8 ms·

This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's proj

This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement. 1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late. 2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy) 3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable. Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs. https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability-the-quiet-driving-force-behind-rising-curtailment-costs-in-great-britain/ https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...

bee_rider 1y ago
I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?
- citrin_ru 1y ago
  Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.
  - mapt 1y ago
    Is there a rational reason to do that?
    - shawabawa3 1y ago
      The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
      - mapt 1y ago
        If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift. You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
        MagnumOpus 1y ago
        The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours. In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
        pbmonster 1y ago
        Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed. So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid. Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
  - MagnumOpus 1y ago
    “Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works. If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing. Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest. On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
  - aregue 1y ago
    One solution is to have several markets. Norway also has transmission problems. The land is divided into 5 areas, each with its own price.
- vidarh 1y ago
  What makes you think they haven't? At least half a dozen operators have more than one data centre in Scotland, and many more have one.
  - ErikCorry 1y ago
    Are you sure? > Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continues-courting-data-center-developers/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue... Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      About the number of data centres in Scotland? Yes, I am sure. I have done business with operators of several of them. You'd open them because of plenty of customer demand.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    According to an article today, there are 16 data centres in Scotland https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zxx43x4vo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zxx43x4vo
- api 1y ago
  Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling. I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling. If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Agreed! That was what I meant, sorry for any ambiguity.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Plumb in some district heating and everyone wins.
londons_explore 1y ago
The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.". It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
- hylaride 1y ago
  IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts". NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons". Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
- amiga386 1y ago
  The government were mooting "we'll give you free electricity for life if you let us build the pylons near you" in 2024 https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-pylons-country-energy-system-2030-annual-bill-climate-net-zero/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py... It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylons-to-save-hundreds-on-energy-bills https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
- syrgian 1y ago
  Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value? Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).
sameesh 1y ago
spawn more overlords!
ErikCorry 1y ago
It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered. And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
- amiga386 1y ago
  EGL2 was proposed in 2015 and was meant to be operational by 2023. It wasn't even approved until August 2024. Construction began a month later. EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-push-back-uks-3b-subsea-electricity-superhighway-by-16-months/ https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus... > The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances. We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect. It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
  - ErikCorry 1y ago
    If EGL2 took 9 years to get approval, that's the fault of the Nimbies, right?
    - amiga386 1y ago
      The project was proposed in 2015 but it didn't seriously start until 2020. That's purely politics. I'd say the lion's share of time was spent seeking planning permission, writing environmental impact documents, planning the route, building the justification for any compulsory purchases, consulting with interest parties, etc. Some of that would be NIMBYs, but I don't think there was a sustained campaign to hold back EGL2, it just took a lot of bureaucracy, and effectively "death by a thousand cuts". A project gets to be 5 years late one day at a time. See the timeline and some of the documents here: https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date

bee_rider 1y ago

I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?

citrin_ru 1y ago
Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.
- mapt 1y ago
  Is there a rational reason to do that?
  - shawabawa3 1y ago
    The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
    - mapt 1y ago
      If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift. You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
      - MagnumOpus 1y ago
        The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours. In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
      - pbmonster 1y ago
        Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed. So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid. Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
- MagnumOpus 1y ago
  “Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works. If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing. Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest. On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
- aregue 1y ago
  One solution is to have several markets. Norway also has transmission problems. The land is divided into 5 areas, each with its own price.
vidarh 1y ago
What makes you think they haven't? At least half a dozen operators have more than one data centre in Scotland, and many more have one.
- ErikCorry 1y ago
  Are you sure? > Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continues-courting-data-center-developers/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue... Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    About the number of data centres in Scotland? Yes, I am sure. I have done business with operators of several of them. You'd open them because of plenty of customer demand.
- amiga386 1y ago
  According to an article today, there are 16 data centres in Scotland https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zxx43x4vo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zxx43x4vo
api 1y ago
Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling. I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling. If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Agreed! That was what I meant, sorry for any ambiguity.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Plumb in some district heating and everyone wins.

londons_explore 1y ago

The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.". It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.

hylaride 1y ago
IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts". NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.
pjc50 1y ago
Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons". Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
amiga386 1y ago
The government were mooting "we'll give you free electricity for life if you let us build the pylons near you" in 2024 https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-pylons-country-energy-system-2030-annual-bill-climate-net-zero/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py... It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylons-to-save-hundreds-on-energy-bills https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
syrgian 1y ago
Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value? Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).

sameesh 1y ago

spawn more overlords!

ErikCorry 1y ago

It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered. And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.

amiga386 1y ago
EGL2 was proposed in 2015 and was meant to be operational by 2023. It wasn't even approved until August 2024. Construction began a month later. EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-push-back-uks-3b-subsea-electricity-superhighway-by-16-months/ https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus... > The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances. We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect. It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
- ErikCorry 1y ago
  If EGL2 took 9 years to get approval, that's the fault of the Nimbies, right?
  - amiga386 1y ago
    The project was proposed in 2015 but it didn't seriously start until 2020. That's purely politics. I'd say the lion's share of time was spent seeking planning permission, writing environmental impact documents, planning the route, building the justification for any compulsory purchases, consulting with interest parties, etc. Some of that would be NIMBYs, but I don't think there was a sustained campaign to hold back EGL2, it just took a lot of bureaucracy, and effectively "death by a thousand cuts". A project gets to be 5 years late one day at a time. See the timeline and some of the documents here: https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date