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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

#231

Post by heavenlyblue »

DennisP wrote: post #221
hristov wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). Ther…

The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month. So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else,…

You could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.

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

#232

Post by chriswarbo »

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.

Maybe not directly, but it can be useful with a buffer. The most obvious buffer would be batteries, e.g. installing a PowerWall on a building; but there are a whole bunch of more direct use-cases, which may be more efficient.

For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning

Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down.

Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).

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

#233

Post by Scoundreller »

floatrock wrote: post #226
Scoundreller wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot of Texas power utilities charged fixed rates but had to buy at spot prices. It didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, especially if they didn’t have generation capacity themselves.

Power companies tend to buy hedges and other financial instruments to offset the risk. The ones that went bankrupt like Griddy were strict wholesale passthrough. That's not say someone isn't eating the cost of the high spot prices, it's just a lot of that cost is borne by sophisticated professionals who's job it is to price risk and black swan events. The problem with wholesale passthrough rates is consumers are rare…

There’s been 2 others that sold fixed rates:

“Just Energy” and another cooperative.

Reality is, electricity distribution corps are more tolerant of risk than individuals because generators have to sell, but the distributor can always file for bankruptcy if it suddenly becomes very unprofitable.

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

#234

Post by michaelt »

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…

Bitcoin is "special" because you've got hardware that will pay for itself in 2 years and be obsolete in 4 years. So if you've got it turned off 50% of the time, you're losing money.

But if you're in a different industry, with equipment that takes a longer to become obsolete or wears out before it becomes obsolete, lower utilisation might be fine. Plenty of capital equipment spends loads of time idle.

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

#235

Post by goodcanadian »

pydry wrote: post #116
CraigJPerry wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cool if i could use an electric car parked at home during the day to store some of that cheap electricity then spend it from the car back into the house at night. When i looked into this last, it wasn’t common to have that bi-directional power flow capability. There was one, very expensive, Mitsubishi solution on the UK market around 2 years ago.

Cycling car batteries is expensive. The cost of wearing out the battery is probably not going to exceed the value you get from drawing on it most of the time. That said, if you leave a car plugged in overnight and it charges fastest when the wind is blowing and slowest when prices drift up that will have a similar effect - for free.

If you were to fully charge and then fully discharge the battery, it might be an issue; however, that is not what you would typically do. If you cycle between say 25% to 90%, there is some evidence that it is better than just letting it sit. (The biggest issue seems to be leaving it fully charged for a long period of time.)

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

#236

Post by ThomPete »

ben_w wrote: post #222
ThomPete wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.

The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor. The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year. Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combi…

wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.

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

#237

Post by yodelshady »

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…

If the flaw with nuclear is that private investors won't bite unless there's a very predictable return (£90/MWh, apparently), the flaw with wind is that private investors won't cover the (at least one) order of magnitude of excess capacity needed to meet a cold snap.

Having to pay wind producers to power off seems like we've combined the operational flaws of both - admittedly, at a much lower price point and without the waste/accident issues.

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

#238

Post by bartimus »

hristov wrote: post #162
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 electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). Ther…

This reminds me of a certain quote:

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

It seems a bit reckless to already be transitioning into a situation expecting those solutions to magically come to be.

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

#239

Post by mnw21cam »

adwn wrote: post #225
mnw21cam wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, last time that (accidentally, effectively) happened just down the road from here, it caused some rather interesting smells, and that was just a 300A feed (or rather, it blew a 300A fuse - repeatedly - the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times until I wandered over and told him about the smelly bit of pavement).

> the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times What the fuck?!

That admittedly was kind of my thought at the time. As he explained to me, often the underground cable will short out due to water ingress (it had rained a lot in the previous few hours), and pumping 300+A through that water could often drive the water off, and resolve the short.

It took a bit of persuading to get him to believe me about the smell of burning plastic and suspiciously dry area of pavement just down the road. Once he believed me, a crew came in, dug the thing up, replaced a section of cable, and relaid tarmac, in a surprisingly short time.

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

#240

Post by heavenlyblue »

londons_explore wrote: post #216
gambiting wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can go on the Octopus Agile tariff here in UK, where you pay exactly what the prices are. If the prices are negative, then Octopus actually credits your account. I know some people with EVs on the Agile tariff, they have their car chargers set to only charge when the price is <0 - which happens at least a couple times a week, and they effectively get paid for charging the electric cars. Personally I'm on their…

> which happens at least a couple times a week, Citation needed. Last time I looked the pricing of octopus agile went negative for like 15 minutes a year... EDIT: just crunched the data... It looks like this only happened frequently in 2020 (not in 2018/19/21), and even then, for a typical 1 kilowatt household, it would only save £2 per year, and even if you deliberately maxed out and used the maximum current limit o…

This is why it should be done on an organisational level: a company provides a service that makes sure that the car charger is enabled only at times with negative prices, and then makes money on providing a certain guaranteed load.
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