The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

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.

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

"wind power"...

The article says we pay three times, curtail wind and then burn gas. Which is bad.

But all the solutions are aimed at reducing the curtailment of wind. Rather than reducing the gas burnt.

If the money saved by building more wind (or solar) and not having to burn gas saves more money then who cares if more wind is "wasted"?

It would be nice to use every last drop, but I dont want to actually spend money to achieve that goal when it could be used to e.g. build yet more wind, and burn even less gas.

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!