. It has to be extremely low to justify not curtailing.
  - jl6 4y ago
    True. I suspect that grid-scale electrolysis is near the very bottom of the economies-of-scale-S-curve and will have a promising future not just in power2gas2power, but also in producing the green hydrogen inputs needed for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for hard-to-electrify applications like aviation.
  - kokanee 4y ago
    Technically it depends on the levelized cost of hydrogen, which encompasses capex, opex, and a slew of other relevant inputs. Similar "levelized cost" formulas are used throughout the utility sector to make these kinds of decisions; what makes green hydrogen unique is simply that it is undergoing a spike in research and development right now that is drastically changing some of the inputs to the LCOH equation. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46267.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46267.pdf
    - epistasis 4y ago
      This are good models for roughly continual usage of the equipment, but they don't model the use cases of operating capacity factors less than 60% for electrolysis, and it's likely that the capacity factor of electrolysis equipment powered by excess wind would be <10%. At that point, the capex beings to dominate nearly all other factors. I in fact used to be somewhat optimistic about hydrogen as a long term storage mechanism for our excess renewables, until I saw models like these from NREL. Now I am extremely skeptical of any hydrogen from electrolysis unless it's from something like solar+storage facilities. (Which are actually being proposed now, which is very exciting!)
londons_explore 4y ago
So why are these undersea cables so expensive? Lets do a little Math... A cable that moves 4GW of electricity 450 km is say +-1 million volts and 2000 amps. Assuming we want no more than 3% losses in the cable at full load, then each conductor needs to be 40mm diameter aluminium, at a total material cost of $3.6M To insulate a 1 million volt cable, we need 100mm of PVC - total cost $60M. And we'll obviously need a few mm of steel + more PVC on the outside for protection from the environment. And now add in the manufacturing cost, and the cost to get it into place...
- zabzonk 4y ago
  and the need for two of them in parallel to make them redundant from trawler and similar damages.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    HVDC cables are typically built in pairs - the positive one and the negative one. They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both. But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing. But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  and the control hardware. The things that stepup/down are not cheap.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    They're cheap if you buy them from China. China is world leading on this stuff, and has built tens of similar lines in recent years. However, I'm sure 'national security' will require the equipment be procured from a western world supplier with no expertise.
iamkoch 4y ago
[flagged]
fencepost 4y ago
I think one of the most important elements is buried - electricity pricing is uniform across the entire UK. That seems nuts to me, and incentivizes building in locations that are less useful - it's likely cheaper to build in Scotland, higher production from more wind, you get paid more (for expected yield plus curtailment apparently), and you have less wear on the equipment when you adjust to lower output.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Is the UK not a unified grid? Most of the US is. A kwh is a kwh.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    england and wales are run by national grid, who also have a huge us operation - scottish operations a bit less clear
    - scrlk 4y ago
      National Grid ESO are the system operator for the GB grid. National Grid Electricity Transmission operate the transmission network in England and Wales. The transmission network in the south of Scotland is operated by SP Transmission; in the north of Scotland, it's SSEN Transmission.
  - toast0 4y ago
    The US runs three major grids: East, West, and Texas. There's interconnections, but capacity is limited. Sounds like the UK is similar here with the bottleneck between Scotland and southern England. Within the US grids, there's really subgrids with interconnection and bottlenecks, too, but those interior bottlenecks aren't brought up as often as say overnight wind production in Texas being over local demand as well as interconnect capacity.
  - timerol 4y ago
    Even in the parts of the US that are unified grids, a kWh is not a kWh. Where you live determines how expensive your electricity is. Compare Cambridge, MA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/02139/ https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/02139/ with Philadelphia, PA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/19101/ https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/19101/. About twice as expensive in MA.
user568439 4y ago
Seems like factoring the location is the easiest solution. If energy were much cheaper in Scotland, some factories would move there, more people would move there as well and you would not need to transport so much energy across the country. But I guess there are more things to consider than the energy in that decision.
- pornel 4y ago
  I'd also love to have real-time pricing as an option on the consumption side. It's so dumb that we have "smart" fridges that can tweet, but not smart to avoid their energy use during peak hours. It's a thermal battery!
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Get Octopus Agile [1] and you can query their REST API [2] to find the energy prices. Then you could control your fridge via a smart switch. 1. https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ 2. https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/ https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/
mikaeluman 4y ago
The UK seems to have a very interesting situation. We also have a proposal for curtailment in Sweden for wind power producers, but for a different reason. In the UK, curtailment seems needed due to power transfer capacity issues. In Sweden it is purely due to grid stability reasons. As wind does not work as a baseload power source this becomes problematic as too much wind power generation can then negatively affect profitability for nuclear and hydro which are baseload power sources. I would be interested to see how stable wind power production is across all hours and throughout the year in the UK. I imagine it's better than here, but is it good enough to support an industrial nation?
- tupac_speedrap 4y ago
  https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
  - mikaeluman 4y ago
    Thanks. Then it's essentially the same situation. I imagined UK might be more fortunate due to being an island. But then wind power can only be part of a mix of energy sources, with a strong supply of baseload power backing it.
kerblang 4y ago
I'll pose the argument that if Texas can, the UK can: https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-project-nears-finish-aiding-wind-po/ https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-proje... And yeah that was a long time ago
chris222 4y ago
Very good article. As far as the options presented I think transmission lines are still the best bet, along with storage. Storage can come in many forms including at a customers residence via batteries or thermal storage. Not all of these options need to be cycled daily to make financial sense. In the U.S. we have an insane number of people that maintain days worth of storage as fuel for their generators only to be used infrequently when the power goes out.
oliwary 4y ago
Here is what I do not understand about these kinds of dynamics: Are they not the perfect way to encourage the creation of energy storage companies and technologies? It seems like there is a massive opportunity to purchase energy when it is cheap or even negatively priced, figure out some way of storing it, and then sell it back once the price is higher. Over time, this could stabilize the grid and encourage development and scale benefits in energy storage. Where are these companies? Are the technologies not yet efficient enough, even when the price of electricity is negative? Or is this technology being deployed already? EDIT: Well turns out this is covered in the article. Hoping there will be more development in this direction in the future!
- aliqot 4y ago
  > figure out some way of storing it My hypothesis is this being the issue.
- Raydovsky 4y ago
  Because storage is hard and expensive. Generating energy is easy (with renewables).
- dx034 4y ago
  6% is not really a lot. I guess batteries can be profitable if you cycle daily. But at 6% curtailment, they would've been used only a few times a year. You'd need really cheap storage for that.
nfcampos 4y ago
This reminded me of https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/mining-for-cryptocurrencies-could-be-the-future-of-energy-storage/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/mining-for-cryptocurr... (I know this isn’t storage, jk)
stuaxo 4y ago
Our system favours England over scotland, with the national grid charging Scotland much more to move energy around. With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...
- ccalloway 4y ago
  That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.
bjourne 4y ago
The North Sea Link is 720 km long and costed only £1.6 billion and took only three years to lay: https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operations-nid24262.html https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operat... So a new 440 km long cable for £3.4 billion done in 2029 seem like a crummy deal.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Yeah. The cost objection seems like learned helplessness. A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008. 1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-potential-2003-2012-the-uk-decade-that-decayed/ https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot... 2. "UK productivity continues lost decade", 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195 3. "The UK is facing two lost decades on living standards", 2022: https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b94c https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...
  - Jochim 4y ago
    The UK conservative party is peak neoliberal. The cabinet is/was largely made up of people that have openly written proposals on how to dismantle national services. Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse. Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I assume that cables aren’t all equal, eg maybe the new one carries more power or is more efficient or the sea floor makes it harder to lay. It could still be a good deal even if the upfront cost is higher. I guess there could also be accounting shenanigans, eg if you pay $x upfront and $y over several years, you could focus on $x if the project seems unpopular and focus on $(x+y) if the project shows a popular serious investment in a government policy. But I’ve no idea about this case.
neilwilson 4y ago
Sounds like a job for the Terraform Industries product from a few days ago https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
adrianmonk 4y ago
> evidence from Texas suggests that windfarms do not end up near population centres even in markets with locational pricing and liberal planning laws The windy part of Texas is not the part where most people live. The western part of the state and the panhandle are windy but also pretty dry. Most of the people live more toward the central or eastern part of the state where it's greener but less windy. Pricing incentives may just not be enough to overcome that.
bsder 4y ago
3 billion pounds (the estimated cost of the HVDC link) seems like it would install a LOT of local storage which would alleviate problems from both the transmission blockage and the bursty nature of wind power. HVDC links are a good thing, but why is storage not the first step?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I notice that the curtailment for today happens to coincide with the lowest demand at 5 in the morning. Their screenshot also has overnight curtailment. It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.
extropy 4y ago
Opportunity to generate cheap hydrogen?
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Covered in the article.
brilee 4y ago
6% curtailment seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. Around 20-25% curtailment, it becomes economical to run those hydrogen electrolyzers part-time, even with the capital expenditures required. I wouldn't use that hydrogen gas to regenerate electricity, though - there are many industries that can directly consume that hydrogen gas and avoid the lossy round-trip from electricity->hydrogen->electricity. I explore this idea further in this blog post: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
- prennert 4y ago
  Does your analysis rely on a localized energy market? Because with curtailment it seems to me that there is no incentive for energy producers to sell energy cheaply to factobatteries, right?
- marmetio 4y ago
  Agree. It's also a given that a renewable grid has to be overbuilt. Current estimates are by about 50%. I don't know what the current target is, but 6% is well below what it will eventually be. The article suggests building more physical infrastructure, but that comes with its own cost and environmental impacts, ironically.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I don’t understand the reason for the triple cost for curtailment. Like it seems the obvious options would be: - pay $x for y joules of wind - pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?
matthewmorgan 4y ago
So the rest of the UK essentially subsidizes the electricity price to South East England, is that correct?
scotty79 4y ago
Why not mine bitcoins? Distributed on demand load for distibuted excessive energy production. You can by prev gen mining equipment dirt cheap.
caf 4y ago
This report on congestion in the Australian NEM is pretty good reading on the concept of electricity network congestion and some of the market mechanisms that have been used to account for it, and some of the ways in which they can result in non-optimal outcomes. It's quite approachable: https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9-bf32-4bf1-bcc4-81dd8095dfc7/Final-Report-Appendix-A-An-introduction-to-congestion-in-the-NEM.PDF https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9...
cjdell 4y ago
Wind in the UK has been doing really well recently and the grid has never been greener: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out. Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables. I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  In the Netherlands they are going to build two new nuclear power plants but the company wants assurance that they don't have to compete with the massive wind mill parks on the North Sea. Not really a new problem for the Netherlands whenever there is a problem the country tends to overreact with massive infrastructure spending. It hasn't been that long that brand new coal power plants had to be closed.
- dx034 4y ago
  Just want to say how great the UX of that page is. I've used many data sources and pages that show power generation, this one is by far the most intuitive one. I wish it existed for more countries.
pmarreck 4y ago
Banning construction of wind farms on all of England is possibly the stupidest governmental decision I've ever heard of. This entire problem would go away if they had just allowed some wind farms.
mhardcastle 4y ago
One has to wonder if the fixed costs of some kind of electricity -> fuel production will ever get cheap enough to solve this problem. If it would pay, it would be great for there to be a factory on stand-by to make, e.g., hydrogen or ethanol using the extra energy.
TedShiller 4y ago
Relevant book written by Sir David MacKay (Cambridge/Caltech professor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/
patientplatypus 4y ago
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bergenbergen 4y ago
if, like me, you’re wondering why curtailment is even necessary, read here: https://news.warrington.ufl.edu/faculty-and-research/what-is-curtailment-an-electricity-market-expert-explains/ https://news.warrington.ufl.edu/faculty-and-research/what-is...
spiritplumber 4y ago
Hire the Penguin and build giant batteries?
liberty-bzmh 4y ago
It would be more surprising when the UK isn't.
danw1979 4y ago
Great article. The fact we can’t just make and throw up a bunch more pylons and cables alongside existing routes, for anything less than £££bn, is just depressing.
cbmuser 4y ago
Yes, that’s one of the main problems with volatile generation. You often don’t get the power when you need it and vice versa. This isn’t news though and the reason why Germany is returning to goal despite of having installed 130 GW of wind and solar generation capacity.
- adrianN 4y ago
  No, the reason Germany is burning more coal is because they stopped importing gas from Russia and supply France with extra electricity while they repair their nuclear reactors. It has literally nothing to do with the volatility of wind power.
mrjin 4y ago
It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity. So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.
- alex_duf 4y ago
  For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account
  - mrjin 4y ago
    Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.
eftychis 4y ago
To the commenters saying that wind farms should move South or blaming wind farms or other energy producers. (My opinion and knowledge follows.) That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures. Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y. My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past. I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power. P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."
- thewarrior 4y ago
  UK has managed to cheap skate on many different fronts. When money was cheap they went on a cost cutting spree for a decade when they should have been using all of that money to invest in services and infrastructure. Now everything is crumbling.
- Wildgoose 4y ago
  Scotland has a different legal system and even historically insisted upon separate versions of otherwise national concerns - for example that is why there is a "National Trust"[1] and a separate "Scottish National Trust". Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament this tendency has only accelerated. [1] A charity that maintains stately homes and other historic artefacts
  - eftychis 4y ago
    Interesting and informative. Thank you!
Moissanite 4y ago
Given the point in the conclusion about planning relaxation not really helping to move future turbines closer to people, it seems that the sensible approach would be to factor any power network upgrades into the cost of wind when looking at TCO and ensure that the generators contribute to it. That, plus a small location-based payment bias plus eventual demand-based payment are all likely to be necessary - if oil/gas prices remain high, it is unrealistic to keep paying the same high cost per MWH to wind farms forever.
karol 4y ago
Haven't seen such mumbo-jumbo for a while. UK has an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation. There is a project to re-forest the north coast to coast. Then these trees can be also burned for energy as biomass. Just look it up.
- Wildgoose 4y ago
  Deforestation is historic, your comment implies it is recent. We know from comprehensive aerial photographs of the UK taken by Germany in the 1930s/40s that the UK has much more forest coverage now than it had then. The UK switched to coal beginning in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth because of the lack of forests providing a source of wood. The current reforestation projects have nothing to do with "an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation". There isn't any recent deforestation - just the opposite in fact.
  - karol 4y ago
    I didn't say it was recent. I said that UK has unfavourable wind patterns because there aren't enough trees.
Quindecillion 4y ago
Negative prices on power i.e. curtailment, is the perfect use case for Bitcoin mining. Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power? May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy. Energy buyer of first and last resort.
- iso1631 4y ago
  Hydrogen electrolysis and increasing interconnects seem a more useful thing to do.
  - Quindecillion 4y ago
    I haven't followed the technology very closely, but it was my understanding that large scale storage of hydrogen isn't here yet, if it ever will be? And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc. It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business. However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight. Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
    - iso1631 4y ago
      > It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business. The core business of national grid plc is massive transmission projects
- 98Windows 4y ago
  Please stop, bitcoin is a waste of electricity, it has no economic value. Its cancerous. Just make hydrogen or some other storable material.
eru 4y ago
It's funny that tiny Singapore is an example of a country with different pricing nodes, instead of uniform pricing for the whole place.

441 points by RobinL 4y ago

I don't live in the UK nor work anywhere near the energy sector, and yet I found this a really fascinating, clear read that opened my eyes to many issues I'd never considered before. Thanks.

nateguchi 4y ago

One thing that I find hard to understand is how the electricity prices in the UK have gone up so dramatically (blaming gas prices) when a large amount of the electricity is not generated from gas. Is the price being artificially inflated?

anamexis 4y ago
I would imagine that as gas prices shoot up, demand dramatically increases for electricity.
foota 4y ago
A couple possibilities. It could be competition from other countries with a different mix (e.g., the price in the UK has to compete with other countries or it'd be exported to the degree possible) Power is also sold (ok, not sure about the UK) at the market price. So the most expensive generation needed to meet demand determines the market price. So even if gas is a small portion of the generation it could still determine the price.
cjcartlidge 4y ago
The price of electricity in the UK is linked to the most costly supply in the entire mix. So if gas is the most expensive then we pay all other power-producing suppliers, regardless of means of generating, the wholesale price we'd pay for gas. It's a strange system.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It makes sense to extract honest bids. The lower you bid, the more likely you are to be paid. So in the long term, it leads to cheaper prices. If for example you had a cheap source of gas when others put their price up, it would reward you making that info public. Short term global fuel price spikes are a weak point, though.
archydeb 4y ago
Author of the article here Electricity prices in the UK (and most other places) are set by the marginal unit, which is the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. All other generation for that time period gets paid the same price. The marginal unit in the UK is usually gas, hence the sensitivity to gas prices
- ta545 4y ago
  My understanding is most wind was bought at a guarenteed price by the government at the time of construction, so a wind farm producing 1MWh gets paid say £40 regardless of the cost of electricity on the grid - even if marginal cost was £20/MWh As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?
  - RobinL 4y ago
    See here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    The government. The mechanism is called Contracts for Difference, and as the name implies they work by ensuring the difference between an agreed strike price and the actual price - in either direction is paid However, notice two further considerations: 1. Such contracts eventually expire. Exactly when varies. But the wind farm is still there, just now the energy price all goes to the operator. 2. Older government subsidies were not CfD. Ten years ago if you built a wind farm you got a direct subsidy. The CfD schemes come into existence from about 2014. They're one of a small number of good ideas the Tories had. They're in line with Tory ideology, but they also actually make sense in the world that actually exists.
    - youngtaff 4y ago
      Even suppliers who sign CFDs can delay the start of the contract - Orsted are doing this for one of their recently commissioned wind farms
bee_rider 4y ago
The whole system as detailed in the article seems pretty artificial and not great. For some reason prices appear to be set at the national level, ignoring the fact that Scotland has an excess of wind energy. If consumers could see that the price difference on their end, I guess there’d be more incentive to upgrade the infrastructure and get it down to England more efficiently.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  If gas is setting the price as the most expensive form of energy, then it acts as an incentive to build cheaper forms of energy because your margins are that much higher. Alas, England doesn't allow on-shore wind power, and there's not sufficient capacity (in terms of HVDC lines) to transfer enough power from Scotland down to England to move all of the excess energy.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    That seems like a good way to spur early development. I wonder, though — if consumers could actually see the cost benefit of the wind power, might gas have been just priced out of the system by now? (Or relegated to some backup status). (Supposing the transmission infrastructure were upgraded to allow for the higher flow, or England changed its laws to be more in line with economic realities).
Analemma_ 4y ago
The marginal price of electricity (i.e. the price of the most expensive source) is what drives the retail cost, because it's a liquid commodity that can't (to a first approximation) be stored. Imagine 90% of your electricity comes from wind and the last 10% has from gas because there is nothing else - the price of electricity is going to equal the price of gas because the wind providers can raise prices until they're just under the price of gas, since there are no other options. The most expensive form of electricity sets the price until it isn't needed anymore and is booted off the grid entirely, but once you cover that last 10% with wind then the price falls dramatically. In theory this is what we want: the windfall profits on cheap power during periods of expensive energy are supposed to attract the market to build more of these plants and chase those profits, thereby accelerating the green transition. But it's possible what we saw last year was too much, and that the damage to the economy (nothing strangles economic growth like expensive energy) does more harm than this incentive does good. People are talking about renegotiating power agreements in Europe to pay fixed prices for renewables so this wouldn't happen again, but I haven't heard how likely this is to succeed.
- grey-area 4y ago
  Sounds like a dysfunctional market that would be better nationalised and run for the public good.
kspacewalk2 4y ago
You can't base your electricity prices solely or even mostly on an unpredictable source of generation, which is nearly absent one day and generates more power than is needed on another day. Efficient storage is a long-term fix for this, but it ain't here. Natural gas is the most flexible source of on-demand power, so it (disproportionately even to its share of 1/3rd of all generated power) affects consumer electricity rates.
simongray 4y ago
The way it works in the EU—not sure if the UK participates in this market still?— is that every energy source is priced according to the most expensive energy source until demand is covered by supply. So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
walthamstow 4y ago
Funnily enough the price the consumer pays right now is much lower than the price of energy because of badly thought out government subsidies I am in the 95th percentile for income (though not wealth) in the UK and here's my energy bill for December: Daily grid charges £20 Energy used @ market price £315 Truss govt unit price subsidy -£98 Johnson govt flat subsidy -£67 Total bill before VAT £170
RobinL 4y ago
It's quite complicated, but there's a good explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390 (I recently asked the same question!)
balderdash 4y ago
No, first understand the concept of market clearing auctions[1], then understand that the there is a dispatch stack (that looks like something like this [2]), and that gas plants are the marginal producer required to balance the market, as they are not baseload (nukes) and not intermittent (renewables) but are dispatchable (ramp up/down capacity as need to balance the market). [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912045570/g153251bci061.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
Manuel_D 4y ago
There's a couple reasons. A small amount of electricity may be generated from gas, but that small amount is often crucial and in a lot of demand. Furthermore, peaker plants will produce less and less electricity as more renewables reduced their duty cycle. But the overhead cost of maintenance remains: reducing a gas plant from running 10 hours a day to 2 hours a day does not result in a 5x reduction of cost.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Curtailment, like negative prices, seems like something that it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about. Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment. Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.

benj111 4y ago
But that presupposes we can actually supply enough electricity to where it's needed. We already hitting the limits, thus the curtailment and burning gas. Adding more capacity unless it's in the right place doesn't solve the issue.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The example given was christmas day, when most industry stops, when the wind was blowing strongly. (UK heat is mostly gas, not electric). It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that. Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days. It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly. Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
  - ta545 4y ago
    At some point there will be more bang for buck to increase the north/south capacity. The price they're talking seems to be very low compared with other infrastructure. Sure it takes 6 years to build two 2GW links, so build 4 or 6 in parallel. What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.

pleb_nz 4y ago

So does NZ.... Man this place blows especially in Canterbury where I am. Nearly every single day it's windy enough that it annoys and sometimes ruins being outside. I must say 3 to 4 times a week 'f** this windy hole' to someone. Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.

teruakohatu 4y ago
The reason that all or almost all of the power you use is renewable. Adding more renewable generation in the South Island won't help the coal generation in the North Island. Right now, investment in infrastructure needs to be made to move power from Manapōuri to the North Island. As to why we are not replacing the 1.8m tons of coal we import from as far away as Indonesia with wind or solar in the North Island? I don't know. Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal. There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south. https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and-market-data/consolidated-live-data https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and...
- ta545 4y ago
  It looks like there's just one HVDC interaliand link capable of sending 1.2GW, and dating back to 1964. Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island. 10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-per-capacity-and-length-for-HVDC-options-The-cost-of-two_fig7_284359690 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
  - morepork 4y ago
    The current HVDC link has had a lot of upgrades from the original 600MW to 1200MW now, and there are proposals to upgrade it further, but not nearly to the scale you suggest, as there just isn't the need for such levels of transmission. Unless there were plans for major new hydro schemes in the South Island there's no particular reason not to just build new generation in the North. There is ample wind and geothermal in the North Island. This would all change if the Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter were to close as that would leave a huge amount of generation that would need to go north to be used.

mariambarouma 4y ago

this is a remarkable achievement in itself. Years ago, renewables opponents kept making baseless claims that no grid would be stable with large amounts of renewables. It's now end of 2022 and for this year we've seen on multiple occasions power grids running perfectly fine on very large amounts of renewables with very little gas. Success, I guess.

mikaeluman 4y ago
Did you look at the situation in Germany? The foremost country on renewables... And brown coal.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Ok so what’s the difference ?
  - mikaeluman 4y ago
    Doesn't seem to be a difference. UK just has better access to gas, for now I presume. Without a baseload power source a modern economy just can't function. That is why intermittent sources like wind and solar must be a minority of the energy supply. In Germany they don't have access to hydro and have chosen to dispense with their nuclear capacity. That leaves gas. Without Russia that is becoming hard and expensive. That leaves coal. Germany had enormous deposits of coal.

xiphias2 4y ago

One more thing that can be used for soaking up rarely generated free energy are cheap old inefficient Bitcoin miners. There are many places already using it for this. Bringing Bitcoin miners to a place at this point is just shipping a container.

socks 4y ago
This sounds great, but in reality, this concept is also a curse. Moving Bitcoin miners is much easier than building transmission lines - potentially discouraging funding for the infrastructure needed to move the energy where it is more useful. I remember reading of BTC mining companies moving their infrastructure right next door to remote coal fired power plants, getting extremely cheap rates, which otherwise might have been completely decommissioned due to transmission costs.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  Carbon tax fixes this.
  - socks 4y ago
    I don't believe it does. The same phenomenon can occur with a renewable energy source. Remote renewable energy source (solar, hydro etc), not grid connected, could attract the same sort of Bitcoin mining system and even claim to be 'green' - when in fact they are reducing the commercial attractiveness of building the infrastructure to move the energy to the grid, so it might be a net-negative environmental benefit (or at best, negligible, assuming that the mining equipment was originally connected to a dirty grid, rather than new equipment) (and would not be subject to carbon tax).
    - TheDudeMan 4y ago
      > they are reducing the commercial attractiveness of building the infrastructure A company will do whatever is most profitable (build transmission or build generation). Which is fine, given the bad things (e.g. coal) were taxed out of profitability.

davedx 4y ago

I know quite a bit about most of the things discussed in the article from having worked for a renewables company and yet I learned quite some new bits I didn’t know about, for example the intra-UK submarine HVDC connectors (and their eye watering cost). Not a very long article but packed with clearly written and valuable information. Great stuff

vardump 4y ago
We need to figure out how to reduce long distance power transfer. Imagine a global power distribution network, the entire world could be 100% solar & wind. Perhaps one day...
- Atheros 4y ago
  Imagine someone invents low cost high temperature superconductors which enable fusion reactors, to much fanfare. Until everyone slowly realizes that we can use those same conductors to balance low cost electricity globally for less money.
- Dma54rhs 4y ago
  Not going to happen for geopolitical reasons ever, unless we have a one king for the whole planet.
  - Atheros 4y ago
    Why couldn't countries just keep dirty coal generators and coal delivery infrastructure mothballed such that if power delivery from the other country is cut, just spin up the coal plants for a while until it gets sorted out. The cost of all of that may be less than the cost savings of importing electricity from a far-away country.
- davedx 4y ago
  For sure. This will be very cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link Edit: would have been. Looks like they lost funding. :(

londons_explore 4y ago

If the UK were ruled, and all decisions made, by a benevolent dictator, then the solution to this problem is easy. Consider every option of where to build the wind turbines, and where to build power cables, add up the cost of every option, and choose the cheapest (environmentally and/or monetarily) that gives everyone the power they need. An ideal market would produce the exact same result right? Well not quite... And this is a classic example. With the current policy of location-independent markets, wind producers build in the best spots, and don't care about the massive expense (to the grid operator) of moving the power south. That isn't the ideal solution. With the new proposed policy of per-location markets, the grid operator 'makes money' by moving power from places of high generation (low prices) to places with high demand (high prices). But wait... That isn't the ideal solution either. The grid operator has an incentive to maximize their own profits, and if they ship too much power from north to south, then the price difference will be lowered, and their profits will decrease. So they will underbuild deliberately. But wait you say - this is an ideal market, so there is no monopoly grid operator. In this ideal market, there are many grid operators, each competing to move power from the north to the south, and if one operator deliberately underbuilds, then another will build more to capture that profit. The end result is cables will keep being added till the money to be made equals the cost of the cables... And that is equal to the ideal benevolent dictator solution! But... That assumes a cable costs a certain £ amount per MWH transferred. But real cables have efficiencies of scale - one large cable is more money efficient than many competing small cables. And considering that, you're back to the single-cable-operator problem. In the market, they are a monopoly and will underbuild. If they aren't a monopoly, whoever has the biggest cable takes all the profit, and becomes a monopoly. And if you artificially force there to be 10 small companies competing, then there will be 10 small money-inefficient cables. There is no perfect answer, except a (non existent) benevolent dictator!

beepbooptheory 4y ago
You really don't see any middle ground here? I feel like a rationally and centrally planned infrastructure not based on market incentives is not that hard to imagine, whatever your political beliefs are, why resort to some kind of philosophical thought experiment of the dictator?

Zamicol 4y ago

TL;DR: "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" because of high long distance transmission costs.

singhrac 4y ago
That's not an entire summary, I think. The lack of local (or nodal, as it's often called in the US) pricing means that there's comparatively little incentive to build new transmission. The UK is not a large country, and we routinely build much larger transmission lines (if I'm not mistaken, the UK is the geographic size of Texas, where the exact same problem is being solved effectively).
- Zamicol 4y ago
  My comment was somewhat of a critic of the terse headline. Adding a small amount of information to the cryptic headline removes a lot of perceived mystery. Your statement answers the question, "why is long distance transmission price high?"

bhewes 4y ago

The UK grid needs spot instance pricing like the cloud.

jayelbe 4y ago

A very interesting and well-written article. I'd love to subscribe and see what else the author has, but oddly their blog has no RSS feed. Oh well!

archydeb 4y ago
Sorry about that! I gave up on RSS with the death of Google Reader. A Twitter follow is your best bet :)

ed25519FUUU 4y ago

California is facing a similar issue dealing with its solar duck curve[1], where prices essentially go negative during periods of peak solar generation. As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap. 1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-how-address-over-generation-solar-energy https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...

sh1mmer 4y ago
If only there were some actually useful use of excessive energy that weren’t mining bitcoin.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  One example is producing hydrogen from water with excess power. It can then be added to the natural gas network, or used by trucks or trains, or stored for a power plant. Orkney is trialling this.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  Charging cars, heating water in a well insulated tank
  - cwalv 4y ago
    It's great when we can use off peak energy for things like this, but they're not as easy to locate onsite as bitcoin miners .. and difficulty with transmission is a big part of the problem
    - youngtaff 4y ago
      Electric cars have utility as we can use them to transport us from one place to another. Bitcoin on the other hand is just a waste of energy

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dclowd9901 4y ago

I have a tangential question (and I truly do not mean to be provocative with it, just curious): Has anyone put any effort into figuring out how much impact we have on air movement in general with windmills? Like, is there a scenario where we could negatively impact the environment by capturing "too much wind"?

grey-area 4y ago
This is an interesting study in that topic, I would have thought the answer is no to your question, but possibly a very large wind farm could change wind velocity/temp and thus have a knock on effect. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101

fiftyacorn 4y ago

I was hearing one of the things they are doing is pumping water up the hills at hyrdo powerstation's to reuse at peak periods

seb1204 4y ago
Yes this is what is commonly referred to as pumped hydro or often only hydro

jl6 4y ago

That 70% energy loss in round trip conversion to hydrogen doesn’t look so bad if the alternative is 100% loss by not running the turbines.

epistasis 4y ago
That really depends on the capex of the hydrogen equipment. It has to be extremely low to justify not curtailing.
- jl6 4y ago
  True. I suspect that grid-scale electrolysis is near the very bottom of the economies-of-scale-S-curve and will have a promising future not just in power2gas2power, but also in producing the green hydrogen inputs needed for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for hard-to-electrify applications like aviation.
- kokanee 4y ago
  Technically it depends on the levelized cost of hydrogen, which encompasses capex, opex, and a slew of other relevant inputs. Similar "levelized cost" formulas are used throughout the utility sector to make these kinds of decisions; what makes green hydrogen unique is simply that it is undergoing a spike in research and development right now that is drastically changing some of the inputs to the LCOH equation. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46267.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46267.pdf
  - epistasis 4y ago
    This are good models for roughly continual usage of the equipment, but they don't model the use cases of operating capacity factors less than 60% for electrolysis, and it's likely that the capacity factor of electrolysis equipment powered by excess wind would be <10%. At that point, the capex beings to dominate nearly all other factors. I in fact used to be somewhat optimistic about hydrogen as a long term storage mechanism for our excess renewables, until I saw models like these from NREL. Now I am extremely skeptical of any hydrogen from electrolysis unless it's from something like solar+storage facilities. (Which are actually being proposed now, which is very exciting!)

londons_explore 4y ago

So why are these undersea cables so expensive? Lets do a little Math... A cable that moves 4GW of electricity 450 km is say +-1 million volts and 2000 amps. Assuming we want no more than 3% losses in the cable at full load, then each conductor needs to be 40mm diameter aluminium, at a total material cost of $3.6M To insulate a 1 million volt cable, we need 100mm of PVC - total cost $60M. And we'll obviously need a few mm of steel + more PVC on the outside for protection from the environment. And now add in the manufacturing cost, and the cost to get it into place...

zabzonk 4y ago
and the need for two of them in parallel to make them redundant from trawler and similar damages.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  HVDC cables are typically built in pairs - the positive one and the negative one. They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both. But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing. But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.
KaiserPro 4y ago
and the control hardware. The things that stepup/down are not cheap.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  They're cheap if you buy them from China. China is world leading on this stuff, and has built tens of similar lines in recent years. However, I'm sure 'national security' will require the equipment be procured from a western world supplier with no expertise.

iamkoch 4y ago

[flagged]

fencepost 4y ago

I think one of the most important elements is buried - electricity pricing is uniform across the entire UK. That seems nuts to me, and incentivizes building in locations that are less useful - it's likely cheaper to build in Scotland, higher production from more wind, you get paid more (for expected yield plus curtailment apparently), and you have less wear on the equipment when you adjust to lower output.

TylerE 4y ago
Is the UK not a unified grid? Most of the US is. A kwh is a kwh.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  england and wales are run by national grid, who also have a huge us operation - scottish operations a bit less clear
  - scrlk 4y ago
    National Grid ESO are the system operator for the GB grid. National Grid Electricity Transmission operate the transmission network in England and Wales. The transmission network in the south of Scotland is operated by SP Transmission; in the north of Scotland, it's SSEN Transmission.
- toast0 4y ago
  The US runs three major grids: East, West, and Texas. There's interconnections, but capacity is limited. Sounds like the UK is similar here with the bottleneck between Scotland and southern England. Within the US grids, there's really subgrids with interconnection and bottlenecks, too, but those interior bottlenecks aren't brought up as often as say overnight wind production in Texas being over local demand as well as interconnect capacity.
- timerol 4y ago
  Even in the parts of the US that are unified grids, a kWh is not a kWh. Where you live determines how expensive your electricity is. Compare Cambridge, MA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/02139/ https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/02139/ with Philadelphia, PA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/19101/ https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/19101/. About twice as expensive in MA.

user568439 4y ago

Seems like factoring the location is the easiest solution. If energy were much cheaper in Scotland, some factories would move there, more people would move there as well and you would not need to transport so much energy across the country. But I guess there are more things to consider than the energy in that decision.

pornel 4y ago
I'd also love to have real-time pricing as an option on the consumption side. It's so dumb that we have "smart" fridges that can tweet, but not smart to avoid their energy use during peak hours. It's a thermal battery!
- aembleton 4y ago
  Get Octopus Agile [1] and you can query their REST API [2] to find the energy prices. Then you could control your fridge via a smart switch. 1. https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/ 2. https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/ https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/

mikaeluman 4y ago

The UK seems to have a very interesting situation. We also have a proposal for curtailment in Sweden for wind power producers, but for a different reason. In the UK, curtailment seems needed due to power transfer capacity issues. In Sweden it is purely due to grid stability reasons. As wind does not work as a baseload power source this becomes problematic as too much wind power generation can then negatively affect profitability for nuclear and hydro which are baseload power sources. I would be interested to see how stable wind power production is across all hours and throughout the year in the UK. I imagine it's better than here, but is it good enough to support an industrial nation?

tupac_speedrap 4y ago
https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
- mikaeluman 4y ago
  Thanks. Then it's essentially the same situation. I imagined UK might be more fortunate due to being an island. But then wind power can only be part of a mix of energy sources, with a strong supply of baseload power backing it.

kerblang 4y ago

I'll pose the argument that if Texas can, the UK can: https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-project-nears-finish-aiding-wind-po/ https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-proje... And yeah that was a long time ago

chris222 4y ago

Very good article. As far as the options presented I think transmission lines are still the best bet, along with storage. Storage can come in many forms including at a customers residence via batteries or thermal storage. Not all of these options need to be cycled daily to make financial sense. In the U.S. we have an insane number of people that maintain days worth of storage as fuel for their generators only to be used infrequently when the power goes out.

oliwary 4y ago

Here is what I do not understand about these kinds of dynamics: Are they not the perfect way to encourage the creation of energy storage companies and technologies? It seems like there is a massive opportunity to purchase energy when it is cheap or even negatively priced, figure out some way of storing it, and then sell it back once the price is higher. Over time, this could stabilize the grid and encourage development and scale benefits in energy storage. Where are these companies? Are the technologies not yet efficient enough, even when the price of electricity is negative? Or is this technology being deployed already? EDIT: Well turns out this is covered in the article. Hoping there will be more development in this direction in the future!

aliqot 4y ago
> figure out some way of storing it My hypothesis is this being the issue.
Raydovsky 4y ago
Because storage is hard and expensive. Generating energy is easy (with renewables).
dx034 4y ago
6% is not really a lot. I guess batteries can be profitable if you cycle daily. But at 6% curtailment, they would've been used only a few times a year. You'd need really cheap storage for that.

nfcampos 4y ago

This reminded me of https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/mining-for-cryptocurrencies-could-be-the-future-of-energy-storage/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/mining-for-cryptocurr... (I know this isn’t storage, jk)

stuaxo 4y ago

Our system favours England over scotland, with the national grid charging Scotland much more to move energy around. With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Scotland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...

ccalloway 4y ago
That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.

bjourne 4y ago

The North Sea Link is 720 km long and costed only £1.6 billion and took only three years to lay: https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operations-nid24262.html https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operat... So a new 440 km long cable for £3.4 billion done in 2029 seem like a crummy deal.

tuatoru 4y ago
Yeah. The cost objection seems like learned helplessness. A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008. 1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-potential-2003-2012-the-uk-decade-that-decayed/ https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot... 2. "UK productivity continues lost decade", 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195 3. "The UK is facing two lost decades on living standards", 2022: https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b94c https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...
- Jochim 4y ago
  The UK conservative party is peak neoliberal. The cabinet is/was largely made up of people that have openly written proposals on how to dismantle national services. Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse. Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I assume that cables aren’t all equal, eg maybe the new one carries more power or is more efficient or the sea floor makes it harder to lay. It could still be a good deal even if the upfront cost is higher. I guess there could also be accounting shenanigans, eg if you pay $x upfront and $y over several years, you could focus on $x if the project seems unpopular and focus on $(x+y) if the project shows a popular serious investment in a government policy. But I’ve no idea about this case.

neilwilson 4y ago

Sounds like a job for the Terraform Industries product from a few days ago https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...

adrianmonk 4y ago

> evidence from Texas suggests that windfarms do not end up near population centres even in markets with locational pricing and liberal planning laws The windy part of Texas is not the part where most people live. The western part of the state and the panhandle are windy but also pretty dry. Most of the people live more toward the central or eastern part of the state where it's greener but less windy. Pricing incentives may just not be enough to overcome that.

bsder 4y ago

3 billion pounds (the estimated cost of the HVDC link) seems like it would install a LOT of local storage which would alleviate problems from both the transmission blockage and the bursty nature of wind power. HVDC links are a good thing, but why is storage not the first step?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I notice that the curtailment for today happens to coincide with the lowest demand at 5 in the morning. Their screenshot also has overnight curtailment. It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.

extropy 4y ago

Opportunity to generate cheap hydrogen?

tuatoru 4y ago
Covered in the article.

brilee 4y ago

6% curtailment seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. Around 20-25% curtailment, it becomes economical to run those hydrogen electrolyzers part-time, even with the capital expenditures required. I wouldn't use that hydrogen gas to regenerate electricity, though - there are many industries that can directly consume that hydrogen gas and avoid the lossy round-trip from electricity->hydrogen->electricity. I explore this idea further in this blog post: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/

prennert 4y ago
Does your analysis rely on a localized energy market? Because with curtailment it seems to me that there is no incentive for energy producers to sell energy cheaply to factobatteries, right?
marmetio 4y ago
Agree. It's also a given that a renewable grid has to be overbuilt. Current estimates are by about 50%. I don't know what the current target is, but 6% is well below what it will eventually be. The article suggests building more physical infrastructure, but that comes with its own cost and environmental impacts, ironically.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I don’t understand the reason for the triple cost for curtailment. Like it seems the obvious options would be: - pay $x for y joules of wind - pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?

matthewmorgan 4y ago

So the rest of the UK essentially subsidizes the electricity price to South East England, is that correct?

scotty79 4y ago

Why not mine bitcoins? Distributed on demand load for distibuted excessive energy production. You can by prev gen mining equipment dirt cheap.

caf 4y ago

This report on congestion in the Australian NEM is pretty good reading on the concept of electricity network congestion and some of the market mechanisms that have been used to account for it, and some of the ways in which they can result in non-optimal outcomes. It's quite approachable: https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9-bf32-4bf1-bcc4-81dd8095dfc7/Final-Report-Appendix-A-An-introduction-to-congestion-in-the-NEM.PDF https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9...

cjdell 4y ago

Wind in the UK has been doing really well recently and the grid has never been greener: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out. Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables. I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
In the Netherlands they are going to build two new nuclear power plants but the company wants assurance that they don't have to compete with the massive wind mill parks on the North Sea. Not really a new problem for the Netherlands whenever there is a problem the country tends to overreact with massive infrastructure spending. It hasn't been that long that brand new coal power plants had to be closed.
dx034 4y ago
Just want to say how great the UX of that page is. I've used many data sources and pages that show power generation, this one is by far the most intuitive one. I wish it existed for more countries.

pmarreck 4y ago

Banning construction of wind farms on all of England is possibly the stupidest governmental decision I've ever heard of. This entire problem would go away if they had just allowed some wind farms.

mhardcastle 4y ago

One has to wonder if the fixed costs of some kind of electricity -> fuel production will ever get cheap enough to solve this problem. If it would pay, it would be great for there to be a factory on stand-by to make, e.g., hydrogen or ethanol using the extra energy.

TedShiller 4y ago

Relevant book written by Sir David MacKay (Cambridge/Caltech professor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/

patientplatypus 4y ago

[dead]

bergenbergen 4y ago

if, like me, you’re wondering why curtailment is even necessary, read here: https://news.warrington.ufl.edu/faculty-and-research/what-is-curtailment-an-electricity-market-expert-explains/ https://news.warrington.ufl.edu/faculty-and-research/what-is...

spiritplumber 4y ago

Hire the Penguin and build giant batteries?

liberty-bzmh 4y ago

It would be more surprising when the UK isn't.

danw1979 4y ago

Great article. The fact we can’t just make and throw up a bunch more pylons and cables alongside existing routes, for anything less than £££bn, is just depressing.

cbmuser 4y ago

Yes, that’s one of the main problems with volatile generation. You often don’t get the power when you need it and vice versa. This isn’t news though and the reason why Germany is returning to goal despite of having installed 130 GW of wind and solar generation capacity.

adrianN 4y ago
No, the reason Germany is burning more coal is because they stopped importing gas from Russia and supply France with extra electricity while they repair their nuclear reactors. It has literally nothing to do with the volatility of wind power.

mrjin 4y ago

It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity. So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.

alex_duf 4y ago
For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account
- mrjin 4y ago
  Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.

eftychis 4y ago

To the commenters saying that wind farms should move South or blaming wind farms or other energy producers. (My opinion and knowledge follows.) That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures. Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y. My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past. I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power. P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."

thewarrior 4y ago
UK has managed to cheap skate on many different fronts. When money was cheap they went on a cost cutting spree for a decade when they should have been using all of that money to invest in services and infrastructure. Now everything is crumbling.
Wildgoose 4y ago
Scotland has a different legal system and even historically insisted upon separate versions of otherwise national concerns - for example that is why there is a "National Trust"[1] and a separate "Scottish National Trust". Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament this tendency has only accelerated. [1] A charity that maintains stately homes and other historic artefacts
- eftychis 4y ago
  Interesting and informative. Thank you!

Moissanite 4y ago

Given the point in the conclusion about planning relaxation not really helping to move future turbines closer to people, it seems that the sensible approach would be to factor any power network upgrades into the cost of wind when looking at TCO and ensure that the generators contribute to it. That, plus a small location-based payment bias plus eventual demand-based payment are all likely to be necessary - if oil/gas prices remain high, it is unrealistic to keep paying the same high cost per MWH to wind farms forever.

karol 4y ago

Haven't seen such mumbo-jumbo for a while. UK has an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation. There is a project to re-forest the north coast to coast. Then these trees can be also burned for energy as biomass. Just look it up.

Wildgoose 4y ago
Deforestation is historic, your comment implies it is recent. We know from comprehensive aerial photographs of the UK taken by Germany in the 1930s/40s that the UK has much more forest coverage now than it had then. The UK switched to coal beginning in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth because of the lack of forests providing a source of wood. The current reforestation projects have nothing to do with "an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation". There isn't any recent deforestation - just the opposite in fact.
- karol 4y ago
  I didn't say it was recent. I said that UK has unfavourable wind patterns because there aren't enough trees.

Quindecillion 4y ago

Negative prices on power i.e. curtailment, is the perfect use case for Bitcoin mining. Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power? May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy. Energy buyer of first and last resort.

iso1631 4y ago
Hydrogen electrolysis and increasing interconnects seem a more useful thing to do.
- Quindecillion 4y ago
  I haven't followed the technology very closely, but it was my understanding that large scale storage of hydrogen isn't here yet, if it ever will be? And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc. It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business. However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight. Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
  - iso1631 4y ago
    > It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business. The core business of national grid plc is massive transmission projects
98Windows 4y ago
Please stop, bitcoin is a waste of electricity, it has no economic value. Its cancerous. Just make hydrogen or some other storable material.

eru 4y ago

It's funny that tiny Singapore is an example of a country with different pricing nodes, instead of uniform pricing for the whole place.