A very interesting and well-written article.
I'd love to subscribe and see what else the author has, but oddly their blog has no RSS feed. Oh well!
The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
41–50 of 396 posts
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#42Curtailment, 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…
The problem is that there was no wind in the coldest days of December when we needed electricity the most. Building more of something that goes to zero when you need it doesn't help. With huge storage capacity, maybe, but even the author of the article doesn't seem to think storage is particularly practical.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#43TL;DR: "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" because of high long distance transmission costs.
That's not an entire summary, I think. The lack of local (or nodal, as it's often called in the US) pricing means that there's comparatively little incentive to build new transmission. The UK is not a large country, and we routinely build much larger transmission lines (if I'm not mistaken, the UK is the geographic size of Texas, where the exact same problem is being solved effectively).
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
That seems like a good way to spur early development. I wonder, though — if consumers could actually see the cost benefit of the wind power, might gas have been just priced out of the system by now? (Or relegated to some backup status). (Supposing the transmission infrastructure were upgraded to allow for the higher flow, or England changed its laws to be more in line with economic realities).
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#45California is facing a similar issue dealing with its solar duck curve[1], where prices essentially go negative during periods of peak solar generation.
As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#46If 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... An…
You really don't see any middle ground here? I feel like a rationally and centrally planned infrastructure not based on market incentives is not that hard to imagine, whatever your political beliefs are, why resort to some kind of philosophical thought experiment of the dictator?
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cl…
At some point there will be more bang for buck to increase the north/south capacity. The price they're talking seems to be very low compared with other infrastructure. Sure it takes 6 years to build two 2GW links, so build 4 or 6 in parallel.
What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#48Curtailment, 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'd rather waste wind than waste money.
How is paying wind farms hundreds of millions of pounds to turn off wind generation not wasting money?
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#49So 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 more capacity on the way, but planning/approving these things is slow. The beauty of wind power in NZ is that the more you have spread around in different places, the more more hydro lake capacity you can keep up your sleeve for when it is needed.
Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
#50Curtailment, 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 faul…
I always thought gas was quite quick to start which made it a good complement to renewables.