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Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

bbc.com

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Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#81

Post by kalleboo »

eldaisfish wrote: post #30
IAmEveryone wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric cars are perfect for this. Connect them to the grid and the internet, and they’ll charge but also feed back as needed.

Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still. Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to th…

25% of lowest demand sounds amazing! I'm mostly a pessimist about renewables due to the storage issue so I would have guessed more like 2-5%.

Assuming lowest demand is at night, that means that building just 3 more batteries you could power the whole state for an hour at night?

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#82

Post by throwaway123x2 »

piokoch wrote: post #35
sandworm101 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity. If you depend on wind power plants how this guarantee can be given? What if wind stops. Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for no…

Blockchain, obviously. /s

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#83

Post by batpangolin »

wcoenen wrote: post #56
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time t…

Lots of things that we currently do were designed on the basis that power supply and demand were predictable and slowly-changing. Now we will see technologies evolve on the basis that unpredictable power supply is very cheap and predictable power supply can be quite expensive. That's fine.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#84

Post by batpangolin »

Toutouxc wrote: post #67
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts of free electricity.

But these applications will appear.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#86

Post by lkramer »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

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

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#87

Post by Glench »

missedthecue wrote: post #68
Glench wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, great point. I like this report showing that rapidly decarbonizing will create 25 million jobs, save the average American household $2000 per year, and improve the quality of life of everyone: "How to create 25 million jobs by decarbonizing the economy" - https://www.fastcompany.com/90533448/how-to-create-25-millio...

That is like saying we can create 25 million jobs by starting a land war in Asia. I mean they directly compared it to WWII mobilization in the article.

Yeah exactly. That is the level of commitment needed to stay below 2 degrees of warming. The authors of that report worked backward from the goal of staying below 2 degrees and said, "what needs to happen in what timeframe to make that happen?" They found that if we started decades ago we wouldn't need a WWII-level of effort but since we waited so long we now have to move incredibly fast to electrify everything.

But the good news is that we can move that fast! We now know exactly what needs to happen (electrify everything) and in what timeframe (2035) to stay below 2 degrees and doing that will not only solve climate change but also create jobs, save us money, make us healthier, and improve our quality of life.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#88

Post by seanalltogether »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

> So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.

Ireland is a good example of this. One of the reasons that Ireland has not been able to increase wind farms is because they don't have the ability to export it rapidly. The last time the interconnect with GB was cut, they had to shut down a bunch of wind farms. There was big news a while ago about building a new interconnect to France which should allow for more wind farms in Ireland while relying on french "nuclear batteries"

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#89

Post by pydry »

wcoenen wrote: post #56
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time t…

I forsee periods of negative/cheap/free electricity becoming much more common. If your equipment is not used on average two days a week, the economics start to look a LOT more sensible even for more capital intensive, energy intensive applications.

At the moment pretty much every MWh generated is a substituted MWh not generated by gas and periods of negative pricing are still relatively rare.

Wind is so cheap though, that at some point, overproduction will become the norm rather than exceptional and being able to timeshift your usage could, unexpectedly, end up saving you more money than reducing your usage.

The counterintuitiveness of this and the fact that this is new territory is why I think that there's lots of profit potential.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#90

Post by codeulike »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

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

The problem here is not negative electricity prices - those are the opposite of a problem. The problem is the grid needs to re-adapt.

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