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The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

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Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#151

Post by Gwypaas »

PaulHoule wrote: post #100
redleader55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nuclear power plants can vary their output faster than most people think, see https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12... ... most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of…

The problem is taking the most expensive power source with a large portion of the costs being the initial investment and then not running it 100% is economical suicide.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#152

Post by bamboozled »

entropicgravity wrote: post #149
redleader55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HVDC is now a thing. Collecting solar in Northern Austrialia and sending it to Singapore over a 3800km long transmission line. Under construction now.

The project has stalled due to the two billionaires funding the project having a “spat”.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#153

Post by avianlyric »

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…

From the article

> the National Grid pays the windfarms to turn off, and pays a (typically gas powered) alternative generator, closer to the demand, to turn on.

Curtailing wind means paying someone else to generate that energy in the “right” location, which usually means burning gas. So all the extra wind being built isn’t reducing amount of gas being burned, it’s just increasing the total cost of electricity.

> Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.

We can build all the wind we want, but if connected to consumers by nothing more than a long extension lead that barely run a kettle, then it’s totally useless. The wind needs to be located so the energy generated can actually be transported to end users. Curtailment is basically a direct measure of the amount of wind we’ve built, that can’t actually be used. Building more isn’t helpful in the slightest.

The article certainly doesn’t advocate for reducing the amount of wind built, quite the opposite, they just point out we need it built in the right places so we can actually use the energy produced. Rather than built bunch of wind turbines that will forever be pointed out of the wind.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#154

Post by Reason077 »

moffkalast wrote: post #147
Reason077 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nuclear power plant can't just "keep spinning without a load" - all that energy has to go somewhere! If a nuclear plant is disconnected from the grid (tripped), the nuclear reaction must be stopped (eg: by inserting control rods into the core).

Of course it can, just short the generator coils and you have a free brake. The turbine should then still have resistance and shouldn't overspeed. Or just idk, use it to pump some water in a loop or discharge through some resistors. Getting rid of power isn't that hard if you want to do it. Simplest solution would I suppose be to just have an outside radiator that brings the steam to cooling tower levels of manageabi…

> "just short the generator coils and you have a free brake"

You'll soon end up with a burning/melted generator.

> "pump some water in a loop"

OK, but you're going to need huge pumps (1000+ MW!). Expensive.

> "or discharge through some resistors"

Again, you'll need extremely large resistors, and a way to dissipate an awful lot of heat. We're talking about a huge amount of energy here!

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#155

Post by bamboozled »

mikaeluman wrote: post #63
mariambarouma wrote: post #19

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.

Did you look at the situation in Germany? The foremost country on renewables... And brown coal.

Ok so what’s the difference ?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#156

Post by Scoundreller »

entropicgravity wrote: post #149
redleader55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HVDC is now a thing. Collecting solar in Northern Austrialia and sending it to Singapore over a 3800km long transmission line. Under construction now.

Thank you. People laughed when I suggested an HVDC link between North America and Europe.

Nordstream 1 was 1222km, and Britpipe now, is 60km shorter.

Boston to Lisbon is 5100km. Churchill Falls (home of a giant hydro dam project in Labrador Canada which got screwed by Hydro-Quebec because the only via transit was through Quebec), would be just under 4000km subsea.

The transit contract expires in 2039 I believe...

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#157

Post by fmajid »

entropicgravity wrote: post #149
redleader55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HVDC is now a thing. Collecting solar in Northern Austrialia and sending it to Singapore over a 3800km long transmission line. Under construction now.

There's this incredible project to build a 10GW solar farm in Morocco (1/3 of UK peak consumption) and bring the power to the UK via HVDC cable. Amazingly they estimate only 10% losses despite being over 3800km long:

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?

And then there are pumped hydropower storage project like this one with a proposed storage capacity of 200 GWh and 1.5GW of power:

https://www.coireglas.com

In the worst case, couldn't the excess power simply be used in electrolyzers to generate hydrogen? They may not be very efficient but it's better than throwing free energy away.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#158

Post by tialaramex »

grey-area wrote: post #111
archydeb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the article here Electricity prices in the UK (and most other places) are set by the marginal unit, which is the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. All other generation for that time period gets paid the same price. The marginal unit in the UK is usually gas, hence the sensitivity to gas prices

Is that a good idea? It doesn’t sound very sensible to price everything at the cost of the most expensive unit, why do they do that?

What price do you think we should pay for the electricity?

Suppose we insist we'll pay less than the price you agree to sell for. Obviously that's not a sale, that's robbery. This problem arises even if we agree to pay everybody the average, because some suppliers didn't bid average, their bid was higher, but we still claimed their electricity, so we are stealing from them.

OK, suppose we decide we'll pay all accepted bids at their bid price regardless of the marginal unit cost. If we do this the supplier is incentivised to guess the bid we will accept, so as to collect the difference between their actual price and the price we're willing to pay. If they're very good at this, we pay exactly the same as now, but, regardless of whether they're good at it the grid is significantly destabilized by the increased uncertainty due to lack of efficient price signals.

What other ideas do you have ?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#159

Post by seb1204 »

redleader55 wrote: post #39
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…

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…

The statement that we need all of them is not correct. Grid forming inverters and large battery storage will replace gas peak plants in the future. First to go are however the old coal and nuclear plants as they become unprofitable.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#160

Post by avianlyric »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #136
stdbrouw wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that's not what the article is about. If more wind power gets built in Scotland to serve needs in England, then increasingly more of that output will have to be curtailed because we simply can't move the energy to where it needs to be, to the point where the only thing adding more wind farms would do is to provide a tad bit more energy when there's hardly any wind to distribute. In all other scenarios, having…

The article leaves an impression that curtailment is a problem that is costing us money. See most other comments here as evidence of that. I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved. Burning fossil fuels is a problem to be solved. High electricity prices are a problem to be solved. Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power , which almos…

> The article leaves an impression that curtailment is a problem that is costing us money.

That’s because curtailment does cost us money. Someone’s paying those wind operators to turn off the farms. We literally pay money to wind farms to explicitly make them produce nothing.

How do you reconcile these two statements?

> High electricity prices are a problem to be solved.

> I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved.

Curtailment cost money, you still need pay the wind operators to the energy you told them not to produce, plus pay someone else to produce the energy that’s now not being produced by wind. That cost ultimately ends driving up the price of electricity.

You want to reduce the cost of electricity, a good start would be not paying people for electricity that can’t be used.

> Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power, which almost inevitably increases the amount of wind curtailed.

Only if you can transport the energy. Otherwise you’re just building turbines that can’t be used, and paying for the privilege of not using them.

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