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UK announces commercial operations of longest land/subsea interconnector

nationalgrid.com

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

#111

Post by Reason077 »

cfn wrote: post #108
dubcanada wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you not just keep gas as a backup? I don’t see why you need both coal and gas?

I suppose gas and coal are sourced from different places and that may give some resilience to the system. They also serve very different functions in the grid. Coal is for baseline and gas is for peak.

Coal is very much used only for peak in the UK in recent years. The remaining plants (in fact, there’s only one still in service now) are kept on standby during winter and activated only when demand is forecast to exceed supply (plus a safety margin).

Gas is now more of a year-round flexible baseload, taking up the slack whenever demand is high and/or renewables production is low.

Nuclear is now the only true baseload in the UK - always generating more-or-less the same output except when they have to be shut down for maintenance, refuelling, or decommissioning!

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

#112

Post by tomatocracy »

cfn wrote: post #108
dubcanada wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you not just keep gas as a backup? I don’t see why you need both coal and gas?

I suppose gas and coal are sourced from different places and that may give some resilience to the system. They also serve very different functions in the grid. Coal is for baseline and gas is for peak.

These days, it's nearer the other way around in the UK - gas is closer to baseload (sort of) and coal has a profile closer to a peaker (especially when turning up/down rather than on/off).

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

#113

Post by doikor »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #34
martin-adams wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, but the problem they face is that they can't get any of the developers to want to build them because the ROI is set too low. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/what-wen...

That's a very recent phenomenon though right? Presumably the current rates of inflation have a big impact. It wasn't so long ago that we were seeing record low strike prices being accepted for offshore wind, down to about £40/MWh.

It’s mostly the fact that the more wind you build the less each turbine will make in profit as in general they all spin at the same time pushing the prices down when they produce electricity.

The solution is to increase demand during those moments and thus these new interconnects to Denmark and Norway. Other option is to build storage or new consumption (hydrogen, ammonia, e fuels, etc)

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

#114

Post by KaiserPro »

zeristor wrote: post #51
KaiserPro wrote: post #40

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.

indeed! there is a bottleneck between scotland and england in terms of grid capacity that needs to be solved. Its not cheap, and probably not as lucrative.

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

#115

Post by chmod775 »

o11c wrote: post #94
gary_0 wrote: post #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.

> weighs about 40 kg per meter For reference, a human child weighs about 15 kg per meter. But since humans grow in 3 dimensions, a healthy adult human will be around 40–45 kg per meter, similar to the cable. In our current overweight society, realistic adult humans are of course heavier.

Can you convert that to football fields?

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

#116

Post by corradio »

justinclift wrote: post #65
corradio wrote: post #5

If you’re curious, you can follow it live on https://app.electricitymaps.com Right now it’s transporting ~20MW from Denmark to the UK

Interesting. The map seems buggy for Canada. The "Country" map for Canada seems to be wrong, as it looks like it's subdivided into several pieces (as if it was the "Zone" view).

Indeed I’ve reported the bug here: https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/i...

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

#117

Post by tomatocracy »

askvictor wrote: post #99
KaiserPro wrote: post #40

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.

What are the reasons why an interconnect might be uni directional? I get that a DC interconnect might only go in one direction at a time, but might it not be able to change such direction that is?

Regulation and tax are big ones. The ElecLink UK/France interconnector was significantly delayed due to disagreements in how it should be regulated and taxed. Similarly, things like the EU Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism have the potential to make it unprofitable to import electricity into the EU without affecting exports (because even significant price discrepancies would be swallowed up by the additional carbon tax which might be imposed). (In the case of the UK the EU will likely agree to waive the carbon tax but it's not certain even there).

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

#118

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ta1243 wrote: post #53
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>For example Octopus Agile is charging under 5p/kWh from 2230-2300 today, and from 0600-0630 actually paid its customers 4p/kWh

I understand that, the market is trying to deal with an inefficiency in the system. What I don't understand is how removing those inefficiencies will lead to higher prices. If anything it should do the opposite.

The cap is incidental, I don't like it but it doesn't really have much to do with this.

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

#119

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hardlianotion wrote: post #33
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The interconnector is with Denmark, which is connected to other countries as well. Presumably it is this extra demand that could cause the price rise.

>Presumably it is this extra demand that could cause the price rise.

The cable works both ways.

Having an inter-connector opens the market to a larger pool of suppliers on both sides of the cable. You would expect this to lower prices rather than increase them.

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

#120

Post by tomatocracy »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #34
martin-adams wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, but the problem they face is that they can't get any of the developers to want to build them because the ROI is set too low. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/what-wen...

That's a very recent phenomenon though right? Presumably the current rates of inflation have a big impact. It wasn't so long ago that we were seeing record low strike prices being accepted for offshore wind, down to about £40/MWh.

There are a couple of things which are misleading about the quoted CfD strike prices. Firstly they are in 2012 prices. Secondly, they are inflated by CPI every year which means the market prices then lower than a true fixed price would be priced. Thirdly, in all rounds prior to the most recent round, what was granted by govt were actually options to enter into a CfD, so developers were able to walk away and replace CfDs with higher-priced market PPAs at COD if they wanted to (and many have indeed done that). As a result, the business plan which some developers have followed has essentially been to bid the lowest price they could get sufficient debt financing with and then try to improve on that with higher priced PPAs or finding financing willing to take merchant risk at COD.
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