Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

archy.deberker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 396 posts

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#11

Post by SamBam »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #4

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 was…

I'm not sure I understand. Sure, letting turbines spin and not use the power, while burning extra gas, isn't worse for the environment than just burning gas in the first place (though it's significantly more expensive to triple-pay for the energy), but it's better is to turn that unused power into used power.

The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#12

Post by mattcoles »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #4

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 was…

I understand that curtailment is needed to incentivise private businesses to invest in wind when the output and demand can’t be correlated, but if the government owned the wind farms then it wouldn’t matter if we wasted right? We could just always be overproducing and wouldn’t have to pay for it.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#13

Post by bee_rider »

nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#14

Post by Analemma_ »

nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#15

Post by kspacewalk2 »

nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#16

Post by simongray »

nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#17

Post by ZeroGravitas »

cjcartlidge wrote: post #8
nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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.

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#18

Post by walthamstow »

nateguchi wrote: post #3

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?

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

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#19

Post by mariambarouma »

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.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#20

Post by jthirkle »

mattcoles wrote: post #12
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #4

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 was…

I understand that curtailment is needed to incentivise private businesses to invest in wind when the output and demand can’t be correlated, but if the government owned the wind farms then it wouldn’t matter if we wasted right? We could just always be overproducing and wouldn’t have to pay for it.

The UK government? Owning things? Surely you can't be serious...
Post reply on HN