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The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

ukerc.ac.uk

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Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#31

Post by adolph »

philipallstar wrote: post #11
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns. (Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has…

> the inevitable capacity meltdowns Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.

What population growth?

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#32

Post by leoedin »

philipallstar wrote: post #11
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns. (Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has…

> the inevitable capacity meltdowns Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth.

Is this really true in the UK? Electricity production in the UK peaked in 2005. It's down 20% on that today. The issue here is that in 2005 electricity was primarily produced in large power stations reasonably close to where it was consumed, while in 2025 it's increasingly produced in locations far from population centres. The actual ability of the grid to deliver power to the last mile isn't really a problem. The problem is that most of the houses are in the South, and increasingly large amounts of generation are in the North.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#33

Post by bardak »

Ekaros wrote: post #9
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns. (Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has…

I'm all for free market with some subsidiaries for backup generation for electricity generation. But transfer should be only publicly owned companies. Be it national for national grid and regional owned by suitable entity say municipality or group of them. Same goes for water and sewer. Maybe garbage could be mixed model. In big enough towns having multiple competing companies for removal is not unreasonable competit…

> Same could be said for part of bus networks

The only part of municipal/ regional bus network that is suitable for privatisation in a high labour cost country is contracting out operations. Ticketing, route planning andscheduling all should be under a central governmental authority. There is a reason that, outside of London, England has some of the worst bus services in the developed world

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#34

Post by teamonkey »

pjc50 wrote: post #18

The B6 boundary: https://www.neso.energy/publications/electricity-ten-year-st... The power lines follow the two main road links, the A1 and the A74/M6. I suppose that's not surprising from an access point of view. What is surprising is that the solution to NIMBY opposition is to route offshore and underwater, at considerable expense - and still getting opposition at the landing points. Fortunately one of the landing…

> And should probably be asking why new high usage AI datacenters are still happening in London.

Companies won’t be incentivised to move to Scotland unless there is regional power pricing in place, and both Conservative and Labour governments would rather shoot their own kneecaps off than offer tax incentives for companies to move to Scotland.

That said, there are two AI datacentres opening in North-East England. That’s still a long way for the power to travel, but I feel part of the reason is to soak up surplus wind power even if it’s not actually cheaper.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#35

Post by mytailorisrich »

adolph wrote: post #31
philipallstar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the inevitable capacity meltdowns Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. What population growth? https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

The UK has experienced the 2 largest annual growth on record in the last 5 years, with +755k mid-23 to mid-2024 alone [1]. Even your link shows about 11% growth since 2010 and higher growth rates since ~2004.

So we can argue about what "very large" means, but population growth is significant.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#36

Post by jcattle »

jayflux wrote: post #15

Transmission is a real problem and just like Nuclear, we haven’t improved it in the past 30 years. So both eastern green link projects (offering more capacity) are due to be finished in 2029, “ok” I think “but surely we’re doing some work onshore to improve the existing network in the meantime..” > Due to ongoing project work for increased power flow from North to South across two Transmission Owner (TO) regions and…

The german economic ministry has recently proposed exactly that. Slow the addition of more generation while the grid catches up. As expected this proposal did not go over super well.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#37

Post by ZeroConcerns »

philipallstar wrote: post #11
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Yeah, this whole "let's sell off state-owned infrastructure on the Free Market" hasn't worked out so well: not only in the UK, but also elsewhere in Europe, the handsome profits of those moves have pretty much evaporated, investments in upgrades have been severely lacking, and now everyone is pointing fingers due to the inevitable capacity meltdowns. (Note that I'm not opposed to privatization in general, and it has…

> the inevitable capacity meltdowns Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth. Just like water and housing. Money available is lowered by state-enforced price caps. Purchase prices are raised by state-mandated net zero rules that subsidise green sources.

> Capacity is constantly being hit by very large population growth

Europe has not been 'hit by a very large population growth' by any stretch of the imagination in recent years. Capacity issues are mostly due to deprecating natural gas, which has lead to an increase in solar, but that's just a minor issue when you look at industry migrating from furnaces to heat pumps.

> Just like water and housing

Water is squarely an agriculture thing and housing has been a shitshow forever. But thanks for bringing those up as well -- it's like a dogwhistle trifecta!

> state-enforced price caps, state-mandated net zero rules

Most parts of Europe lack those entirely. There are (less and less) 'green subsidies', sure, but funnily enough, the increasing cost of fossil fuels is doing most of the work here.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#38

Post by blauditore »

epgui wrote: post #22

It seems to me that a bigger issue is lack of storage. With battery storage acting as buffers we would normalize/smooth out required transmission rates.

All I keep hearing is that storage is crazy expensive. Otherwise this would be a very obvious solution to everyone.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#39

Post by ZeroGravitas »

throwawayben wrote: post #3

it is insane to me that they rejected moving to zonal pricing. zonal pricing would give incentive to move power demand closer to production, create costs to nimby-ism, and give the benefits of lower costs to those who live closer. but it might make energy cost more down here in the south east and (in particular) London while benefiting the North and Scotland so we can't have that

His conclusion point 8 covers this.

Basically it shifts risk to developers and we want developers to install lots of green energy over the next decade.

(I just noticed the recommended related article is research on exactly this topic)

There's other machanisms to incentivize demand closer to production, though whether they are being used optimally is debatable.

Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain

#40

Post by teamonkey »

benbojangles wrote: post #26

How do other countries cope

Different geography.

The majority of the UK’s population is in the South; it has a lot of wind capacity in general but especially in the very North. So the problem is getting it from North to South, not helped by how mountainous Scotland is.

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