211–220 of 396 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope they will have good anti-submarine defences. And one more strategic dependency on another country.
Are you referring to Morocco or a potential future independent Scotland :-) ?
- pay $x for y joules of wind
- pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x
I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UK government? Owning things? Surely you can't be serious...
They seem to be re-nationalising the railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Railways Maybe not: "The Transport Secretary announced on 19 October 2022 that the Transport Bill which would have set up GBR would not go ahead in the current parliamentary session."
It's just another example of the hubris of the Conservative party. We've seen it play out repeatedly over the last decade and even earlier in Thatcher's neoliberalism. Labour's lurch to the right resulted in displays of similar small minded arrogance. Their undermining of the NHS through piecemeal privatisation is nothing short of a crime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
On top of the above you want to make a profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
I really feel like you misunderstood the article. Perhaps you went into it with a different assumption of what it was going to say. The article is saying that if we built more transmission lines, or increased storage capacity, or had localized pricing, that more of the power generated would get used, and we wouldn't need to turn on the fossil-powered plants as much. More wind wasted is precisely equal to more fossil…
The North Sea Link is 720 km long and costed only £1.6 billion and took only three years to lay: https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operat... So a new 440 km long cable for £3.4 billion done in 2029 seem like a crummy deal.
Yeah. The cost objection seems like learned helplessness. A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008. 1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot... 2. "UK productivity continues lo…
Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse.
Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Varying output from a nuclear plant is mostly achieved by simply releasing the generated steam into the atmosphere instead of sending it through the turbine[1]. But operating a nuclear plant in this fashion pushes up the price per MWh considerably given their very high cap-ex and op-ex. And while fuel cost is negligible for nuclear, creating more nuclear waste per useful MWh generated is a further drag on costs. So a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting complicating factor here is that much of the UK's installed base of CCTG stations were built during the 90s with the intention of replacing many of the smaller coal-fired stations, which would typically be doing 2-shift operations (i.e., day and evening). Now, those CCGT stations are increasingly used to counterbalance renewables, and (as you point out) are now running on much shorter cycles than they…
It won't be long (perhaps in the next 2-3 years) before the UK grid will be able to operate for periods without any CCGTs running at all. We've already come quite close this winter, with record low CCGT output and record high wind turbine production. Wind turbine output, although variable, is also fairly predictable: so good modelling and scheduling should ensure that when CCGTs do operate, they can run as efficientl…
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/national-gri...