TL;DR: "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" because of high long distance transmission costs.
The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
31–40 of 396 posts
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#32The UK grid needs spot instance pricing like the cloud.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#33One 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?
No, first understand the concept of market clearing auctions[1], then understand that the there is a dispatch stack (that looks like something like this [2]), and that gas plants are the marginal producer required to balance the market, as they are not baseload (nukes) and not intermittent (renewables) but are dispatchable (ramp up/down capacity as need to balance the market).
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#34So does NZ.... Man this place blows especially in Canterbury where I am. Nearly every single day it's windy enough that it annoys and sometimes ruins being outside. I must say 3 to 4 times a week 'f** this windy hole' to someone. Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.
There is a lot more wind power than there used to be. Getting wind farms consented is hard because people always seem to come out of the woodwork and complain and ruining the scenery, or the noise, or whatever.
But I think the bigger issue is that due to the amount of wind that has already been built, peak demand happens on cold still nights in winter. Building more wind without storage doesn't help there, and that's when they're forced to fire up all the gas and even coal turbines at Huntly.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#35I 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
We need to figure out how to reduce long distance power transfer.
Imagine a global power distribution network, the entire world could be 100% solar & wind. Perhaps one day...
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#37Curtailment, 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…
But that presupposes we can actually supply enough electricity to where it's needed. We already hitting the limits, thus the curtailment and burning gas. Adding more capacity unless it's in the right place doesn't solve the issue.
The example given was christmas day, when most industry stops, when the wind was blowing strongly. (UK heat is mostly gas, not electric).
It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that.
Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days.
It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly.
Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#38Curtailment, 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.
> We could just always be overproducing
Depends on what you mean by overproducing. The energy put into an electrical grid must be balanced by demand or bad things will happen. I think the second answer in the below StackExchange is a good description.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/117437/what-...
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#39Curtailment, 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…
Balancing a nationwide power grid is very complex. Some energy sources can be started and stopped instantly, but are limited - water. Others are plentiful, but unpredictable - wind. Others are predictable, but take a long time to start and stop - gas, coal(several hours), nuclear(1 day to start, fast to stop, but very expensive). A balanced grid will need all of them, will need them in quantities which can cover faults in the big producers(a nuclear reactor makes 700-800 MW). They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances, for cost and grid stability reasons.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#40Curtailment, 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've worked in curtailment. It's a fraught shell game.
I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.