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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

#251

Post by MagnumOpus »

citrin_ru wrote: post #207
bee_rider wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?

Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.

“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.

If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#252

Post by blitzar »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch

> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating

1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#253

Post by nagisa »

aembleton wrote: post #199
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #37

This is why you don't let "markets" run things at national scale. Short-term profits and for-profit policy lobbying are utterly incompatible with building intelligent, robust, future-proof infrastructure.

> This is why you don't let "markets" run things at national scale. Even food distribution?

I suspect what they are alluding to is the perverse incentives that materialize when the market does not have an ability to adapt to real costs incurred based on the relative location between generators and consumers.

Food is a bad counter example here, as retailers are not prevented from adjusting their prices the further away you choose to live off major population hubs. OTOH electricity in many cases costs the same in the entire country (incl. UK.) This means that energy consumers are not incentivized by these expenses to consider the real costs of the grid. They will rather build a new factory/etc close to London where they might expect to have access to better workforce pool instead of in Scotland right next to the overproducing turbines.

NIMBYism against new grid infrastructure would also largely disappear overnight if the market actually made economic incentives (in a form of reduced electricity prices/fees) for people to accept infrastructure bringing that electricity to them. The way things stand today – when electricity costs the same to everybody in the country – of course you wouldn't want any works in your vicinity.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#254

Post by MagnumOpus »

mapt wrote: post #242
shawabawa3 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which…

If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift. You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.

The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.

In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#256

Post by blitzar »

manarth wrote: post #91
actionfromafar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows battery installations radiate 5G vaccines. Subscribe to my Kennedy-adjacent newsletter.

A vaccine against 5G? That'd really blow some peoples' minds!

Big vaccine and big telco just want to get their claws into you and then you will need boosters for 6G and 7G

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#257

Post by shawabawa3 »

jcattle wrote: post #229
adrianN wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. Steering demand will not work. Unless by steering demand you suggest forcibly moving millions of people to Scotland. You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity. Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more…

There are multiple issues, transmission is one, but supply+demand being out of sync is another

E.g peak solar is around 2pm, peak demand is around 7pm

Grid storage (including EVs and smart heat pumps) absolutely help with this second problem

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#258

Post by hylaride »

londons_explore wrote: post #249
amiga386 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement. 1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late. 2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarm…

The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.". It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like mo…

IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts".

NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#259

Post by ryao »

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…

I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#260

Post by physicsguy »

ta1243 wrote: post #236
physicsguy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suitable for wind and a lot of the places that are are less densely populated and so it affects people less there too.

Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.

It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"
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