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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

#341

Post by ccalloway »

avianlyric wrote: post #277
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?

Because the wind providers have already sold that electricity in an energy auction. So the grid has to pay them for electricity, even if they can’t use it. One of the big points in the article is that there’s a single energy market in the UK that doesn't consider location. So it’s possible for wind providers to sell energy from locations where it can’t be used. An obvious fix is to introduce multiple energy markets f…

This isn't a real economic loss. Claiming it is, is tantamount to saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#342

Post by ccalloway »

mcfedr wrote: post #287
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…

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

But by framing it as a problem of 'curtailment', it looks like a problem which gets worse and worse, the more oversupply of wind capacity that we have. In actual fact, this does not make any sense.

Building additional wind generation can never be more wasteful than the costs of its construction. If it were free, it would make sense to vastly overbuild.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#343

Post by pydry »

dTal wrote: post #339
pydry wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as far as I know, there exists no proven, cheap, scalable technology to store power at grid scale at all It's called pumped storage. We dont need as much storage as people think. Solar and wind anti correlate and a vast amount of demand can be time shifted.

I was wondering if someone was going mention that. Pumped hydro is great, but it's not scalable. You need favorable geography to make it economical at all, and in the end it doesn't store enough energy to do more than smooth over transient grid fluctuations lasting a few hours. The UK is, relatively speaking, quite well provisioned with pumped hydro - its largest storage facility is Dinorwig in North Wales, which is…

The suitable geography is considerably less rare than the nuclear and carbon industries jointly like to pretend. This has been confirmed by multiple studies (I have posted them at least 3 times before because this talking point is sadly rather common).

Nowhere is currently "well" provisioned for pumped hydro given a solar and wind grid coz while they existed for over a hundred years they have never had to store that much energy. Newer, larger ones are being built around the world. Australia will be well provisioned soon.

Go back in time 10 years when solar and wind first became economic and people made similar comments about how little of it there was (1% of total power!), ignoring the unit economics completely. We are at that exact same inflexion point with pumped hydro.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#344

Post by HenriTEL »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #46
londons_explore wrote: post #29

If 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?

My understanding is that he's talking about a central entity that has full ownership of electricity delivery and production, by opposition to a free market of competing entities. Basically the centrally planned infrastructure you're talking about, not a real dictator.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#345

Post by mrjin »

alex_duf wrote: post #295
mrjin wrote: post #278

It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity. So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas…

For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account

Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#346

Post by cinntaile »

pydry wrote: post #312
dTal wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptical that renewables are cheaper than nuclear when one factors in the impossible amounts of energy storage required to make them meet the same reliability guarantees that nuclear (and fossil) can meet - indeed, as far as I know, there exists no proven, cheap, scalable technology to store power at grid scale at all .

>as far as I know, there exists no proven, cheap, scalable technology to store power at grid scale at all It's called pumped storage. We dont need as much storage as people think. Solar and wind anti correlate and a vast amount of demand can be time shifted.

The anticorrelation is mostly on longer timescales. Winter vs summer for example. On a daily or hourly basis the anti correlation is pretty much non existent and it's on these timescales that you would time shift demand. A quite common occurence in Europe is that large parts of Europe during winter have almost non existent air pressure differences for days or weeks on end. During these times neither wind nor solar is very helpful and other solutions are needed, not all European countries have the pumped storage capacity for that. LNG to the rescue I suppose, now that Russia is limiting supply.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#347

Post by ccalloway »

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.

But for most of the time, the marginal cost of electricity is the same across the UK. The transmission network is not usually maxed out, and this means that generation anywhere can meet supply anywhere for minimal cost.

Consumers already pay per-unit electricity costs which are fixed over a billing period, regardless of whether gross prices exceeded the consumer price, or dropped below zero, for small intervals during that period. So it wouldn't really make any sense to charge different prices in Scotland and England, only for the periods when they actually diverged due to lack of transmission. And if this occasional discrepancy was averaged over a billing period, it would probably be much too small to really affect demand.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#348

Post by ccalloway »

stuaxo wrote: post #126

Our system favours England over scotland, with the national grid charging Scotland much more to move energy around. With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...

That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#349

Post by dTal »

pydry wrote: post #343
dTal wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if someone was going mention that. Pumped hydro is great, but it's not scalable. You need favorable geography to make it economical at all, and in the end it doesn't store enough energy to do more than smooth over transient grid fluctuations lasting a few hours. The UK is, relatively speaking, quite well provisioned with pumped hydro - its largest storage facility is Dinorwig in North Wales, which is…

The suitable geography is considerably less rare than the nuclear and carbon industries jointly like to pretend. This has been confirmed by multiple studies (I have posted them at least 3 times before because this talking point is sadly rather common). Nowhere is currently "well" provisioned for pumped hydro given a solar and wind grid coz while they existed for over a hundred years they have never had to store that…

The largest pumped hydro facility in the world is Fengning in China, at 40GWh, and the second largest is Bath County in Virginia, at 24 GWh. Dinorwig's 9GWh is really not too shabby. Even Fengning would only power the UK for just over an hour. This is simply not the same order of magnitude for the storage you'd need to make it through a gray UK winter on renewable energy alone.

What's the longest period without wind and sun you're willing to provision for before you give up and tell the population they'll have to do without electricity for a bit? A day, a week, a month? Numerically, how much storage would that actually need? How many stations, how big? You'd need over a hundred Fengnings to power the UK for a week. Where would they go? I'm all for renewables + storage but you can't handwave these questions as FUD, it's a serious problem.

I suspect that if we committed to categorically eliminating fossil fuels, including peaker plants, the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants. Statistically, it'll happen at some point no matter how much storage you provision.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#350

Post by dx034 »

cjdell wrote: post #233

Wind in the UK has been doing really well recently and the grid has never been greener: https://grid.iamkate.com/ Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will r…

Just want to say how great the UX of that page is. I've used many data sources and pages that show power generation, this one is by far the most intuitive one. I wish it existed for more countries.
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