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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

#271

Post by amluto »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #191
declan_roberts wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation. In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880

Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift? That seems counterproductive and exploitative.

PG&E doesn’t even give all its time-of-use ratepayers the same peak hours. The rates are nonsensical.

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

#272

Post by demosito666 »

gendal wrote: post #258
djhworld wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....that being said, when you see stuff like this page and news articles about cheap renewable power etc, there are A LOT of negative reactions to it (even evidenced by the comments on here!) because for most people in the UK they never really see any direct benefit - energy prices seem to keep going up and a lot of people are on contracts with fixed rates that rise often. I'm not sure what the solution is, I know th…

Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale. This is because the wind farms don't get paid the wholesale price. They get paid their guaranteed, index-linked CFD strike price. This means that, for every £1/MWh drop in the wholesale price, they get an exactly…

In other words, betting on wind (or sun) where there is little wind (and sun) is not an optimal choice. But folks on HN were telling otherwise. Who might’ve known…

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

#273

Post by bronson »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #113
bronson wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because PG&E is a for-profit company. They are supposed to charge what the market will bear.

Unfortunately since PG&E is a regulated utility it's not that simple.

When you compare PG&E's electricity rates to the rest of the nation (and neighbors like SMUD), you can see that the CPUC isn't doing much.

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

#274

Post by 3form »

djhworld wrote: post #208
bjackman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power. I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay functi…

I think freezer could be comparable, no? How many cycles of dishwasher are you running per day?

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

#275

Post by irishcoffee »

djhworld wrote: post #179
irishcoffee wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade back, in the US, the local power company would give you a discount if you used less energy than average during peak hours. At the time I had a vacant rental, very little energy use. (FWIW I’ve since sold it, being a landlord isn’t a good time) I watched a specific neighbor go through great pains to honor this system and so as to reap the benefits of a much lower bill. Sweating their buns off during the hotte…

There is an element of truth in that if you go to the extremes, where it's almost definitely not worth it. I don't sit in the dark during the peak times, during the week I'm working during that time anyway and I still have my monitors etc on. It's just I don't usage high-draw appliances like cookers during that time. I eat dinner after 7pm anyway. Also I have an EV, but don't commute or travel long distances regularl…

I contend you’re still saving the cost of a lunch meal… per month.

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

#276

Post by oskarkk »

marcosdumay wrote: post #206
piva00 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.

Yeah, the idea of people claiming that something on the Great Britain is too far and can't distribute power to something else on the Great Britain is laughable. Next we'll have somebody from Lichtenstein saying the same about their country...

Well, I only said that if we're considering a ~fully renewable energy generation in the UK, with supply evened out by massive pumped storage projects, then locating all the storage in Scotland isn't ideal for the efficiency of the system. But yeah, I looked up the losses on HVDC lines, and it seems to be a non-issue (at least from a technical point of view). I also looked at a map of wind power[0] - seems concentrated on Scotland, so the distance from generation to potential storage would be quite short.

[0] https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-wind-power-t...

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

#277

Post by rimunroe »

muskstinks wrote: post #217
bjackman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

I'm following battery prices and you can now get 25kwh for 3.5k. This will be a solved problem a lot sooner for a lot of people. A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.

> A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.

Over what time period, and where? My geothermal system draws about 1200 watts when heating our large house on the coldest days of the year

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

#278

Post by pseudohadamard »

upofadown wrote: post #198
bjackman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.

In my case I've got a contactor on the house power board that disconnects the hot water at night, so it's only heating off solar power. You can also get specialised solar diverters that do the same thing, but they cost literally ten times as much and only squeeze a tiny bit of extra efficiency out of the system.

If you do go down this path, make sure you insulate the crap out of the cylinder and surrounding water pipes, mine only heats once a day and that's once the sun's providing the power for it.

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

#279

Post by nl »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #72
traceroute66 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or actually brcause gas is expensive. Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017. Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is de…

The study you have linked is completely wrong. There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion. This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing o…

> There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex

I live in Australia and I assure you there is a huge international market for gas. It's one of Australia's major exports.

Also in Europe the Russian sourcing of gas is a major strategic factor in energy policy.

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

#280

Post by pseudohadamard »

declan_roberts wrote: post #126
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…

That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation. In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880

Australia has that in an even more extreme form, although it's more an emu curve there. In fact the CA one isn't really a duck any more either is it?
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