Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

grid.iamkate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 313 posts

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

#281

Post by kalleboo »

bjackman wrote: post #187
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 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…

Our Mitsubishi heat pump water heater has integration with some solar systems and weather services to attempt to time hot water production to solar peak.

We don't have solar panels but have a solar energy plan (cheap during the day, expensive during dawn/sundown, average overnight with fixed hourly schedule independent of actual production) so for us it's just programmed to follow a fixed schedule of prioritizing filling up during the solar hours and 100% forbidden from filling up during the expensive "duck curve" hours.

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

#282

Post by zajio1am »

themoose8 wrote: post #229
xp84 wrote: post #216

Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed…

Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even…

The same system is used all over EU.

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

#283

Post by hvb2 »

rlpb wrote: post #265
hvb2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The cheaper producers who cannot meet the full market demand still get to sell at the cost of the most expensive product.

Which would mean it's super lucrative and your same laws of economics will tell you that that means they'll be building like crazy.

My while point was that as soon as you get to a day where no gas is needed you've lost the ability to react quickly because no supplier will just leave a gas plant around just for that

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

#284

Post by tsoukase »

Adapting to a fossil fuel free society damands to comply to some inconveniences, like to afford some days without or expensive electricity, to change the time of device use, even to be used to lower home temperatures. For me the most difficult part is to persuade my wife to comply. Fortunately I have solar/battery/netmetering and I only pay a small amount for the network use.

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

#285

Post by vizzier »

gambiting wrote: post #107
traceroute66 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iran To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards. Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to ov…

I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.

Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.

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

#286

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…

This presentation suggests that BESS is used to keep the frequency stable, and remove huge price spikes:

https://cigre.org.uk/web-cont1001/uploads/Integrating-Grid-F...

This suggests that there is evidence for these sort of issues somewhere else on the web.

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

#287

Post by ZeroGravitas »

hvb2 wrote: post #8
ghighi7878 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity. Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nucl…

I've read this before and I don't understand how this doesn't become/is untenable. Doesn't this mean that solar/wind are insanely lucrative? Also, this would mean that in order to really bring the price down, gas needs to be taken out as a source. But gas is typically the source that balances the grid because its output can be changed quickly. So price wise, you might get a drop but you would lose your ability to rea…

Renewables (and nuclear) have high up front costs and comparitively low marginal cost. Comparing it against something that burns expensive fuel can be misleading (if you want it to be).

One system is taking the money and turning round and handing it to their fuel suppliers, the other is turning round and handing it to the people who loaned them money to build a giant complex structure that would take a decade or more of risk and uncertainty to pay itself back.

Gas bids high because it literally makes no business sense for them to operate for less than the gas input costs. They'd rather sit it out when electricity prices are lower. Renewables will take almost any price once built because wind and sun is free, but won't build in the first place without a path to paying off their investment over a certain timespan.

(This is why more solar has been built in places with good low risk finance than where the sunlight resource is strongest)

CfDs are a competitive bidding process and so give a market price for what developers need their price to be over 15 years or more for it to make a standard return on investment. Developers outside this process need to guess what electricity prices will be, at the times they generate for years to come.

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

#288

Post by GlacierFox »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #256
GlacierFox wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a Chinese company to own 1 billion pounds of energy infrastructure in Scotland.

Because?... This would have been a factory to produce wind turbines, which would have benefited the country. And I thought net-zero was a priority. Essentially all solar panels are made in China. All our car factories are foreign-owned, and even nuclear power plants are.

Because? I just said. I'd rather _China_ don't own 1 billion pounds of our country's energy infrastructure. Are you being coy or are you seriously that naive? Utterly perplexed you need more of an explanation.

And all those things you mentioned. I'd rather they were all home-grown but I can live with the French having a chunk of our Nuclear - because I like the French.

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

#289

Post by youngtaff »

Worksheet wrote: post #201
belorn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the fixed costs in this? Here in Sweden I have seen a strong trend that as the grid has become more variable and connected to the European grid, a larger portion of the bill becomes fixed. For most part of the year, the fixed costs are now greater than costs that scale with consumption. Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost…

Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK said: "Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs." Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk f…

> I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy. Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.

The CfDs set a floor price when there’s lots electricity being generated by renewables but they also contribute to bills when the market price is over the strike price

Electricity bills are higher because we’ve had two fossils fuel shocks in the last 5 years and the costs for decarbonisation are added to electricity bills rather than gas ones

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

#290

Post by youngtaff »

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…

If it’s all due to the reliance on wind and the floor price CfDs set why does the price spike when oil and gas prices rise?
Post reply on HN