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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

#281

Post by oliwarner »

manarth wrote: post #140
oliwarner wrote: post #56

A couple of days ago it says wind cost us £1m. It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.

Pumped hydro is an approach that is in use on the grid today, and has future proposals earmarked for development. https://www.coireglas.com/project The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.

Dinorwig is an amazing place to visit. Not sure if they're open right now but go if you can.

Yeah, I like pumped hydro and even with its lower efficiency, it's cost effective... but I live in the Fens and I'm looking at solutions that work everywhere. Local storage is going to be more important once a significant portion of the country has an EV and heat pump.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#282

Post by bee_rider »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #239
mapt wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a rational reason to do that?

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…

It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them.

OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.

On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#283

Post by pbmonster »

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.

Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed.

So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.

Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#284

Post by yrro »

arethuza wrote: post #19
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.

We're a windy island surrounded by sea - which seems to be pretty ideal for wind generation going by the number of huge projects underway?

Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind.

https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml

16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore

To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#285

Post by MalcolmDwyer »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #172
arethuza wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The young folks that I've talked to...

Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#286

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

bee_rider wrote: post #282
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…

It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them. OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all. On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized…

> if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely

What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#287

Post by bee_rider »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #286
bee_rider wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them. OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all. On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized…

> if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?

I feel like I discussed that in the second half of my post, so I’m not sure how to respond to this question.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#288

Post by gandalfian »

People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#289

Post by sameesh »

amiga386 wrote: post #154
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…

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…

spawn more overlords!

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#290

Post by punnerud »

ErikCorry wrote: post #141
misiek08 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like UK, like many other countries, already have grid that can't cope with casual usage and transferring power from farms to users. Adding "renting" of grid sound like it could make it even worse (if possible).

The Norwegian grid is divided up into different regional grids and they each have different electricity prices. Those who build interconnects between the areas can get some of the price difference. It's very different from the UK market, which pretends to have a single area, runs auctions to determine the price and then has to make post-auction adjustments (in the billions) to fix the fact that electricity can't be t…

This is a layer way lower than that, this is between solar farms and buildings, solar farms and close factories. Not big electric zones like that.
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