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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

#171

Post by jon_adler »

ratherbefuddled wrote: post #85
Angostura wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices. Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).

Having just had solar and a battery fitted by Octopus I'm interested - would you mind sharing what you use for automation here please?

Not op but may I suggest looking at Home Assistant, Octopus Energy Addin and Predbat: https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#172

Post by grumpy-de-sre »

arethuza wrote: post #94
grues-dinner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them. There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.

Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future.

Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.

The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.

The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.

I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#173

Post by cmsefton »

The craziest thing about UK energy is that it uses marginal pricing, where the price of energy is dictated by the most expensive generator to meet demand i.e. gas. Doesn't matter if your energy is coming from wind or solar, you're still going to be charged according to the price of gas. Until this can change, consumers are always going to suffer and think green energy isn't cheaper.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#174

Post by p_l »

ErikCorry wrote: post #130
p_l wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)

It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.

Germany is very weird in a certain way of total belief in power of free market.

So you see, the market was supposed to correct that.

But profit laid with cheap gas turbines to backstop wind and buying from france ;)

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#175

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mixedbit wrote: post #32

I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example: * Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C * Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C * Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water Such overus…

Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.

The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#176

Post by devnullbrain »

HPsquared wrote: post #136
grues-dinner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specifically, concern for house prices in a really myopic way. It's 'preferable' to hamstring the place you live in than to turn it into somewhere with a functioning economy that people want to live in.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#177

Post by Phil_Latio »

cedilla wrote: post #153
ghusto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he said > then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it. Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.

I don't know what the name of the internet law is, but I think it goes something like: when someone tells you about a regulation and how outrageously stupid it obviously is, they probably misrepresented it or frames it in an adventurous way. In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not for…

> In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions"

https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...

> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.

Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#178

Post by 1718627440 »

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.

Do you want to have power lines instead of a garden?

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#179

Post by adrianN »

jcattle wrote: post #133
adrianN wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#180

Post by littlestymaar »

cameronh90 wrote: post #123
littlestymaar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if such a system was set up, it would take years before the appliances where all updated to take advantage of it. And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.

Years isn't that long. The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040. Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and c…

Each year is a significant fraction of a government mandate though.
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