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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

#61

Post by adrianN »

fidotron wrote: post #48
mixedbit wrote: post #32

I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example: * Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C * Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C * Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water Such overus…

You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck. It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negat…

I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#62

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

This is called re-dispatch. The market is setup up to treat Britain like a copper plate but the grid is limited north-south.

The solutions are:

1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.

2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#63

Post by Hikikomori »

mixedbit wrote: post #32

I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example: * Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C * Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C * Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water Such overus…

You can get price into home assistant and control any kind of device that it supports it, or hack it on your own.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#64

Post by mschuster91 »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #47
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…

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.

> Who opposes Power lines?

A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].

> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.

That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...

[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#65

Post by c0n5pir4cy »

vollbrecht wrote: post #5

The pressing question is, how much £ per £ lost need to be invested in grid infrastructure to reduce this number?

A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).

Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#66

Post by 3D30497420 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #55
mixedbit wrote: post #32

I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example: * Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C * Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C * Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water Such overus…

With flexible rate agreements, that's already possible, and some DIYers already are doing this - the problem is the interfacing. Heat pumps (and central heating systems in general) are notorious for being walled gardens, most freezers run on analog technology (i.e. a bi-metal strip acting as a thermostat).

I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.

Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#67

Post by sourdoughness »

mixedbit wrote: post #32

I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example: * Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C * Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C * Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water Such overus…

We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).

The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.

It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#68

Post by apelapan »

moooo99 wrote: post #21
rapsey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind turbines are not base load, so they do not lower electricity prices.

That is just false. Of course wind turbines can and do lower prices, regardless of wether or not they‘re base load not

They lower the prices a lot when they are producing at full tilt. This means that prices, at least to some degree, go up when wind turbines are not producing at full capacity, since the other power sources need to amortize their fixed costs across fewer kilowatt hours sold.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#69

Post by p_l »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #47
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…

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.

Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#70

Post by formerly_proven »

raverbashing wrote: post #29
daedrdev wrote: post #4

The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem. Sadly the government seems dar more interested…

NIMBYs dragging things down as usual They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well

It of course makes sense when you consider that statistically NIMBYs are mostly the property-owning class, which are mostly boomers.
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