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UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

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Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#51

The good thing about this is that its bidirectional, so can be used to offload ~4.2% of the total generation capacity of the UK, or should they need it, import that amount. That should also cut the tops and bottoms off the spot price of electricity.

A large amount of wind power generation is in Scotland, four further interconnects are being built to transfer this to SE England, but it’ll take a while.

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#53
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ It will bring more than £500 million in savings for UK consumers in the first ten years.” If you believe that I have a monorail to sell you! Why pass onto consumers what you can take as profit. Norwegian news is reporting that the price of electricity will increase a tiny amount (about £10-15 a year) in both Norway & the UK as an increased flow of power means more bidders for it, pushing the price up when power is…

>Why pass onto consumers what you can take as profit. Because other suppliers will outbid you. >Norwegian news is reporting that the price of electricity will increase a tiny amount (about £10-15 a year) in both Norway & the UK as an increased flow of power means more bidders for it, pushing the price up when power is scarce (which seems to be most of the time). That doesn't make sense, if energy is scarce in one cou…

It will lower the peaks of the prices, but at the same time increase the depths. Currently those on market driven tarrifs can sometimes get paid to take electricity, and certainly have low prices. For example Octopus Agile is charging under 5p/kWh from 2230-2300 today, and from 0600-0630 actually paid its customers 4p/kWh

With Denmark able to buy 1GW this will increase demand at the cheapest bits (when supply is high), but with Denmark able to sell 1GW it will increase supply and thus drive lower price.

The majority of people in the UK don't pay market prices for electricity and instead pay a government set "cap" which is based around hiding the actual cost in the marketing material because far too many people in the UK don't understand what you can do with 1kWh or how it affects your bill - some people on think that turning 30W of LED lights off makes a material difference to the monthly cost they pay for example.

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, and the UK is one of the largest builders of offshore wind. But Denmark has spare capacity, and UK electricity prices are high.

It’s not really said in the story, but this is a bidirectional connector. There are certainly times when the UK generates excess energy from wind.

Is that rare? I naively thought that all electrical infrastructure could flow in whichever direction there was need.

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#55
post #39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's surely more about convience, i.e. no one in Europe wants to actually deal with Russia so will faff around pretending they don't know who did it as long as possible

There's only three possible outcomes that have any chance of being true and none of them are good: - It was the Russians, and the demands by the public to respond might escalate the current situation from a nice contained proxy war into something that might get actual voters killed. - It was the Ukrainians, which would be politically awkward because we're supposed to be allies. - It was the USA, which would also be p…

Not sure it had to be a state operation. The attack could have been done by just a handful of guys with practically no funding. The pipe is not that deep underwater and would not require much incentive to blow.

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really said in the story, but this is a bidirectional connector. There are certainly times when the UK generates excess energy from wind.

Is that rare? I naively thought that all electrical infrastructure could flow in whichever direction there was need.

See "reverse power flow": https://roadnighttaylor.co.uk/connectology/what-is-reverse-p...

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#57
post #42

There is a nice UK grid dashboard too [0]. The UK grid is actually quite variable given the amount of wind input, so imports/exports tend to be quite twitchy depending on what's happening - frequently going to negative and also substantially positive on pricing. [0] https://grid.iamkate.com/

Unfortunately, Denmark has many of the same winds as the UK, so on the exact same days the UK has excess power, Denmark doesn't need power...

There is a 20 hour time difference from when the wind picks up in the UK until the wind picks up in Denmark

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#58
Lots of fun facts on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Link

> Annual transmission capacity of 12.3 TWh.

> The actual cable is made of copper, steel, paper and plastic and weighs about 40 kg per meter.

> It is similar in capacity and length to the UK–Norway North Sea Link.

Re: UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

#60

How come Denmark can produce cheaper and less carbon intensive energy than the UK? Can't offshore windmills be built in the UK too?

As further up in the thread, if a cyclone comes in on the gulf stream it arrives 20hrs earlier in the UK than in Denmark, and when significant wind power is built on the Irish Atlantic coast then there's effects will be amplified and a smoother renewable provision for now Europe will be available.
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