The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain • Hacker News Board

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#271

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

keyringlight wrote: post #39

mytailorisrich wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is illegal to sell electricity directly to someone else. To sell electricity you need to be licensed as an energy supplier. So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".

With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't ex…

What you want is an electric car with "V2G" (vehicle to grid) technology. Still not quite publicly available yet.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#272

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

api wrote: post #228

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?

Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling. I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling. If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.

Agreed! That was what I meant, sorry for any ambiguity.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#273

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

tomaytotomato wrote: post #6

A family member lives on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines. However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper. The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust. Which seems bureaucratic? I wish we could have decen…

Is that Eigg? I thought they had their own micro-grid, but it sounds like they are subject to National Grid authority nonetheless?

> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation

Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#274

Post by tialaramex » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

bargainbin wrote: post #75

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.

It’s so prevalent there’s a dedicated term for people who oppose it: NIMBY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

And at its extreme BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone

It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#275

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

nashashmi wrote: post #60

Imagine if wind slowed down all across the country because of wind turbines. The long term effects would be less soil erosion and less mountain erosion and water turbulence. What would the short term effects be? Bird populations will find it more difficult to travel long distance with fewer winds? Temperatures would sore in some places while dropping in other places? Pollution will become more stationary instead of b…

The energy comes mostly from the Atlantic. You're not going to cover that in turbines.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#276

Post by syrgian » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value?

Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#277

Post by grues-dinner » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #259

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.

Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.

Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#278

Post by arethuza » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #269

arethuza wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything" I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and t…

A recent battery planning application got objections from the fire service on the grounds that its location might be difficult to reach (narrow lane) if it catches fire. Which is actually a reasonable objection? Fire codes are a thing for a reason. Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.

One of the other comments noted that a lot of organisations may be asked - but they don't have to respond. I was looking at the actual submitted documents for planning applications...

Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#279

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #251

citrin_ru wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.

Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.

On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#280

Post by amiga386 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

syrgian wrote: post #276

londons_explore wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value? Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).

Yes, but you have to factor in that you can't eat houses.

Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.