Curtailment, like negative prices, seems like something that it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about.
Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
Balancing a nationwide power grid is very complex. Some energy sources can be started and stopped instantly, but are limited - water. Others are plentiful, but unpredictable - wind. Others are predictable, but take a long time to start and stop - gas, coal(several hours), nuclear(1 day to start, fast to stop, but very expensive). A balanced grid will need all of them, will need them in quantities which can cover faults in the big producers(a nuclear reactor makes 700-800 MW). They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances, for cost and grid stability reasons.
> Others are predictable, but take a long time to start and stop - gas, coal(several hours), nuclear(1 day to start, fast to stop, but very expensive).
The start time is long but that does not say much about the overall operations.
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute
> In France, with an average of 2 reactors out of 3 available for load variations, the overall power adjustment capacity of the nuclear fleet equates to 21,000 MW (i.e. equivalent to the output of 21 reactors) in less than 30 minutes.
Despite the insistence that Closed Cycle Gas Turbines can't react quickly, because they're by far the largest component that we could start and stop the UK does in fact very quickly increase and decrease output from the CCGTs. For example this morning 2.79GW at 0600 to 3.89 at 0700.
There are much faster options, batteries, import, even the pumped storage is seconds instead of minutes - if available, but CCGT is just not that slow to change compared to the weather. In that same period the wind power went from 10.9GW to 11.4GW. 500MW is a lot of power but it's not more than 1.1GW
... most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design)
to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once
or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated
power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
One trouble is that changing the power output does put stress on components because of thermal expansion and contraction, potentially shortening their lifespan, but it something that can be designed for.
1.6 GW per reactor for the latest ones under construction (Hinkley Point C) and in development (Sizewell C). Each site has 2 reactors for a total of 2 x 2 x 1.6 GW = 6.4 GW.
Although this is largely just replacing the UK's existing fleet of reactors, almost all of which will have shut down by the time Hinkley Point C comes online. Of the current 5 operating UK nuclear power stations, only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028.
> "They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances"
One of the reasons offshore wind has been so economic & successful in the UK is they can usually plug in to existing, redundant transmission lines left behind by decommissioned coal and nuclear power stations, which are often on the coast. It's relatively cheap to connect to the grid when the infrastructure is already there waiting: you just need to build the cables from the turbines to the shore.
You can transmit a lot of power long distances with HVDC systems. 2GW systems are in development (TenneT 2GW platform & 525kV DC cables) & HVDC interconnectors can be several hindered km long…
The statement that we need all of them is not correct.
Grid forming inverters and large battery storage will replace gas peak plants in the future.
First to go are however the old coal and nuclear plants as they become unprofitable.
I'm not sure I understand. Sure, letting turbines spin and not use the power, while burning extra gas, isn't worse for the environment than just burning gas in the first place (though it's significantly more expensive to triple-pay for the energy), but it's better is to turn that unused power into used power.
The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
The article says we pay three times, curtail wind and then burn gas. Which is bad.
But all the solutions are aimed at reducing the curtailment of wind. Rather than reducing the gas burnt.
If the money saved by building more wind (or solar) and not having to burn gas saves more money then who cares if more wind is "wasted"?
It would be nice to use every last drop, but I dont want to actually spend money to achieve that goal when it could be used to e.g. build yet more wind, and burn even less gas.
The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
But it was missing the most obvious long term solutions for excess wind power: carbon capture and hydrogen generation. We cannot build enough excess wind power to ever have too much for those “sinks”.
I've worked in curtailment. It's a fraught shell game.
I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.
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.
Depends on what you mean by overproducing. The energy put into an electrical grid must be balanced by demand or bad things will happen. I think the second answer in the below StackExchange is a good description.
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.
Tell that to Ofgem. The latest price settlement for electricity transmission and distribution networks (RIIO-T2 and RIIO-ED2) has cut the amount of investment the networks are allowed to carry out.
> the National Grid pays the windfarms to turn off, and pays a (typically gas powered) alternative generator, closer to the demand, to turn on.
Curtailing wind means paying someone else to generate that energy in the “right” location, which usually means burning gas. So all the extra wind being built isn’t reducing amount of gas being burned, it’s just increasing the total cost of electricity.
> Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
We can build all the wind we want, but if connected to consumers by nothing more than a long extension lead that barely run a kettle, then it’s totally useless. The wind needs to be located so the energy generated can actually be transported to end users. Curtailment is basically a direct measure of the amount of wind we’ve built, that can’t actually be used. Building more isn’t helpful in the slightest.
The article certainly doesn’t advocate for reducing the amount of wind built, quite the opposite, they just point out we need it built in the right places so we can actually use the energy produced. Rather than built bunch of wind turbines that will forever be pointed out of the wind.
1) a lot of wind means there's too much power... that has to be used somewhere, that's why you have negative prices, to get someone to take that power off the grid and use it for something, sometimes useless, and someone has to pay for that
2) no wind means you still need gas, hydro, nuclear etc. powerplants, because you need power even when there is no wind and sun, so you need all the power generating capacity covered even without wind
But that presupposes we can actually supply enough electricity to where it's needed. We already hitting the limits, thus the curtailment and burning gas. Adding more capacity unless it's in the right place doesn't solve the issue.
The example given was christmas day, when most industry stops, when the wind was blowing strongly. (UK heat is mostly gas, not electric).
It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that.
Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days.
It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly.
Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
The problem is that there was no wind in the coldest days of December when we needed electricity the most. Building more of something that goes to zero when you need it doesn't help. With huge storage capacity, maybe, but even the author of the article doesn't seem to think storage is particularly practical.
I don't think the suggestion is to replace gas generation facilities with wind, but to concentrate new power generation on wind.
The incremental cost of keeping a gas generator working is very close to zero compared to all the other expenses involved in building the plant and buying gas to burn in it. We can keep all our gas infrastructure around and simply use it less often if we have more wind.
6% curtailment seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. Around 20-25% curtailment, it becomes economical to run those hydrogen electrolyzers part-time, even with the capital expenditures required. I wouldn't use that hydrogen gas to regenerate electricity, though - there are many industries that can directly consume that hydrogen gas and avoid the lossy round-trip from electricity->hydrogen->electricity.
Agree. It's also a given that a renewable grid has to be overbuilt. Current estimates are by about 50%.
I don't know what the current target is, but 6% is well below what it will eventually be. The article suggests building more physical infrastructure, but that comes with its own cost and environmental impacts, ironically.
Does your analysis rely on a localized energy market? Because with curtailment it seems to me that there is no incentive for energy producers to sell energy cheaply to factobatteries, right?
If the UK were ruled, and all decisions made, by a benevolent dictator, then the solution to this problem is easy. Consider every option of where to build the wind turbines, and where to build power cables, add up the cost of every option, and choose the cheapest (environmentally and/or monetarily) that gives everyone the power they need.
An ideal market would produce the exact same result right?
Well not quite... And this is a classic example.
With the current policy of location-independent markets, wind producers build in the best spots, and don't care about the massive expense (to the grid operator) of moving the power south. That isn't the ideal solution.
With the new proposed policy of per-location markets, the grid operator 'makes money' by moving power from places of high generation (low prices) to places with high demand (high prices).
But wait... That isn't the ideal solution either. The grid operator has an incentive to maximize their own profits, and if they ship too much power from north to south, then the price difference will be lowered, and their profits will decrease. So they will underbuild deliberately.
But wait you say - this is an ideal market, so there is no monopoly grid operator. In this ideal market, there are many grid operators, each competing to move power from the north to the south, and if one operator deliberately underbuilds, then another will build more to capture that profit. The end result is cables will keep being added till the money to be made equals the cost of the cables...
And that is equal to the ideal benevolent dictator solution!
But... That assumes a cable costs a certain £ amount per MWH transferred. But real cables have efficiencies of scale - one large cable is more money efficient than many competing small cables.
And considering that, you're back to the single-cable-operator problem. In the market, they are a monopoly and will underbuild. If they aren't a monopoly, whoever has the biggest cable takes all the profit, and becomes a monopoly. And if you artificially force there to be 10 small companies competing, then there will be 10 small money-inefficient cables.
There is no perfect answer, except a (non existent) benevolent dictator!
You really don't see any middle ground here? I feel like a rationally and centrally planned infrastructure not based on market incentives is not that hard to imagine, whatever your political beliefs are, why resort to some kind of philosophical thought experiment of the dictator?
My understanding is that he's talking about a central entity that has full ownership of electricity delivery and production, by opposition to a free market of competing entities. Basically the centrally planned infrastructure you're talking about, not a real dictator.
And who would have thought that any dictator/ political party (either lefty or righty, it doesn't really matter) couldn't come up with a decent solution ["vote for us, we will solve your problems"] like they always seem to promise? After 10+ years....
Publicly owned old technology is very different to attempts to publicly develop next generation power, which tends to require brave entrepreneurs historically.
Natural monopolies should be centrally planned, because in this case the market competition is between nations on the basis of which one is an efficient and therefore cost effective place to operate. Companies don't set up competing mail rooms in the same building, that would be insane. It's less obvious at a national scale but economically just as silly to try and introduce competition where it would not naturally exist. The same principals also apply to railways, water, roads and phone lines.
A slight adjustment to this is that the single-cable-operator can become a monopoly because of government regulations. Permits, planning permission, running roughshod over objections (see HS2, Heathrow third runway). So the ideal market can never materialise. We (citizens/subjects) are somewhat okay with this. Most people do not want the free market criss-crossing the countryside with operators laying cables across whichever farmers accept money from them.
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.
Funnily enough this used to make sense. When you were burning coal, generation skewed north and its cheaper to generate close to source and transport energy. Now, transport of energy is a significant cost, but it’s difficult to price/support that, and the industry/national grid have been working very hard on smart grids for exactly this reason.
But for most of the time, the marginal cost of electricity is the same across the UK. The transmission network is not usually maxed out, and this means that generation anywhere can meet supply anywhere for minimal cost.
Consumers already pay per-unit electricity costs which are fixed over a billing period, regardless of whether gross prices exceeded the consumer price, or dropped below zero, for small intervals during that period. So it wouldn't really make any sense to charge different prices in Scotland and England, only for the periods when they actually diverged due to lack of transmission. And if this occasional discrepancy was averaged over a billing period, it would probably be much too small to really affect demand.
The US runs three major grids: East, West, and Texas. There's interconnections, but capacity is limited. Sounds like the UK is similar here with the bottleneck between Scotland and southern England.
Within the US grids, there's really subgrids with interconnection and bottlenecks, too, but those interior bottlenecks aren't brought up as often as say overnight wind production in Texas being over local demand as well as interconnect capacity.
Unfortunately there is no big copper plate in the ground connecting all of the UK. Transmission capacity between different parts of the grid is limited.
I don't live in the UK nor work anywhere near the energy sector, and yet I found this a really fascinating, clear read that opened my eyes to many issues I'd never considered before. Thanks.
To the commenters saying that wind farms should move South or blaming wind farms or other energy producers. (My opinion and knowledge follows.)
That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures.
Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y.
My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past.
I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power.
UK has managed to cheap skate on many different fronts. When money was cheap they went on a cost cutting spree for a decade when they should have been using all of that money to invest in services and infrastructure. Now everything is crumbling.
Scotland has a different legal system and even historically insisted upon separate versions of otherwise national concerns - for example that is why there is a "National Trust"[1] and a separate "Scottish National Trust".
Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament this tendency has only accelerated.
[1] A charity that maintains stately homes and other historic artefacts
Yeah. The cost objection seems like learned helplessness.
A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008.
The UK conservative party is peak neoliberal. The cabinet is/was largely made up of people that have openly written proposals on how to dismantle national services.
Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse.
Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
I assume that cables aren’t all equal, eg maybe the new one carries more power or is more efficient or the sea floor makes it harder to lay. It could still be a good deal even if the upfront cost is higher.
I guess there could also be accounting shenanigans, eg if you pay $x upfront and $y over several years, you could focus on $x if the project seems unpopular and focus on $(x+y) if the project shows a popular serious investment in a government policy.
Our system favours England over scotland, with the national grid charging Scotland much more to move energy around.
With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network.
That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.
I know quite a bit about most of the things discussed in the article from having worked for a renewables company and yet I learned quite some new bits I didn’t know about, for example the intra-UK submarine HVDC connectors (and their eye watering cost). Not a very long article but packed with clearly written and valuable information. Great stuff
Imagine someone invents low cost high temperature superconductors which enable fusion reactors, to much fanfare. Until everyone slowly realizes that we can use those same conductors to balance low cost electricity globally for less money.
Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out.
Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables.
I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.
In the Netherlands they are going to build two new nuclear power plants but the company wants assurance that they don't have to compete with the massive wind mill parks on the North Sea.
Not really a new problem for the Netherlands whenever there is a problem the country tends to overreact with massive infrastructure spending. It hasn't been that long that brand new coal power plants had to be closed.
Just want to say how great the UX of that page is. I've used many data sources and pages that show power generation, this one is by far the most intuitive one. I wish it existed for more countries.
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 few mm of steel + more PVC on the outside for protection from the environment.
And now add in the manufacturing cost, and the cost to get it into place...
Your comment reminded me of
"No Time on Our Side," a book about a submersible laying cable near the UK that sunk after a hatch failed during recovery operations. The author (who was a pilot in the submersible) details the incredible rescue effort to bring them back to the surface alive over a period of about 3 days.
A wonderful book and also one that made me appreciate how hard it is to lay cable (in some places).
HVDC cables are typically built in pairs - the positive one and the negative one.
They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both.
But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing.
But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.
Here is what I do not understand about these kinds of dynamics: Are they not the perfect way to encourage the creation of energy storage companies and technologies?
It seems like there is a massive opportunity to purchase energy when it is cheap or even negatively priced, figure out some way of storing it, and then sell it back once the price is higher. Over time, this could stabilize the grid and encourage development and scale benefits in energy storage.
Where are these companies? Are the technologies not yet efficient enough, even when the price of electricity is negative? Or is this technology being deployed already?
EDIT: Well turns out this is covered in the article. Hoping there will be more development in this direction in the future!
6% is not really a lot. I guess batteries can be profitable if you cycle daily. But at 6% curtailment, they would've been used only a few times a year. You'd need really cheap storage for that.
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.
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.
Technically it depends on the levelized cost of hydrogen, which encompasses capex, opex, and a slew of other relevant inputs. Similar "levelized cost" formulas are used throughout the utility sector to make these kinds of decisions; what makes green hydrogen unique is simply that it is undergoing a spike in research and development right now that is drastically changing some of the inputs to the LCOH equation.
Why are electrolyzers so expensive? The glass ones used in school labs are stupidly simple — just some glassware and a couple of electrodes — so why are they so expensive on an industrial scale?
California is facing a similar issue dealing with its solar duck curve[1], where prices essentially go negative during periods of peak solar generation.
As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap.
One example is producing hydrogen from water with excess power. It can then be added to the natural gas network, or used by trucks or trains, or stored for a power plant.
Spot prices are the best in order to save the planet so to speak. People will waste energy when it's cheap aka pay with their wallets.
A lot of EU household's pays market price for the electricity.
So does NZ.... Man this place blows especially in Canterbury where I am. Nearly every single day it's windy enough that it annoys and sometimes ruins being outside. I must say 3 to 4 times a week 'f** this windy hole' to someone.
Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.
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't know.
Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal.
There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south.
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.
Yes NZ is baffling. NZ is a place which could easily be 100% renewable with very little investment. There is plenty of wind, sun and the large hydro power station could serve as backup/storage. However I see dramatically less windfarms and solar installations than in a place like Germany which has much less sun and wind.
Not to be pedantic, but the roaring 40s are by definition not the trade winds. The trade winds are easterlies- they originate from the east and blow towards the west. The "roaring 40s" are westerlies, flowing in the opposite direction and categorically not the trades. Incidentally, NZ is an amazing place to take up wind sports, so I'm with you on the larger point.
There is more capacity on the way, but planning/approving these things is slow. The beauty of wind power in NZ is that the more you have spread around in different places, the more more hydro lake capacity you can keep up your sleeve for when it is needed.
There is a lot more wind power than there used to be. Getting wind farms consented is hard because people always seem to come out of the woodwork and complain and ruining the scenery, or the noise, or whatever.
But I think the bigger issue is that due to the amount of wind that has already been built, peak demand happens on cold still nights in winter. Building more wind without storage doesn't help there, and that's when they're forced to fire up all the gas and even coal turbines at Huntly.
It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity.
So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.
For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account
Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.
This sounds great, but in reality, this concept is also a curse.
Moving Bitcoin miners is much easier than building transmission lines - potentially discouraging funding for the infrastructure needed to move the energy where it is more useful.
I remember reading of BTC mining companies moving their infrastructure right next door to remote coal fired power plants, getting extremely cheap rates, which otherwise might have been completely decommissioned due to transmission costs.
At Earth scale it's not human generated heat that's the problem.
The problem (simplified) is that vast amounts of energy from the Sun fall daily across the globe.
An amount of that energy generates a great deal of heat at the land surface and ocean layer.
Much more heat by magnitudes than humans create.
Some of that heat warms the land, water and lower atmosphere, a great deal of that heat radiates outwards toward space ..
A balance was struck that's been more or less "just right" on average for some 200K years.
We have altered that balance by increasing the insulating properties of the lower atmosphere via increased CO2 (with worse flow on effects from increasing methane and water vapor).
This additional trapped energy is causing more powerful atmospheric events and increased mean tempretures.
But the cause is insulating in very large amounts of energy, not generating small amounts of energy (at the appropriate relative scales).
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?
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
My understanding is most wind was bought at a guarenteed price by the government at the time of construction, so a wind farm producing 1MWh gets paid say £40 regardless of the cost of electricity on the grid - even if marginal cost was £20/MWh
As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?
The price of electricity in the UK is linked to the most costly supply in the entire mix. So if gas is the most expensive then we pay all other power-producing suppliers, regardless of means of generating, the wholesale price we'd pay for gas. It's a strange system.
The marginal price of electricity (i.e. the price of the most expensive source) is what drives the retail cost, because it's a liquid commodity that can't (to a first approximation) be stored. Imagine 90% of your electricity comes from wind and the last 10% has from gas because there is nothing else - the price of electricity is going to equal the price of gas because the wind providers can raise prices until they're just under the price of gas, since there are no other options. The most expensive form of electricity sets the price until it isn't needed anymore and is booted off the grid entirely, but once you cover that last 10% with wind then the price falls dramatically.
In theory this is what we want: the windfall profits on cheap power during periods of expensive energy are supposed to attract the market to build more of these plants and chase those profits, thereby accelerating the green transition. But it's possible what we saw last year was too much, and that the damage to the economy (nothing strangles economic growth like expensive energy) does more harm than this incentive does good. People are talking about renegotiating power agreements in Europe to pay fixed prices for renewables so this wouldn't happen again, but I haven't heard how likely this is to succeed.
The way it works in the EU—not sure if the UK participates in this market still?— is that every energy source is priced according to the most expensive energy source until demand is covered by supply.
So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
There's a couple reasons. A small amount of electricity may be generated from gas, but that small amount is often crucial and in a lot of demand. Furthermore, peaker plants will produce less and less electricity as more renewables reduced their duty cycle. But the overhead cost of maintenance remains: reducing a gas plant from running 10 hours a day to 2 hours a day does not result in a 5x reduction of cost.
The whole system as detailed in the article seems pretty artificial and not great. For some reason prices appear to be set at the national level, ignoring the fact that Scotland has an excess of wind energy. If consumers could see that the price difference on their end, I guess there’d be more incentive to upgrade the infrastructure and get it down to England more efficiently.
If gas is setting the price as the most expensive form of energy, then it acts as an incentive to build cheaper forms of energy because your margins are that much higher.
Alas, England doesn't allow on-shore wind power, and there's not sufficient capacity (in terms of HVDC lines) to transfer enough power from Scotland down to England to move all of the excess energy.
No, first understand the concept of market clearing auctions[1], then understand that the there is a dispatch stack (that looks like something like this [2]), and that gas plants are the marginal producer required to balance the market, as they are not baseload (nukes) and not intermittent (renewables) but are dispatchable (ramp up/down capacity as need to balance the market).
You can't base your electricity prices solely or even mostly on an unpredictable source of generation, which is nearly absent one day and generates more power than is needed on another day. Efficient storage is a long-term fix for this, but it ain't here. Natural gas is the most flexible source of on-demand power, so it (disproportionately even to its share of 1/3rd of all generated power) affects consumer electricity rates.
A couple possibilities. It could be competition from other countries with a different mix (e.g., the price in the UK has to compete with other countries or it'd be exported to the degree possible)
Power is also sold (ok, not sure about the UK) at the market price. So the most expensive generation needed to meet demand determines the market price. So even if gas is a small portion of the generation it could still determine the price.
Given the point in the conclusion about planning relaxation not really helping to move future turbines closer to people, it seems that the sensible approach would be to factor any power network upgrades into the cost of wind when looking at TCO and ensure that the generators contribute to it. That, plus a small location-based payment bias plus eventual demand-based payment are all likely to be necessary - if oil/gas prices remain high, it is unrealistic to keep paying the same high cost per MWH to wind farms forever.
I notice that the curtailment for today happens to coincide with the lowest demand at 5 in the morning. Their screenshot also has overnight curtailment.
It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.
I have a tangential question (and I truly do not mean to be provocative with it, just curious): Has anyone put any effort into figuring out how much impact we have on air movement in general with windmills? Like, is there a scenario where we could negatively impact the environment by capturing "too much wind"?
This is an interesting study in that topic, I would have thought the answer is no to your question, but possibly a very large wind farm could change wind velocity/temp and thus have a knock on effect.
One has to wonder if the fixed costs of some kind of electricity -> fuel production will ever get cheap enough to solve this problem. If it would pay, it would be great for there to be a factory on stand-by to make, e.g., hydrogen or ethanol using the extra energy.
This report on congestion in the Australian NEM is pretty good reading on the concept of electricity network congestion and some of the market mechanisms that have been used to account for it, and some of the ways in which they can result in non-optimal outcomes. It's quite approachable:
I don’t understand the reason for the triple cost for curtailment. Like it seems the obvious options would be:
- pay $x for y joules of wind
- pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x
I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?
> evidence from Texas suggests that windfarms do not end up near population centres even in markets with locational pricing and liberal planning laws
The windy part of Texas is not the part where most people live. The western part of the state and the panhandle are windy but also pretty dry. Most of the people live more toward the central or eastern part of the state where it's greener but less windy.
Pricing incentives may just not be enough to overcome that.
Very good article. As far as the options presented I think transmission lines are still the best bet, along with storage.
Storage can come in many forms including at a customers residence via batteries or thermal storage. Not all of these options need to be cycled daily to make financial sense. In the U.S. we have an insane number of people that maintain days worth of storage as fuel for their generators only to be used infrequently when the power goes out.
Negative prices on power i.e. curtailment, is the perfect use case for Bitcoin mining.
Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power?
May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy.
I haven't followed the technology very closely, but it was my understanding that large scale storage of hydrogen isn't here yet, if it ever will be?
And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc.
It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business.
However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight.
Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
Bitcoin would be a perfect use case, immediate turn on/off installation and giving actually a very good return on the money, especially at producer level. Either way, if I were a British tax payer I'd hate this current situation. Any solution, even hydrogen production which looks like a terrible idea, would still be better
3 billion pounds (the estimated cost of the HVDC link) seems like it would install a LOT of local storage which would alleviate problems from both the transmission blockage and the bursty nature of wind power.
HVDC links are a good thing, but why is storage not the first step?
No, the reason Germany is burning more coal is because they stopped importing gas from Russia and supply France with extra electricity while they repair their nuclear reactors. It has literally nothing to do with the volatility of wind power.
UK has an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation. There is a project to re-forest the north coast to coast. Then these trees can be also burned for energy as biomass.
Deforestation is historic, your comment implies it is recent.
We know from comprehensive aerial photographs of the UK taken by Germany in the 1930s/40s that the UK has much more forest coverage now than it had then.
The UK switched to coal beginning in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth because of the lack of forests providing a source of wood. The current reforestation projects have nothing to do with "an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation". There isn't any recent deforestation - just the opposite in fact.
Banning construction of wind farms on all of England is possibly the stupidest governmental decision I've ever heard of. This entire problem would go away if they had just allowed some wind farms.
That's not an entire summary, I think. The lack of local (or nodal, as it's often called in the US) pricing means that there's comparatively little incentive to build new transmission. The UK is not a large country, and we routinely build much larger transmission lines (if I'm not mistaken, the UK is the geographic size of Texas, where the exact same problem is being solved effectively).
My comment was somewhat of a critic of the terse headline. Adding a small amount of information to the cryptic headline removes a lot of perceived mystery.
Your statement answers the question, "why is long distance transmission price high?"
Years ago, renewables opponents kept making baseless claims that no grid would be stable with large amounts of renewables. It's now end of 2022 and for this year we've seen on multiple occasions power grids running perfectly fine on very large amounts of renewables with very little gas.
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?
It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
Curtailment, like negative prices, seems like something that it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about.
Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
Balancing a nationwide power grid is very complex. Some energy sources can be started and stopped instantly, but are limited - water. Others are plentiful, but unpredictable - wind. Others are predictable, but take a long time to start and stop - gas, coal(several hours), nuclear(1 day to start, fast to stop, but very expensive). A balanced grid will need all of them, will need them in quantities which can cover faults in the big producers(a nuclear reactor makes 700-800 MW). They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances, for cost and grid stability reasons.
> Others are predictable, but take a long time to start and stop - gas, coal(several hours), nuclear(1 day to start, fast to stop, but very expensive).
The start time is long but that does not say much about the overall operations.
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
and https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/power-plants-cold-st...
> In France, with an average of 2 reactors out of 3 available for load variations, the overall power adjustment capacity of the nuclear fleet equates to 21,000 MW (i.e. equivalent to the output of 21 reactors) in less than 30 minutes.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
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> but take a long time to start and stop - gas
Despite the insistence that Closed Cycle Gas Turbines can't react quickly, because they're by far the largest component that we could start and stop the UK does in fact very quickly increase and decrease output from the CCGTs. For example this morning 2.79GW at 0600 to 3.89 at 0700.
There are much faster options, batteries, import, even the pumped storage is seconds instead of minutes - if available, but CCGT is just not that slow to change compared to the weather. In that same period the wind power went from 10.9GW to 11.4GW. 500MW is a lot of power but it's not more than 1.1GW
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Nuclear power plants can vary their output faster than most people think, see
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
One trouble is that changing the power output does put stress on components because of thermal expansion and contraction, potentially shortening their lifespan, but it something that can be designed for.
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HVDC is now a thing. Collecting solar in Northern Austrialia and sending it to Singapore over a 3800km long transmission line. Under construction now.
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> "(a nuclear reactor makes 700-800 MW)"
1.6 GW per reactor for the latest ones under construction (Hinkley Point C) and in development (Sizewell C). Each site has 2 reactors for a total of 2 x 2 x 1.6 GW = 6.4 GW.
Although this is largely just replacing the UK's existing fleet of reactors, almost all of which will have shut down by the time Hinkley Point C comes online. Of the current 5 operating UK nuclear power stations, only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028.
> "They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances"
One of the reasons offshore wind has been so economic & successful in the UK is they can usually plug in to existing, redundant transmission lines left behind by decommissioned coal and nuclear power stations, which are often on the coast. It's relatively cheap to connect to the grid when the infrastructure is already there waiting: you just need to build the cables from the turbines to the shore.
You can transmit a lot of power long distances with HVDC systems. 2GW systems are in development (TenneT 2GW platform & 525kV DC cables) & HVDC interconnectors can be several hindered km long…
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I always thought gas was quite quick to start which made it a good complement to renewables.
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The statement that we need all of them is not correct. Grid forming inverters and large battery storage will replace gas peak plants in the future. First to go are however the old coal and nuclear plants as they become unprofitable.
> Others are plentiful, but unpredictable - wind.
I think it depends on how you define unpredictable.
Wind power forecasting[1] is used pretty extensively as I understand it by all major windfarms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_forecasting#Uncerta... [2] https://www.cerc.co.uk/forecasting/wind-energy.html [3] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
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Several power companies are using synchronous condensers with flywheels to increase inertia
How about redirecting excess nuclear energy to eg produce hydrogen fuel cells?
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I'm not sure I understand. Sure, letting turbines spin and not use the power, while burning extra gas, isn't worse for the environment than just burning gas in the first place (though it's significantly more expensive to triple-pay for the energy), but it's better is to turn that unused power into used power.
The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
The article says we pay three times, curtail wind and then burn gas. Which is bad.
But all the solutions are aimed at reducing the curtailment of wind. Rather than reducing the gas burnt.
If the money saved by building more wind (or solar) and not having to burn gas saves more money then who cares if more wind is "wasted"?
It would be nice to use every last drop, but I dont want to actually spend money to achieve that goal when it could be used to e.g. build yet more wind, and burn even less gas.
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The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
But it was missing the most obvious long term solutions for excess wind power: carbon capture and hydrogen generation. We cannot build enough excess wind power to ever have too much for those “sinks”.
I like negative prices, I got paid to heat my hot water tank and have underfloor heating on last night for 1.5 hours.
Paid for 1.5 hours underfloor, or just on for 1.5?
*also where you are would be interesting. There's a big difference say between Scotland and Croatia.
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I've worked in curtailment. It's a fraught shell game.
I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.
What is the benefit for enrolling in the program? Is it just money? Sounds like a very bad system indeed if the fines are lower than the payout.
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> I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
How is paying wind farms hundreds of millions of pounds to turn off wind generation not wasting money?
Because, overall the wind power is the cheapest energy source available, and has been for a decade (recently overtaken by solar in some markets).
Something that is cheap can have some percent wasted and still be cheaper overall than more expensive options.
Focussing only on the waste without that bigger context is at best a false economy, at worst fossil fuel promoting propaganda.
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you should see how much per MW/h it costs for power from a "Peaker" power plant.
Looks like $150-$198/MWh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
In a sense: because all it does is move money from one place to another.
That's very different to wasting money in a way that actually uses up physical resources or people's time.
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.
> We could just always be overproducing
Depends on what you mean by overproducing. The energy put into an electrical grid must be balanced by demand or bad things will happen. I think the second answer in the below StackExchange is a good description.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/117437/what-...
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.
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The UK government? Owning things? Surely you can't be serious...
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The solution is to upgrade the national grid.
This is needed anyway because it is already maxed out and demand will dramatically increase with the transition to EVs.
Tell that to Ofgem. The latest price settlement for electricity transmission and distribution networks (RIIO-T2 and RIIO-ED2) has cut the amount of investment the networks are allowed to carry out.
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From the article
> the National Grid pays the windfarms to turn off, and pays a (typically gas powered) alternative generator, closer to the demand, to turn on.
Curtailing wind means paying someone else to generate that energy in the “right” location, which usually means burning gas. So all the extra wind being built isn’t reducing amount of gas being burned, it’s just increasing the total cost of electricity.
> Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
We can build all the wind we want, but if connected to consumers by nothing more than a long extension lead that barely run a kettle, then it’s totally useless. The wind needs to be located so the energy generated can actually be transported to end users. Curtailment is basically a direct measure of the amount of wind we’ve built, that can’t actually be used. Building more isn’t helpful in the slightest.
The article certainly doesn’t advocate for reducing the amount of wind built, quite the opposite, they just point out we need it built in the right places so we can actually use the energy produced. Rather than built bunch of wind turbines that will forever be pointed out of the wind.
You have two problems:
1) a lot of wind means there's too much power... that has to be used somewhere, that's why you have negative prices, to get someone to take that power off the grid and use it for something, sometimes useless, and someone has to pay for that
2) no wind means you still need gas, hydro, nuclear etc. powerplants, because you need power even when there is no wind and sun, so you need all the power generating capacity covered even without wind
they should just mine bitcoin with it
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> I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
But doesn't wasting wind waste money if we have to pay so much for curtailment?
But that presupposes we can actually supply enough electricity to where it's needed. We already hitting the limits, thus the curtailment and burning gas. Adding more capacity unless it's in the right place doesn't solve the issue.
The example given was christmas day, when most industry stops, when the wind was blowing strongly. (UK heat is mostly gas, not electric).
It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that.
Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days.
It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly.
Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
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The problem is that there was no wind in the coldest days of December when we needed electricity the most. Building more of something that goes to zero when you need it doesn't help. With huge storage capacity, maybe, but even the author of the article doesn't seem to think storage is particularly practical.
I don't think the suggestion is to replace gas generation facilities with wind, but to concentrate new power generation on wind.
The incremental cost of keeping a gas generator working is very close to zero compared to all the other expenses involved in building the plant and buying gas to burn in it. We can keep all our gas infrastructure around and simply use it less often if we have more wind.
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6% curtailment seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. Around 20-25% curtailment, it becomes economical to run those hydrogen electrolyzers part-time, even with the capital expenditures required. I wouldn't use that hydrogen gas to regenerate electricity, though - there are many industries that can directly consume that hydrogen gas and avoid the lossy round-trip from electricity->hydrogen->electricity.
I explore this idea further in this blog post: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
Agree. It's also a given that a renewable grid has to be overbuilt. Current estimates are by about 50%.
I don't know what the current target is, but 6% is well below what it will eventually be. The article suggests building more physical infrastructure, but that comes with its own cost and environmental impacts, ironically.
Does your analysis rely on a localized energy market? Because with curtailment it seems to me that there is no incentive for energy producers to sell energy cheaply to factobatteries, right?
If the UK were ruled, and all decisions made, by a benevolent dictator, then the solution to this problem is easy. Consider every option of where to build the wind turbines, and where to build power cables, add up the cost of every option, and choose the cheapest (environmentally and/or monetarily) that gives everyone the power they need.
An ideal market would produce the exact same result right?
Well not quite... And this is a classic example.
With the current policy of location-independent markets, wind producers build in the best spots, and don't care about the massive expense (to the grid operator) of moving the power south. That isn't the ideal solution.
With the new proposed policy of per-location markets, the grid operator 'makes money' by moving power from places of high generation (low prices) to places with high demand (high prices).
But wait... That isn't the ideal solution either. The grid operator has an incentive to maximize their own profits, and if they ship too much power from north to south, then the price difference will be lowered, and their profits will decrease. So they will underbuild deliberately.
But wait you say - this is an ideal market, so there is no monopoly grid operator. In this ideal market, there are many grid operators, each competing to move power from the north to the south, and if one operator deliberately underbuilds, then another will build more to capture that profit. The end result is cables will keep being added till the money to be made equals the cost of the cables...
And that is equal to the ideal benevolent dictator solution!
But... That assumes a cable costs a certain £ amount per MWH transferred. But real cables have efficiencies of scale - one large cable is more money efficient than many competing small cables.
And considering that, you're back to the single-cable-operator problem. In the market, they are a monopoly and will underbuild. If they aren't a monopoly, whoever has the biggest cable takes all the profit, and becomes a monopoly. And if you artificially force there to be 10 small companies competing, then there will be 10 small money-inefficient cables.
There is no perfect answer, except a (non existent) benevolent dictator!
You really don't see any middle ground here? I feel like a rationally and centrally planned infrastructure not based on market incentives is not that hard to imagine, whatever your political beliefs are, why resort to some kind of philosophical thought experiment of the dictator?
Democratic rational central planning is a political belief. I happen to agree with it, but you’ll get called names for it.
My understanding is that he's talking about a central entity that has full ownership of electricity delivery and production, by opposition to a free market of competing entities. Basically the centrally planned infrastructure you're talking about, not a real dictator.
And who would have thought that any dictator/ political party (either lefty or righty, it doesn't really matter) couldn't come up with a decent solution ["vote for us, we will solve your problems"] like they always seem to promise? After 10+ years....
Well there was a benevolent dictator in the recent past (upto 1995), when the grid was publicly owned.
Agree, but there have been some very expensive local authority disasters around solar.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-chauffeur-the-leaked-tape-an...
Publicly owned old technology is very different to attempts to publicly develop next generation power, which tends to require brave entrepreneurs historically.
Natural monopolies should be centrally planned, because in this case the market competition is between nations on the basis of which one is an efficient and therefore cost effective place to operate. Companies don't set up competing mail rooms in the same building, that would be insane. It's less obvious at a national scale but economically just as silly to try and introduce competition where it would not naturally exist. The same principals also apply to railways, water, roads and phone lines.
A slight adjustment to this is that the single-cable-operator can become a monopoly because of government regulations. Permits, planning permission, running roughshod over objections (see HS2, Heathrow third runway). So the ideal market can never materialise. We (citizens/subjects) are somewhat okay with this. Most people do not want the free market criss-crossing the countryside with operators laying cables across whichever farmers accept money from them.
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.
Funnily enough this used to make sense. When you were burning coal, generation skewed north and its cheaper to generate close to source and transport energy. Now, transport of energy is a significant cost, but it’s difficult to price/support that, and the industry/national grid have been working very hard on smart grids for exactly this reason.
But for most of the time, the marginal cost of electricity is the same across the UK. The transmission network is not usually maxed out, and this means that generation anywhere can meet supply anywhere for minimal cost.
Consumers already pay per-unit electricity costs which are fixed over a billing period, regardless of whether gross prices exceeded the consumer price, or dropped below zero, for small intervals during that period. So it wouldn't really make any sense to charge different prices in Scotland and England, only for the periods when they actually diverged due to lack of transmission. And if this occasional discrepancy was averaged over a billing period, it would probably be much too small to really affect demand.
The politics around changing that would be spectacular to behold. Especially if it resulted in Scotland having cheaper energy.
I do wonder how effective a "you get 0.5p off your bill if you can see a wind turbine from your house" rule would be against NIMBYism.
The discount for local wind already exists, currently available in Yorkshire and Wales:
https://www.octopusenergygeneration.com/fan-club/
At least this shows different prices in different regions, but I'm not sure why. The article contradicts it.
https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/r505_deemed_ra...
Wholesale energy prices are uniform, network service prices aren't.
Is the UK not a unified grid? Most of the US is. A kwh is a kwh.
Even in the parts of the US that are unified grids, a kWh is not a kWh. Where you live determines how expensive your electricity is. Compare Cambridge, MA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/02139/ with Philadelphia, PA https://electricityrates.com/compare/electricity/19101/. About twice as expensive in MA.
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The US runs three major grids: East, West, and Texas. There's interconnections, but capacity is limited. Sounds like the UK is similar here with the bottleneck between Scotland and southern England.
Within the US grids, there's really subgrids with interconnection and bottlenecks, too, but those interior bottlenecks aren't brought up as often as say overnight wind production in Texas being over local demand as well as interconnect capacity.
> A kwh is a kwh.
Start to finish, the OP is a detailed analysis of why this is not true.
Unfortunately there is no big copper plate in the ground connecting all of the UK. Transmission capacity between different parts of the grid is limited.
england and wales are run by national grid, who also have a huge us operation - scottish operations a bit less clear
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I don't live in the UK nor work anywhere near the energy sector, and yet I found this a really fascinating, clear read that opened my eyes to many issues I'd never considered before. Thanks.
To the commenters saying that wind farms should move South or blaming wind farms or other energy producers. (My opinion and knowledge follows.)
That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures.
Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y.
My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past.
I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power.
P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."
UK has managed to cheap skate on many different fronts. When money was cheap they went on a cost cutting spree for a decade when they should have been using all of that money to invest in services and infrastructure. Now everything is crumbling.
Scotland has a different legal system and even historically insisted upon separate versions of otherwise national concerns - for example that is why there is a "National Trust"[1] and a separate "Scottish National Trust".
Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament this tendency has only accelerated.
[1] A charity that maintains stately homes and other historic artefacts
Interesting and informative. Thank you!
The North Sea Link is 720 km long and costed only £1.6 billion and took only three years to lay: https://www.4coffshore.com/news/north-sea-link-starts-operat... So a new 440 km long cable for £3.4 billion done in 2029 seem like a crummy deal.
Yeah. The cost objection seems like learned helplessness.
A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008.
1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot...
2. "UK productivity continues lost decade", 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195
3. "The UK is facing two lost decades on living standards", 2022: https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...
The UK conservative party is peak neoliberal. The cabinet is/was largely made up of people that have openly written proposals on how to dismantle national services.
Our shortest serving prime minister was one of these people. At a time of national crisis she supported a budget that overwhelmingly cut taxes on the income of the most wealthy while providing effectively zero support for those unable to afford the massive cost of living increase. Causing financial panic, increasing inflation, and requiring massive public spending to keep pension funds from collapse.
Government investment during a decade of near zero percent interest rates was non-existent.
I assume that cables aren’t all equal, eg maybe the new one carries more power or is more efficient or the sea floor makes it harder to lay. It could still be a good deal even if the upfront cost is higher.
I guess there could also be accounting shenanigans, eg if you pay $x upfront and $y over several years, you could focus on $x if the project seems unpopular and focus on $(x+y) if the project shows a popular serious investment in a government policy.
But I’ve no idea about this case.
Our system favours England over scotland, with the national grid charging Scotland much more to move energy around.
With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...
That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.
I know quite a bit about most of the things discussed in the article from having worked for a renewables company and yet I learned quite some new bits I didn’t know about, for example the intra-UK submarine HVDC connectors (and their eye watering cost). Not a very long article but packed with clearly written and valuable information. Great stuff
We need to figure out how to reduce long distance power transfer.
Imagine a global power distribution network, the entire world could be 100% solar & wind. Perhaps one day...
Imagine someone invents low cost high temperature superconductors which enable fusion reactors, to much fanfare. Until everyone slowly realizes that we can use those same conductors to balance low cost electricity globally for less money.
For sure. This will be very cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
Edit: would have been. Looks like they lost funding. :(
Not going to happen for geopolitical reasons ever, unless we have a one king for the whole planet.
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Are there any interesting things you know not mentioned in the article which you want to add here? (I’m curious to hear more)
The details of how battery storage systems currently work is pretty interesting. Modo Energy has a lot of great blog articles about it. Start here: https://platform.modo.energy/phase/article/3393/benchmarking...
Wind in the UK has been doing really well recently and the grid has never been greener:
https://grid.iamkate.com/
Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out.
Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables.
I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.
In the Netherlands they are going to build two new nuclear power plants but the company wants assurance that they don't have to compete with the massive wind mill parks on the North Sea.
Not really a new problem for the Netherlands whenever there is a problem the country tends to overreact with massive infrastructure spending. It hasn't been that long that brand new coal power plants had to be closed.
Just want to say how great the UX of that page is. I've used many data sources and pages that show power generation, this one is by far the most intuitive one. I wish it existed for more countries.
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 few mm of steel + more PVC on the outside for protection from the environment.
And now add in the manufacturing cost, and the cost to get it into place...
> and the cost to get it into place...
Your comment reminded me of "No Time on Our Side," a book about a submersible laying cable near the UK that sunk after a hatch failed during recovery operations. The author (who was a pilot in the submersible) details the incredible rescue effort to bring them back to the surface alive over a period of about 3 days.
A wonderful book and also one that made me appreciate how hard it is to lay cable (in some places).
and the need for two of them in parallel to make them redundant from trawler and similar damages.
HVDC cables are typically built in pairs - the positive one and the negative one.
They are normally operated together, with equal current going through both.
But it's also possible to operate just one, with the return current going through the earth. Personally, I think that's a very bad plan, because putting 2000 Amps through the earth will probably have lots of unknown ecosystem effects. Things like bacteria that navigate or hunt via electric fields will be killed over an area many thousands of kilometers. Also, the chemistry that happens in rocks and underground rivers is altered by electrical current flowing.
But maybe that ship has already sailed - nearly every country has some project that puts big electrical currents through the earth, so maybe we have already destroyed everything that cares, and therefore doing more of the same wouldn't be so bad.
and the control hardware. The things that stepup/down are not cheap.
They're cheap if you buy them from China. China is world leading on this stuff, and has built tens of similar lines in recent years.
However, I'm sure 'national security' will require the equipment be procured from a western world supplier with no expertise.
Here is what I do not understand about these kinds of dynamics: Are they not the perfect way to encourage the creation of energy storage companies and technologies?
It seems like there is a massive opportunity to purchase energy when it is cheap or even negatively priced, figure out some way of storing it, and then sell it back once the price is higher. Over time, this could stabilize the grid and encourage development and scale benefits in energy storage.
Where are these companies? Are the technologies not yet efficient enough, even when the price of electricity is negative? Or is this technology being deployed already?
EDIT: Well turns out this is covered in the article. Hoping there will be more development in this direction in the future!
Because storage is hard and expensive.
Generating energy is easy (with renewables).
6% is not really a lot. I guess batteries can be profitable if you cycle daily. But at 6% curtailment, they would've been used only a few times a year. You'd need really cheap storage for that.
> figure out some way of storing it
My hypothesis is this being the issue.
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.
I'd also love to have real-time pricing as an option on the consumption side.
It's so dumb that we have "smart" fridges that can tweet, but not smart to avoid their energy use during peak hours. It's a thermal battery!
Get Octopus Agile [1] and you can query their REST API [2] to find the energy prices. Then you could control your fridge via a smart switch.
1. https://octopus.energy/agile/
2. https://developer.octopus.energy/docs/api/
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.
Technically it depends on the levelized cost of hydrogen, which encompasses capex, opex, and a slew of other relevant inputs. Similar "levelized cost" formulas are used throughout the utility sector to make these kinds of decisions; what makes green hydrogen unique is simply that it is undergoing a spike in research and development right now that is drastically changing some of the inputs to the LCOH equation.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46267.pdf
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Why are electrolyzers so expensive? The glass ones used in school labs are stupidly simple — just some glassware and a couple of electrodes — so why are they so expensive on an industrial scale?
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California is facing a similar issue dealing with its solar duck curve[1], where prices essentially go negative during periods of peak solar generation.
As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
If only there were some actually useful use of excessive energy that weren’t mining bitcoin.
One example is producing hydrogen from water with excess power. It can then be added to the natural gas network, or used by trucks or trains, or stored for a power plant.
Orkney is trialling this.
Charging cars, heating water in a well insulated tank
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Why not Bitcoin? You can sell it for cash. Do you not like cash? You can plant trees with cash or lots of other green things.
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Spot prices are the best in order to save the planet so to speak. People will waste energy when it's cheap aka pay with their wallets. A lot of EU household's pays market price for the electricity.
So does NZ.... Man this place blows especially in Canterbury where I am. Nearly every single day it's windy enough that it annoys and sometimes ruins being outside. I must say 3 to 4 times a week 'f** this windy hole' to someone.
Sitting in the roaring 40s trade winds why doesnt NZ have more wind generation is baffling.
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't know.
Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal.
There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south.
https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and...
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.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
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Yes NZ is baffling. NZ is a place which could easily be 100% renewable with very little investment. There is plenty of wind, sun and the large hydro power station could serve as backup/storage. However I see dramatically less windfarms and solar installations than in a place like Germany which has much less sun and wind.
Not to be pedantic, but the roaring 40s are by definition not the trade winds. The trade winds are easterlies- they originate from the east and blow towards the west. The "roaring 40s" are westerlies, flowing in the opposite direction and categorically not the trades. Incidentally, NZ is an amazing place to take up wind sports, so I'm with you on the larger point.
There is more capacity on the way, but planning/approving these things is slow. The beauty of wind power in NZ is that the more you have spread around in different places, the more more hydro lake capacity you can keep up your sleeve for when it is needed.
There is a lot more wind power than there used to be. Getting wind farms consented is hard because people always seem to come out of the woodwork and complain and ruining the scenery, or the noise, or whatever.
But I think the bigger issue is that due to the amount of wind that has already been built, peak demand happens on cold still nights in winter. Building more wind without storage doesn't help there, and that's when they're forced to fire up all the gas and even coal turbines at Huntly.
NZ already generates most of electricity from hydropower and geothermal, so wind isn't really necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_New_Zeal...
Peak electricity usage is on the cold, frosty nights when there is no wind or sunshine.
It's not surprising at all. Given the intermittent nature of wind/solar power, it would be a huge waste of transmission network capacity built to the maximum producing capacity.
So, unless a storage facility is available, you will continue to see lots of wind/solar power get discarded as it's the most economical way: it's much more expensive to shut down or reduce output of other type of power generation such as gas or coal plants.
For a given production of wind I would agree with you, but the installed capacity is only going to go up for the foreseeable, so the network needs to take that into account
Oh well, yes and no. Assuming the demand maintains the same, unless something can fill up the gap when wind/solar dropped quickly enough, the current capacity of coal/gas plant simply cannot be reduced or the whole power grid will for sure be brought down by such fluctuations. But if the current capacity of coal/gas plant cannot be reduced, then there isn't much point in increasing solar/wind generation capacity. It's an interlocked problem, cannot be solved by simply changing one parameter only IMO.
One more thing that can be used for soaking up rarely generated free energy are cheap old inefficient Bitcoin miners.
There are many places already using it for this. Bringing Bitcoin miners to a place at this point is just shipping a container.
This sounds great, but in reality, this concept is also a curse. Moving Bitcoin miners is much easier than building transmission lines - potentially discouraging funding for the infrastructure needed to move the energy where it is more useful. I remember reading of BTC mining companies moving their infrastructure right next door to remote coal fired power plants, getting extremely cheap rates, which otherwise might have been completely decommissioned due to transmission costs.
Carbon tax fixes this.
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Generating a load of heat, when part of the what renewables are for is averting climate change seems counterproductive.
At Earth scale it's not human generated heat that's the problem.
The problem (simplified) is that vast amounts of energy from the Sun fall daily across the globe.
An amount of that energy generates a great deal of heat at the land surface and ocean layer.
Much more heat by magnitudes than humans create.
Some of that heat warms the land, water and lower atmosphere, a great deal of that heat radiates outwards toward space ..
A balance was struck that's been more or less "just right" on average for some 200K years.
We have altered that balance by increasing the insulating properties of the lower atmosphere via increased CO2 (with worse flow on effects from increasing methane and water vapor).
This additional trapped energy is causing more powerful atmospheric events and increased mean tempretures.
But the cause is insulating in very large amounts of energy, not generating small amounts of energy (at the appropriate relative scales).
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
Is that a good idea? It doesn’t sound very sensible to price everything at the cost of the most expensive unit, why do they do that?
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An article on how energy pricing from supplier>consumer is determined or created would be really interesting.
My understanding is most wind was bought at a guarenteed price by the government at the time of construction, so a wind farm producing 1MWh gets paid say £40 regardless of the cost of electricity on the grid - even if marginal cost was £20/MWh
As users are then paying £90/MWh for gas, does the excess £50 go to the government or to the wind far owner?
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The price of electricity in the UK is linked to the most costly supply in the entire mix. So if gas is the most expensive then we pay all other power-producing suppliers, regardless of means of generating, the wholesale price we'd pay for gas. It's a strange system.
It makes sense to extract honest bids. The lower you bid, the more likely you are to be paid. So in the long term, it leads to cheaper prices.
If for example you had a cheap source of gas when others put their price up, it would reward you making that info public.
Short term global fuel price spikes are a weak point, though.
The marginal price of electricity (i.e. the price of the most expensive source) is what drives the retail cost, because it's a liquid commodity that can't (to a first approximation) be stored. Imagine 90% of your electricity comes from wind and the last 10% has from gas because there is nothing else - the price of electricity is going to equal the price of gas because the wind providers can raise prices until they're just under the price of gas, since there are no other options. The most expensive form of electricity sets the price until it isn't needed anymore and is booted off the grid entirely, but once you cover that last 10% with wind then the price falls dramatically.
In theory this is what we want: the windfall profits on cheap power during periods of expensive energy are supposed to attract the market to build more of these plants and chase those profits, thereby accelerating the green transition. But it's possible what we saw last year was too much, and that the damage to the economy (nothing strangles economic growth like expensive energy) does more harm than this incentive does good. People are talking about renegotiating power agreements in Europe to pay fixed prices for renewables so this wouldn't happen again, but I haven't heard how likely this is to succeed.
Sounds like a dysfunctional market that would be better nationalised and run for the public good.
The way it works in the EU—not sure if the UK participates in this market still?— is that every energy source is priced according to the most expensive energy source until demand is covered by supply.
So, for example, on particularly windy days here in Denmark, we pay almost nothing as our entire demand will be covered by wind energy. On other days we might pay a lot since we need to import energy produced from gas or other expensive sources.
It's quite complicated, but there's a good explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922390
(I recently asked the same question!)
There's a couple reasons. A small amount of electricity may be generated from gas, but that small amount is often crucial and in a lot of demand. Furthermore, peaker plants will produce less and less electricity as more renewables reduced their duty cycle. But the overhead cost of maintenance remains: reducing a gas plant from running 10 hours a day to 2 hours a day does not result in a 5x reduction of cost.
The whole system as detailed in the article seems pretty artificial and not great. For some reason prices appear to be set at the national level, ignoring the fact that Scotland has an excess of wind energy. If consumers could see that the price difference on their end, I guess there’d be more incentive to upgrade the infrastructure and get it down to England more efficiently.
If gas is setting the price as the most expensive form of energy, then it acts as an incentive to build cheaper forms of energy because your margins are that much higher.
Alas, England doesn't allow on-shore wind power, and there's not sufficient capacity (in terms of HVDC lines) to transfer enough power from Scotland down to England to move all of the excess energy.
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Funnily enough the price the consumer pays right now is much lower than the price of energy because of badly thought out government subsidies
I am in the 95th percentile for income (though not wealth) in the UK and here's my energy bill for December:
Daily grid charges £20
Energy used @ market price £315
Truss govt unit price subsidy -£98
Johnson govt flat subsidy -£67
Total bill before VAT £170
No, first understand the concept of market clearing auctions[1], then understand that the there is a dispatch stack (that looks like something like this [2]), and that gas plants are the marginal producer required to balance the market, as they are not baseload (nukes) and not intermittent (renewables) but are dispatchable (ramp up/down capacity as need to balance the market).
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
You can't base your electricity prices solely or even mostly on an unpredictable source of generation, which is nearly absent one day and generates more power than is needed on another day. Efficient storage is a long-term fix for this, but it ain't here. Natural gas is the most flexible source of on-demand power, so it (disproportionately even to its share of 1/3rd of all generated power) affects consumer electricity rates.
A couple possibilities. It could be competition from other countries with a different mix (e.g., the price in the UK has to compete with other countries or it'd be exported to the degree possible)
Power is also sold (ok, not sure about the UK) at the market price. So the most expensive generation needed to meet demand determines the market price. So even if gas is a small portion of the generation it could still determine the price.
I would imagine that as gas prices shoot up, demand dramatically increases for electricity.
Given the point in the conclusion about planning relaxation not really helping to move future turbines closer to people, it seems that the sensible approach would be to factor any power network upgrades into the cost of wind when looking at TCO and ensure that the generators contribute to it. That, plus a small location-based payment bias plus eventual demand-based payment are all likely to be necessary - if oil/gas prices remain high, it is unrealistic to keep paying the same high cost per MWH to wind farms forever.
Relevant book written by Sir David MacKay (Cambridge/Caltech professor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay
https://www.withouthotair.com/
I notice that the curtailment for today happens to coincide with the lowest demand at 5 in the morning. Their screenshot also has overnight curtailment.
It suggests that replacement CO2 was generated as a result but it looks like it may just have been total system overproduction, which may involve payments but shouldn't cause any extra CO2.
I'll pose the argument that if Texas can, the UK can: https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-proje...
And yeah that was a long time ago
I have a tangential question (and I truly do not mean to be provocative with it, just curious): Has anyone put any effort into figuring out how much impact we have on air movement in general with windmills? Like, is there a scenario where we could negatively impact the environment by capturing "too much wind"?
This is an interesting study in that topic, I would have thought the answer is no to your question, but possibly a very large wind farm could change wind velocity/temp and thus have a knock on effect.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0406930101
One has to wonder if the fixed costs of some kind of electricity -> fuel production will ever get cheap enough to solve this problem. If it would pay, it would be great for there to be a factory on stand-by to make, e.g., hydrogen or ethanol using the extra energy.
This report on congestion in the Australian NEM is pretty good reading on the concept of electricity network congestion and some of the market mechanisms that have been used to account for it, and some of the ways in which they can result in non-optimal outcomes. It's quite approachable:
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9...
I don’t understand the reason for the triple cost for curtailment. Like it seems the obvious options would be:
- pay $x for y joules of wind
- pay $x for y joules of gas; ask wind farm to generate y joules less and pay them $x +/- epsilon for the lost income. Total cost: $2x
I would have guessed that if you’re a big generator then your national grid contract would say something like ‘you turn off when we say so but we’ll pay you for lost revenue.’ I don’t understand why the wind farm, according to the article, is paid twice, both for the energy (not) being generated and to turn off some generation?
> evidence from Texas suggests that windfarms do not end up near population centres even in markets with locational pricing and liberal planning laws
The windy part of Texas is not the part where most people live. The western part of the state and the panhandle are windy but also pretty dry. Most of the people live more toward the central or eastern part of the state where it's greener but less windy.
Pricing incentives may just not be enough to overcome that.
Very good article. As far as the options presented I think transmission lines are still the best bet, along with storage.
Storage can come in many forms including at a customers residence via batteries or thermal storage. Not all of these options need to be cycled daily to make financial sense. In the U.S. we have an insane number of people that maintain days worth of storage as fuel for their generators only to be used infrequently when the power goes out.
Negative prices on power i.e. curtailment, is the perfect use case for Bitcoin mining.
Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power?
May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy.
Energy buyer of first and last resort.
Please stop, bitcoin is a waste of electricity, it has no economic value. Its cancerous. Just make hydrogen or some other storable material.
I'm sorry you don't understand the value of Bitcoin.
Your ignorant hate for something you haven't taken the time to understand is cancerous.
So no, I won't stop.
Hydrogen electrolysis and increasing interconnects seem a more useful thing to do.
I haven't followed the technology very closely, but it was my understanding that large scale storage of hydrogen isn't here yet, if it ever will be?
And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc.
It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business.
However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight.
Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
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Bitcoin would be a perfect use case, immediate turn on/off installation and giving actually a very good return on the money, especially at producer level. Either way, if I were a British tax payer I'd hate this current situation. Any solution, even hydrogen production which looks like a terrible idea, would still be better
Sounds like a job for the Terraform Industries product from a few days ago
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
This reminded me of https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/mining-for-cryptocurr...
(I know this isn’t storage, jk)
3 billion pounds (the estimated cost of the HVDC link) seems like it would install a LOT of local storage which would alleviate problems from both the transmission blockage and the bursty nature of wind power.
HVDC links are a good thing, but why is storage not the first step?
Yes, that’s one of the main problems with volatile generation. You often don’t get the power when you need it and vice versa.
This isn’t news though and the reason why Germany is returning to goal despite of having installed 130 GW of wind and solar generation capacity.
No, the reason Germany is burning more coal is because they stopped importing gas from Russia and supply France with extra electricity while they repair their nuclear reactors. It has literally nothing to do with the volatility of wind power.
Haven't seen such mumbo-jumbo for a while.
UK has an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation. There is a project to re-forest the north coast to coast. Then these trees can be also burned for energy as biomass.
Just look it up.
Deforestation is historic, your comment implies it is recent.
We know from comprehensive aerial photographs of the UK taken by Germany in the 1930s/40s that the UK has much more forest coverage now than it had then.
The UK switched to coal beginning in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth because of the lack of forests providing a source of wood. The current reforestation projects have nothing to do with "an issue with winds getting too strong because of deforestation". There isn't any recent deforestation - just the opposite in fact.
I didn't say it was recent. I said that UK has unfavourable wind patterns because there aren't enough trees.
Banning construction of wind farms on all of England is possibly the stupidest governmental decision I've ever heard of. This entire problem would go away if they had just allowed some wind farms.
Great article.
The fact we can’t just make and throw up a bunch more pylons and cables alongside existing routes, for anything less than £££bn, is just depressing.
It's funny that tiny Singapore is an example of a country with different pricing nodes, instead of uniform pricing for the whole place.
I was hearing one of the things they are doing is pumping water up the hills at hyrdo powerstation's to reuse at peak periods
Yes this is what is commonly referred to as pumped hydro or often only hydro
if, like me, you’re wondering why curtailment is even necessary, read here: https://news.warrington.ufl.edu/faculty-and-research/what-is...
Why not mine bitcoins?
Distributed on demand load for distibuted excessive energy production.
You can by prev gen mining equipment dirt cheap.
So the rest of the UK essentially subsidizes the electricity price to South East England, is that correct?
The UK grid needs spot instance pricing like the cloud.
It would be more surprising when the UK isn't.
Hire the Penguin and build giant batteries?
Opportunity to generate cheap hydrogen?
Covered in the article.
A very interesting and well-written article.
I'd love to subscribe and see what else the author has, but oddly their blog has no RSS feed. Oh well!
Sorry about that! I gave up on RSS with the death of Google Reader. A Twitter follow is your best bet :)
TL;DR: "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" because of high long distance transmission costs.
That's not an entire summary, I think. The lack of local (or nodal, as it's often called in the US) pricing means that there's comparatively little incentive to build new transmission. The UK is not a large country, and we routinely build much larger transmission lines (if I'm not mistaken, the UK is the geographic size of Texas, where the exact same problem is being solved effectively).
My comment was somewhat of a critic of the terse headline. Adding a small amount of information to the cryptic headline removes a lot of perceived mystery.
Your statement answers the question, "why is long distance transmission price high?"
this is a remarkable achievement in itself.
Years ago, renewables opponents kept making baseless claims that no grid would be stable with large amounts of renewables. It's now end of 2022 and for this year we've seen on multiple occasions power grids running perfectly fine on very large amounts of renewables with very little gas.
Success, I guess.
Did you look at the situation in Germany? The foremost country on renewables...
And brown coal.
Ok so what’s the difference ?
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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?
https://gridwatch.co.uk/demand/percent
It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
Thanks. Then it's essentially the same situation. I imagined UK might be more fortunate due to being an island.
But then wind power can only be part of a mix of energy sources, with a strong supply of baseload power backing it.