The UK is wasting a lot of wind power • Hacker News Board

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#371

Post by dTal » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 1:35 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #363

dTal wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/21/six-terawatt-hours-of... 6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK. It is well within the same order of magnitude. >the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants because why build a solar or wind farm this year when you can instead wait 20 years for hinkley c to be fi…

>6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK.

That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country at a lower latitude with different weather patterns and vastly more space to put things like onshore wind/solar farms without running into NIMBYIsm, not to mention more hours of sunlight just from spanning 4 timezones. 6 hours of storage is not even close to enough for reliable renewable power in the UK. It wouldn't even cover a single windless winter night.

And even if we take it at face value, the scenario you linked involves masses of overbuild, over the course of nearly 30 years ("by 2050"), and still leaves 6% of energy coming from carbon combustion. If we start building nuclear plants now, even if we accept your premise that they take 20 years to build (they needn't, especially with scale), then we can get to zero carbon almost a decade earlier - and with minimal land use.

It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#372

Post by msandford » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

ccalloway wrote: post #370

msandford wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. > This isn't a real economic loss. Perhaps I'm misinformed on what economic loss is. To me, paying for something and not getting it is a loss. I go to movies, I buy popcorn, I spill popcorn. Movie theater says "tough noogies" to me that's a simple economic loss…

Obviously my original example, "saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance" perfectly fits your definition of economic loss.

I'm not sure I follow.

> 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.

I see where you're going with the example. I don't think insurance is a good example though, because insurance is decidedly different, at least to my mind.

If you pay for insurance, you got insurance. You're not prepaying for medical treatment, you're paying a small fee to be made whole again if the trip goes sideways. If you paid for insurance and didn't need to use it, you still were insured and got the peace of mind that comes with knowing you either A) have a great time on your trip or B) don't pay for an entire trip that you don't get.

Paying for curtailment is directly paying for something that you directly don't get. No intermediaries, no risk model, no nothing.

If I'm failing to understand, well, OK then! Great! Please do inform me. You rightly stated that I called you misinformed without backing it up. If you're going to say that your original example is obviously correct, maybe try explaining it then?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#373

Post by Panzer04 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #307

Panzer04 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what financial hedging and the like do - users and producers can sell power at guaranteed prices in exchange for missing out on price volatility. Ultimately, it's probably fairest that the wholsesale power market works the way it does to ensure guaranteed power - It costs money to provide a 100% service guarantee. It's worth noting there are some demand response initiatives and the like that are approaching th…

With the past winter it seems that people who do not want to pay a premium on power would prefer if the government then stepped in and paid it for them. With the Energy Price Guarantee program, customers don't need to bear the cost of 100% service guarantee. At this point there isn't really any part of the energy grid that governments do not subsidize. They subsidize companies that provide grid stability. They subsid…

And every step further removed the customer gets the less incentive there is to actually reduce consumption, particularly at the most expensive times of day. Subsidising that period when it’s only going to get monumentally more expensive to supply relative to the rest of the day seems kind of wrong.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#374

Post by prennert » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

brilee wrote: post #204

6% curtailment seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. Around 20-25% curtailment, it becomes economical to run those hydrogen electrolyzers part-time, even with the capital expenditures required. I wouldn't use that hydrogen gas to regenerate electricity, though - there are many industries that can directly consume that hydrogen gas and avoid the lossy round-trip from electricity->hydrogen->electricity. I…

Does your analysis rely on a localized energy market? Because with curtailment it seems to me that there is no incentive for energy producers to sell energy cheaply to factobatteries, right?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#375

Post by jopsen » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

louloulou wrote: post #246

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have two problems: 1) a lot of wind means there's too much power... that has to be used somewhere, that's why you have negative prices, to get someone to take that power off the grid and use it for something, sometimes useless, and someone has to pay for that 2) no wind means you still need gas, hydro, nuclear etc. powerplants, because you need power even when there is no wind and sun, so you need all the power g…

they should just mine bitcoin with it

I know it's a joke, but the if you buy equipment to mine bitcoins, you don't let it sit idle waiting for those few times a year that electricity prices are low.

You computer will be obsolete before you've made a return on investment.

The same problem applies to H2, etc, if the process is rarely used and the setup to do the process is expensive, then it's cheaper not to.

A plant that can produce H2 from electricity might be more expensive than the value of the power discarded.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#376

Post by epistasis » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #289

epistasis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's the only way to build lots of zero carbon baseload right now. Botch cheaper and faster than nuclear, it also regularly gets deployed with an extremely high success rate. Failure of nuclear builds is a huge huge problem that the industry has not been able to solve.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#377

Post by avianlyric » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

ccalloway wrote: post #341

avianlyric wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this even close to insurance? When you buy insurance you buy protection from risk, that risk exists regardless of if a bad thing actually happens or not, and you’re still protected even if nothing happens. There’s no economic loss there because you’re getting the product you paid for (insurance coverage, and a substantial reduction of risk), you claiming on that insurance is irrelevant.

A better comparison would be going on holiday, pre-paying for £100,000 of medical treatment at a hospital, and then never going to hospital. Then there’s clearly an economic loss, you’ve paid £100,000 of your real cash, and got no nothing in return. You haven’t even got protection from risk, because the hospital isn’t gonna help you if your luggage goes missing, but travel insurance obviously will.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#378

Post by londons_explore » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #89

londons_explore wrote: post #77

So why are these undersea cables so expensive? Lets do a little Math... A cable that moves 4GW of electricity 450 km is say +-1 million volts and 2000 amps. Assuming we want no more than 3% losses in the cable at full load, then each conductor needs to be 40mm diameter aluminium, at a total material cost of $3.6M To insulate a 1 million volt cable, we need 100mm of PVC - total cost $60M. And we'll obviously need a fe…

and the need for two of them in parallel to make them redundant from trawler and similar damages.

HVDC cables are typically built in pairs - the positive one and the negative one.

They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both.

But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing.

But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#379

Post by pydry » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #371

pydry wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/01/21/six-terawatt-hours-of... 6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK. It is well within the same order of magnitude. >the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants because why build a solar or wind farm this year when you can instead wait 20 years for hinkley c to be fi…

>6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK. That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country at a lower latitude with different weather patterns and vastly more space to put things like onshore wind/solar farms without running into NIMBYIsm, not to mention more hours of sunlight just from spanning 4 timezones…

>That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country

This is FUD.

You absolutely can if you are discussing orders of magnitude which we were.

Our fundamental disagreement wasnt about whether it was 8x fengnings or 6.5x but rather whether it was of the order of 65 or 6.5.

>It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.

Not impossible, just at great expense and it wasnt worth it. In 5 years less of France's electricity will be nuclear than it is now while still spending vast sums on new plants. They're officially hoping renewables will make up the difference.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#380

Post by debacle » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

mr_pinnen wrote: post #315

debacle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in curtailment. It's a fraught shell game. I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.

What is the benefit for enrolling in the program? Is it just money? Sounds like a very bad system indeed if the fines are lower than the payout.

You get paid an up front amount for enrolling, and then you get paid a per-event amount for complying, as well as different amounts for e.g. testing, having smart monitoring, etc.