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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

#191

Post by Reason077 »

fmajid wrote: post #157
entropicgravity wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capac…

> "Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?"

Absolutely. One HVDC link between Scotland and England (actually, Wales) has already been built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link

And more are planned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_HVDC

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#192

Post by epistasis »

kokanee wrote: post #98
epistasis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on the capex of the hydrogen equipment. It has to be extremely low to justify not curtailing.

Technically it depends on the levelized cost of hydrogen, which encompasses capex, opex, and a slew of other relevant inputs. Similar "levelized cost" formulas are used throughout the utility sector to make these kinds of decisions; what makes green hydrogen unique is simply that it is undergoing a spike in research and development right now that is drastically changing some of the inputs to the LCOH equation. https:…

This are good models for roughly continual usage of the equipment, but they don't model the use cases of operating capacity factors less than 60% for electrolysis, and it's likely that the capacity factor of electrolysis equipment powered by excess wind would be I in fact used to be somewhat optimistic about hydrogen as a long term storage mechanism for our excess renewables, until I saw models like these from NREL. Now I am extremely skeptical of any hydrogen from electrolysis unless it's from something like solar+storage facilities. (Which are actually being proposed now, which is very exciting!)

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#193

Post by ErikCorry »

blibble wrote: post #176
fmajid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capac…

> Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built? why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?

Strangely there already is one between Scotland and Wales and two more are proposed (see the article).

I suspect NIMBYism is a big part of the explanation. Airborne AC links are efficient but ugly. Underwater AC links are tolerated by Nimbies, but inefficient. So you end up with underwater HVDC links.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#194

Post by Vvector »

avianlyric wrote: post #160
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Curtailment cost money, you still need pay the wind operators to the energy you told them not to produce

Why? What are the real costs? Isn't it just a simple disconnect switch? Why do the wind operators get paid for not delivering power? Is it a contractual issue?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#195

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I notice that the curtailment for today happens to coincide with the lowest demand at 5 in the morning. Their screenshot also has overnight curtailment.

It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#196

Post by Reason077 »

blibble wrote: post #176
fmajid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capac…

> Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built? why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?

> "why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?"

Because there are bottlenecks in capacity on the synchronous grid that restrict the amount of power that can be moved from north-to-south (or vice-versa).

It works out better/cheaper/easier to bypass those bottlenecks with efficient undersea HVDC links than to try and build more terrestrial AC transmission lines.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#197

Post by rlpb »

fmajid wrote: post #157
entropicgravity wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capac…

> Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?

The article covers this and explains why it's not enough. Provisioning time for the links exceeds projected generation capacity increases in the Scotland.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#198

Post by grey-area »

tialaramex wrote: post #158
grey-area wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accept…

I don’t know much about it; that’s why I asked the question.

So the short answer is I have no idea, but I doubt we currently live in the best of all possible worlds.

It seems an odd pricing scheme which isn’t working well as gas becomes less desirable and renewables are a bigger part of the mix.

What you describe as paying at the bid price sounds like a free market to me - if you’re going to have a market mechanism perhaps it should use the market to efficiently discover prices, not impose a very odd pricing structure - if imposing nationwide prices, why have a market at all?

There are many possible alternatives:

Allow prices to float in a completely free market, and force suppliers to hedge (which they do anyway to some extent, but they could be required to).

Nationalise the national grid and energy production

Build interconnects and hydro storage to reduce reliance on gas plants and reduce the problem.

Set prices in regional markets to bring production closer to the areas with peak consumption.

Set prices by energy type (separate markets per type like fusion solar etc taking into account externalities).

Set prices by energy use (baseload, fluctuating, peak)

Defining pricing mechanisms is not robbery it is why we have a regulator!

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#199

Post by grey-area »

sampo wrote: post #173
grey-area wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would you decide, who has the right to pay at the cheap price, and who has to pay the expensive price?

There are many possible ways to decide (by region, by use, by type of energy production). At present we all pay exorbitant prices because the system is badly designed and badly planned.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#200

Post by Reason077 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #163
fmajid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capac…

The dumb thing is that electricity transmission and distribution are usually fixed. This already doesn't make sense because it's peak demand that drives the capex. Opex is peanuts. But the retail buyer doesn't usually see the negative/low electricity prices of high-supply+low-demand time periods for their "inefficient" uses that should still be economic.

> "But the retail buyer doesn't usually see the negative/low electricity prices"

There are electricity suppliers in the UK who offer prices linked to the wholesale price, including actually paying you to use electricity if the price goes negative. Quite useful for flexible loads such as EV charging!

https://twitter.com/DanielColquitt/status/139539635553586790...

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