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The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

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Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#81

Post by morepork »

ta545 wrote: post #57
teruakohatu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that all or almost all of the power you use is renewable. Adding more renewable generation in the South Island won't help the coal generation in the North Island. Right now, investment in infrastructure needs to be made to move power from Manapōuri to the North Island. As to why we are not replacing the 1.8m tons of coal we import from as far away as Indonesia with wind or solar in the North Island? I don'…

It looks like there's just one HVDC interaliand link capable of sending 1.2GW, and dating back to 1964. Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island. 10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill. https://www.researchgate.n…

The current HVDC link has had a lot of upgrades from the original 600MW to 1200MW now, and there are proposals to upgrade it further, but not nearly to the scale you suggest, as there just isn't the need for such levels of transmission.

Unless there were plans for major new hydro schemes in the South Island there's no particular reason not to just build new generation in the North. There is ample wind and geothermal in the North Island.

This would all change if the Tiwai Pt aluminium smelter were to close as that would leave a huge amount of generation that would need to go north to be used.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#82

Post by luuurker »

archydeb wrote: post #10
nateguchi wrote: post #3

One thing that I find hard to understand is how the electricity prices in the UK have gone up so dramatically (blaming gas prices) when a large amount of the electricity is not generated from gas. Is the price being artificially inflated?

Author of the article here Electricity prices in the UK (and most other places) are set by the marginal unit, which is the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. All other generation for that time period gets paid the same price. The marginal unit in the UK is usually gas, hence the sensitivity to gas prices

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Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#83

Post by fencepost »

I think one of the most important elements is buried - electricity pricing is uniform across the entire UK. That seems nuts to me, and incentivizes building in locations that are less useful - it's likely cheaper to build in Scotland, higher production from more wind, you get paid more (for expected yield plus curtailment apparently), and you have less wear on the equipment when you adjust to lower output.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#84

Post by TylerE »

fencepost wrote: post #83

I think one of the most important elements is buried - electricity pricing is uniform across the entire UK. That seems nuts to me, and incentivizes building in locations that are less useful - it's likely cheaper to build in Scotland, higher production from more wind, you get paid more (for expected yield plus curtailment apparently), and you have less wear on the equipment when you adjust to lower output.

Is the UK not a unified grid? Most of the US is. A kwh is a kwh.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#85

Post by user568439 »

Seems like factoring the location is the easiest solution. If energy were much cheaper in Scotland, some factories would move there, more people would move there as well and you would not need to transport so much energy across the country.

But I guess there are more things to consider than the energy in that decision.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#86

Post by nicoburns »

morepork wrote: post #28
mattcoles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that curtailment is needed to incentivise private businesses to invest in wind when the output and demand can’t be correlated, but if the government owned the wind farms then it wouldn’t matter if we wasted right? We could just always be overproducing and wouldn’t have to pay for it.

Assuming a competitive market, the outcome is essentially the same right? If the government builds more than would be economic for a private company they're paying the extra through construction costs/maintenance/financing that they would have been paying to incentivise the extra turbines.

> the outcome is essentially the same right?

Nope, the difference can be found in the profits made by the company that does in fact own and run the wind farms. The government could capture that should it wish to build them itself. This has been a hot topic recently with regard to fossil fuel energy generators who have been making large profits (in the billions) at the expense of people's energy bills.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#87

Post by mikaeluman »

The UK seems to have a very interesting situation. We also have a proposal for curtailment in Sweden for wind power producers, but for a different reason.

In the UK, curtailment seems needed due to power transfer capacity issues.

In Sweden it is purely due to grid stability reasons. As wind does not work as a baseload power source this becomes problematic as too much wind power generation can then negatively affect profitability for nuclear and hydro which are baseload power sources.

I would be interested to see how stable wind power production is across all hours and throughout the year in the UK. I imagine it's better than here, but is it good enough to support an industrial nation?

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#89

Post by zabzonk »

londons_explore wrote: post #77

So why are these undersea cables so expensive? Lets do a little Math... A cable that moves 4GW of electricity 450 km is say +-1 million volts and 2000 amps. Assuming we want no more than 3% losses in the cable at full load, then each conductor needs to be 40mm diameter aluminium, at a total material cost of $3.6M To insulate a 1 million volt cable, we need 100mm of PVC - total cost $60M. And we'll obviously need a fe…

and the need for two of them in parallel to make them redundant from trawler and similar damages.

Re: The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

#90

Post by jl6 »

epistasis wrote: post #74
jl6 wrote: post #70

That 70% energy loss in round trip conversion to hydrogen doesn’t look so bad if the alternative is 100% loss by not running the turbines.

That really depends on the capex of the hydrogen equipment. It has to be extremely low to justify not curtailing.

True.

I suspect that grid-scale electrolysis is near the very bottom of the economies-of-scale-S-curve and will have a promising future not just in power2gas2power, but also in producing the green hydrogen inputs needed for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels for hard-to-electrify applications like aviation.

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