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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

#281

Post by avianlyric »

liketochill wrote: post #222
avianlyric wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curtailment is never a bad investment. If anything it’s fantastic for wind investors. Someone is paying you twice for not using your assets. You get all the revenue, and have zero wear and tear on your equipment. In an extreme scenario you could even be paid for not turning on non-functional equipment. What a fantastic deal.

Generally outages, deratings, and unavailable equipment have to be reported to the system operator. Not doing so and then claiming for lost revenue from broken equipment due to curtailment would be fraud.

Already happens unfortunately. Usually because the fines for failure to produce when you’re actually called upon and much smaller than profits from pretending to have production capacity.

With regards to fraud, doing this deliberately would be fraud (but good luck proving it). Building the equipment and then failing to maintain it, and failing to test it, that’s just bad management…

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#282

Post by avianlyric »

bluGill wrote: post #216
Vvector wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Contract. They have to pay for the the bank for the wind turbines even if not used. They have to pay the land owners (or the bank for the land, and government taxes). You also need to pay various employees. Thus you don't open a wind farm without some form of contract. On top of the above you want to make a profit.

Nothing to do with any of the above. Purely a function of how the energy markets in the UK work. There’s no contract providing you with a long term guarantee that the current situation will continue, and the grid doesn’t care if you go bust.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#283

Post by adrianN »

cbmuser wrote: post #276

Yes, that’s one of the main problems with volatile generation. You often don’t get the power when you need it and vice versa. This isn’t news though and the reason why Germany is returning to goal despite of having installed 130 GW of wind and solar generation capacity.

No, the reason Germany is burning more coal is because they stopped importing gas from Russia and supply France with extra electricity while they repair their nuclear reactors. It has literally nothing to do with the volatility of wind power.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#284

Post by mcfedr »

makomk wrote: post #217
SamBam wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thing is that some of those options (especially building more storage) might actually be more expensive and less practical than just building even more wind and letting a lot of the power from it be "wasted".

That assumes the problem of building wind far away from usage changes, right now most new wind is still being built in Scotland, and the problem will get worse not better without also investing in transmission

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#285

Post by adrianN »

TylerE wrote: post #84
fencepost wrote: post #83

I think one of the most important elements is buried - electricity pricing is uniform across the entire UK. That seems nuts to me, and incentivizes building in locations that are less useful - it's likely cheaper to build in Scotland, higher production from more wind, you get paid more (for expected yield plus curtailment apparently), and you have less wear on the equipment when you adjust to lower output.

Is the UK not a unified grid? Most of the US is. A kwh is a kwh.

Unfortunately there is no big copper plate in the ground connecting all of the UK. Transmission capacity between different parts of the grid is limited.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#286

Post by mcfedr »

Vvector wrote: post #194
avianlyric wrote: post #160

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?

Because when they built a wind turbine they assumed all the time it's windy they would be making and selling electricity and that's all part of the calculation that made it a worthwhile investment.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#287

Post by mcfedr »

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…

Curtailment of wind wouldn't be a problem if it's just because too much wind, but that's not the case, there isn't enough transmission, and we are having to use gas, that is a problem

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#288

Post by adrianN »

perilunar wrote: post #265
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.

Why are electrolyzers so expensive? The glass ones used in school labs are stupidly simple — just some glassware and a couple of electrodes — so why are they so expensive on an industrial scale?

Industrial electrolyzers are usually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_electrolyte_membrane_e... which is a bit more complicated. But you also need to consider storing the hydrogen and turning it back into electricity.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#289

Post by jl6 »

epistasis wrote: post #192
kokanee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Why is solar+storage different?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#290

Post by eftychis »

To the commenters saying that wind farms should move South or blaming wind farms or other energy producers. (My opinion and knowledge follows.)

That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures.

Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y.

My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past.

I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power.

P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."

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