The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
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Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#2> Well, that brings us to the oft-ignored elephant in the room: transmission capacity.
This is a well-known issue in the UK, which impacts new solar and wind projects but also charging stations, and large-scale charging in general, and even new developments in areas of too much demand.
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#3it 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
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#4> Well, that brings us to the oft-ignored elephant in the room: transmission capacity. This is a well-known issue in the UK, which impacts new solar and wind projects but also charging stations, and large-scale charging in general, and even new developments in areas of too much demand.
Yeah - I wondered about how "quiet" this driving force was. It's certainly a big issue, but the network operator (NESO) published a big paper after the government asked them to suggest how achievable net-0 by 2030 was, which really specifically called out the need for much larger transmission capacity.
I work in the energy sector and hear it mentioned a lot, but I don't really see it published in the media a lot.
In all honesty, most of the dialogue around energy is just unhelpful and partisan - a lot of it seems critical of the idea of a cleaner network, mainly on the assertion that it's making things more expensive. My understanding is that the opposite is true, but either way, I don't often see much discussion of anything past "clear energy bad".
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#5Yeah, 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 worked out very well in other sectors, noticeably Telecoms, but I'm not aware of it bringing long-term happiness anywhere when it comes to Energy)
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#6it 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
They abandoned it because it does not solve anything and it is political suicide. Most people would have ended being forced to pay more than they already pay without alternative, so would not have helped solve grid constraints, either.
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#7> This usually means turning wind farm output down in Scotland, because we can’t safely export it south, and replacing that energy in the South, typically with gas generation.
Thats super fucked!
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#8There are two things we can do with energy, move it across space or move it across time. Moving it across space requires transmission infrastructure (which is state owned or rapacious corp owned -- very slow to build or upgrade; rent seeking, regulatory capture). The other option is to move across time, which is using batteries. Cars are rarely driven more than ~20 mins/day which make them the ideal energy storage devices. We could even say their primary purpose is energy storage. Just like today's 'phones' are no longer for making calls but for content consumption. When all cars are EVs and can do V2X (vehicle to grid, to load, to home, to anything), it becomes a gigantic, resilient, distributed energy reservoir.
For providing this service, all car (EV) owners must be paid to give the utilities permission to dump excess production and to supply energy back to the grid when needed. Right now, most of the electricity costs are from peak costs (mostly peaker electricity costs). There is no reason that this infrastructure can't be provided by the EV car owners.
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#9Yeah, 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 competition. Same could be said for part of bus networks.
Re: The Quiet Driving Force Behind Rising Curtailment Costs in Great Britain
#10it 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
They abandoned it because it does not solve anything and it is political suicide. Most people would have ended being forced to pay more than they already pay without alternative, so would not have helped solve grid constraints, either.
Could you explain more? It appears economically self evident to me that it would improve the situation but I'm not in the industry and there's probably much I don't understand.
I would say that improving transmission seems like a much better solution but again I think zonal pricing can help there as it could then be more easily sold to the public as being able to import the cheaper (say) Scottish energy to your local zone, whereas at the moment there's no apparent direct cost associated with blocking pylon projects forever.