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The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

wastedwind.energy

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Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#131

Post by lmm »

_kidlike wrote: post #111
wongarsu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one…

they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc... General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody…

> Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.

No it doesn't. The customer has low risk appetite and would rather pay a premium for predictability.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#132

Post by grues-dinner »

lars512 wrote: post #114
myrmidon wrote: post #108

It's good to raise awareness of this. I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is no…

Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.

UK domestic electricity is roughly equal to industrial (94 vs 82 TWh). Commercial is 62. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a286564785...

A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.

And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#133

Post by jcattle »

adrianN wrote: post #61
fidotron wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck. It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negat…

I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand

This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).

The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.

This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#134

Post by gadders »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #47
grues-dinner wrote: post #30

Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-... . And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like th…

Who opposes Power lines? Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.

Who do you think campaigns against power stations?

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#136

Post by HPsquared »

grues-dinner wrote: post #80
notTooFarGone wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who opposes Power lines? Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.

People oppose everything. * Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds * T-frame pylons: boring ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr... ), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too * Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores…

House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#137

Post by cedilla »

Phil_Latio wrote: post #99
cedilla wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't you build wind turbines in Southern Germany? "Generally less wind" does not mean "wind power is infeasible", which it is absolutely not. There are fewer good spots, but that's why, say, the state of Bavaria aims for less than one fifth of the total capacity than the state of Lower Saxony, despite being almost twice as large. It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents pe…

I wrote aggressively expanded. It doesn't make sense to build wind in a region where it's only profitable due to subsidies. > Wind power is so cheap Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastruct…

Electricity prices are only very tangentially related to production cost. As you say yourself, grid costs are a factor.

> France has lower electricity prices

France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).

If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#138

Post by rjakobsson »

Gigachad wrote: post #27
SXX wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even of we agree it's a good idea most likely this doesn't make financial sense. Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.

True. But if the energy is free then you could probably use last gen hardware too. It must not be worth it still since no one is doing it.

People are doing it, it's just early.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#139

Post by Oarch »

grues-dinner wrote: post #30

Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-... . And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like th…

Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#140

Post by manarth »

oliwarner wrote: post #56

A couple of days ago it says wind cost us £1m. It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.

Pumped hydro is an approach that is in use on the grid today, and has future proposals earmarked for development.

https://www.coireglas.com/project

The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.

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