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Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

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Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#261

Post by dotancohen »

jahnu wrote: post #139
dotancohen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korea builds nuclear power plants in five years.

Not any more they don't. Those were older reactor designs which nobody wants now. And the 5 years was first-pour to switch on. Add a few years for planning, permitting and actually supplying to the grid. Newly approved Korean plans are aiming for 2038. Best of luck to them. I'm sceptical they'll make it. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/plans-for-two-ne... Edit to add: They used to be pretty fast but like…

Thank you for the correction.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#262

Post by zeristor »

There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used.

One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there…

There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”.

My understanding is this is being written to an automatic system which isn’t fully commissioned.

Grid battery owners a few years go were irate that they weren’t in the offing to sell power. But that must be resolved by now, since so much money is being invested in it.

Unless that is for non-grid power supply.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#263

Post by zeristor »

zeristor wrote: post #262

There are grid scale batteries on the UK grid. Surely they’re being used. One could work out what the discrepancy between consumption and production during the day to infer the battery discharge rate, but I don’t think there’s anything there… There has been talk, seemingly power generation dispatch a year or so ago was do e by phoning up the power station and saying “More amperes please Mr Woodbine”. My understanding…

I mean negative prices should diminish if there are batteries to charge on it.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#264

Post by hvb2 »

appstorelottery wrote: post #254
card_zero wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered what the ratio of traditional windmills to modern turbines is, and the answer is about 36. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-does-the-... Maybe you should build them 36 traditional windmills instead. Or, like, 9 traditional-looking giant ones.

In terms of public acceptance, you're probably right. The Dutch in my experience love the old windmills, but modern wind turbines are in a different league in terms of harvesting the power of wind efficiently. Blade design is comparable to the aircraft wing design (seriously complex engineering). In my post above I talked about seeing the Vestas V164 in person, but I've also been on top of the tallest wind turbine in…

I don't think that's true. For one because the size is what makes it efficient/worth it. Second, the old windmills have all been there forever, so no one complains because they don't know any better.

Keep in mind that a typical windmill and a wind turbine are very different in size. Some people are afraid of noise, or shade. Especially if your home will be shaded by the blades, I could see that being an issue as you have flickering light all the time.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#265

Post by rlpb »

hvb2 wrote: post #56
rlpb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative? This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want. Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you s…

Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business. In the electricity scenario, that would mean blackouts. If you triple the price, you don't have a new gas plant appear out of thin air. And the result won't really be lower consumption either, because most people would have fixed rate contracts (not in the UK so don't know specifically, but this is very common elsewhere)

> Sure, but those same free markets will happily see those expensive producers go out of business.

No, because remember you are only able to meet 10% of market demand. The expensive producers will still get 90% of the business, and the market price for their product will remain basically the same. This is what we observe in the electricity markets today: the price to us is the cost of the most expensive product. The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#266

Post by teamonkey »

swarnie wrote: post #168
teamonkey wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not currently happening in the UK. A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to c…

Are you sure? The Octopus subreddit seem pretty convinced they get negative pricing when its windy.

It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.

This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#267

Post by ZeroGravitas »

idiotsecant wrote: post #213
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it. It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.

You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there . Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewabl…

It is literally written into regulations in many places that renewables aren't allowed to go above certain percentages even for short periods e.g in Ireland they are raising the cap by 5% every so often with an aim to get to 95% by 2035, it's currently 75% and was 50% when they brought in that particular rule.

In Australia they keep reducing the number of synchronous generators that are required to be connected as they gain more experience.

Renewables started as fringe tech and are now a trillion dollar industry. But they faced skepticsims at every stage along the way.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#268

Post by rlpb »

teamonkey wrote: post #89
rlpb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative? This is how markets are supposed to work. It provides an economic incentive for production to increase, which is what we want. Consider what happens if you develop a farming method to produce potatoes for a fraction of the usual cost, but you can only meet 10% of total demand at your local market. What price are you going to sell your potatoes for when you s…

Yes, but here’s the thing: you don’t have a monopoly over your potato farming method. Lots of new farms are built, and the more that do, the more the average price of a potato drops. Your expected return starts to drop. Yours - and everyone else’s - profit margins get squeezed. Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new fa…

> Investors begin to refuse to build new potato farms because a return on their investment gets worse whenever anyone decides to build a new farm.

If they all refuse, then they're leaving money on the table. One investor could invest in 10% production only, and that would be very lucrative. It would be exactly my low cost to produce potato scenario.

In practice, they don't all refuse, or all invest. The market finds a balance. In time, producers switch to the new method, because anybody who doesn't leaves an opportunity for someone else to take their business and make more money.

This takes time, though. If we want things to go quicker, then we need to guarantee return on investment for longer, which is exactly what the government does by guaranteeing prices to renewable energy producers.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#269

Post by thebruce87m »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #146
djhworld wrote: post #109

I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…

I'm on a similar tariff in the UK and just had a 10kwh battery installed which is just amazing for shaving off all the load between 4-7pm. Whole system installed was ~6k GBP and I think my payback time is going to be < 5 years which I'm super pleased with.

I would also like to know the company name please.

Would love to get a Forster battery + invertor system installed. Seems like the battery is £2k for 16kWh and maybe £1k for an inverter? so interested in your cost breakdown.

https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#270

Post by thebruce87m »

fastasucan wrote: post #200
rwmj wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend has a car which can charge only when prices are low. I'm not totally sure how it works though, does the smart meter communicate this to the car?

No the smart meter communicate with the charger.

Or the car. Octopus in the UK can control both cars and chargers depending on compatibility. They control my Tesla as my charger isn’t compatible.
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