And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.".
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year)
Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons".
Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
Yes, but you have to factor in that you can't eat houses.
Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.
It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
> The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances.
We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect.
It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.
If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.
Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.
On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.
The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same
E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible
If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot
The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift.
You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed.
So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.
Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.
In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them.
OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.
On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…
It depends on the specific load, dishwashers can be configured to run when the price drops a bit, heating can be configured to allow your house to get a little colder, and if the market provides enough incentive, adding insulation will become economical.
I mean it is a big pile of interests that needs to be optimized. One option is to expose it to the market and let the supply and demand optimization process have a go at it.
> Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue...
Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them.
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
I can’t stand the fact that we put everything to committee when we’re trying to do something good, but not otherwise. I live near a highway, I can hear the cars all day, where’s my veto? I’ve lived near trains—but they were freight trains, so I didn’t get the “public transit is helpful for the little people” veto, I guess.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
I feel like a lot of our (EU) legal structures are totally inadequate for long term periods of peace. Eventually everything gets bloated and ossified and vested interests gain more and more influence/control.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
I live about a mile down from two large wind turbines and you can absolutely hear them, especially at night - it's a low droning noise that especially on quiet nights and in the summer when you have your windows open it actually bothers me to a point where I considered selling the house multple times already - but decided that rolling the dice on noise pollution and ending up with something even more annoying just isn't worth it.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
May also depend on the age of the people nearby - am reaching an age with some level of hearing loss and I don't hear many low frequency - or high-pitch noises much anymore (drone of insects, or mosquitoes - squeaky voices of small children, etc.), so I probably wouldn't hear the turbines as much as a person with better hearing.
I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
Yeah, I get why people don't want wind turbines right next to their house, but also in my country I see people in the countryside complaining about turbines that are literally in middle of a forest, many kilometers away. It's just pathetic, especially since we're talking about economic backwater, where tax revenue and jobs from those turbines are a significant plus.
I don't mind them in the distance. I would love if these stupid things were 40km away. The closest is like 500 meters away from my house.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
500 meters is very close, if it ACTUALLY affects you negatively I'd say your concerns are valid, but at 2km it's only going to be the skyline, which isn't your property unless you're in NYC.
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
I assume from context that the "house values" you and several other apparently British posters are using is what in the US we would call "home prices"? Or have I guessed wrong and it is being used more like "family values"? If the latter, what kind of values are meant?
It's home prices indeed AFAICT. It's fairly bloody-minded ti think house prices will go down with nearby renewables, it'd be a small blip if any at all. Give me wind turbines around and take away the cars and delivery motorcycles.
I have a residential solar installation, and the inverter makes some noise when the relays are switching between import and export. I'm not complaining - although it was indeed surprising
Yeah they claimed the associated hardware for it was noisy. I don’t want to link to the actual comments because that’s kind of mean spirited, I’m just pointing out that I’ve heard people complain about the noise from solar and it’s pretty wild to me. I’ve been in close proximity to pretty large arrays and in plenty of homes with them on rooftops. You don’t notice them at all. They also don’t make the air around them unbreathable
House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.
Specifically, concern for house prices in a really myopic way. It's 'preferable' to hamstring the place you live in than to turn it into somewhere with a functioning economy that people want to live in.
If it makes you feel better, it's the same in the US. Some cities self destruct in pursuit of maintaining real estate prices. Of course, once they self destruct, prices plummet. Nobody considers that part.
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
Even without new physical cables - very recently Nordic power markets switch to Flow Based Market Coupling (FBMC) - which basically takes physical properties of the existing lines (coupling points) in grid balancing operations, which allowed some underused lines to be used more (practically) - which made electricity cheaper in some locations, and more expensive in others (because cheaper electricity flew from that region to more expensive ones). It is akin to blocking train lines to a holiday resort because poorer people will be able to access it.
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
It's not a real free market, though, if you ignore transmission. Since transmission is a scarce resource it needs to be part of the market to send the signal to build more of it (or more battery storage, or better located production). The national auctions obscure the actual resource shortage and therefore the market can't work.
And at its extreme BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
Mine's buried; was dug up and replaced overnight a few years ago. If it's slow I think that's just under-resourcing and scheduling rather than it actually taking that long to deal with the specific circumstance.
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
Power lines that cut over your property? I can buy that - thats a nuisance. I'm not saying I would I am saying that as a rural property owner that would be annoying.
Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
We have a similar situation in Italy with garbage.
Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.
Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).
Why do trenches need to be dug across the countryside? Put them alongside existing roads and rail lines. Same with above-ground power lines. It might make them a bit longer, but the ‘eyesore’ is already there, and we can avoid making new ones.
(Re rail lines — if you build power lines over existing rail lines you could also electrify the rail route at the same time, and get rid of the diesel locomotives).
To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried.
Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.
It all links back to preventing renewable energy and maintaining our dependence on fossil fuel imports from autocratic nations and "big enough to lobby" O&G industry. The locals and their dislike of power lines are just convenient pawns.
Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
I do wonder how much nymbyism is influenced by most individuals carrying 5-10 years earnings in their home. Such a potential liability might make one awfully concerned about liabilities.
The Green Party around there picked up a lot of ex Conservative votes and oppose the nuclear plant at Sizewell and pylons for renewables. Its a weird alliance.
I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.
Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.
I live close to the route that this will be built and regularly get cheap/free energy from my energy provider, partially because I live close to the wind generation in question.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
> And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
> You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
There's a program called Hilo [1] in Québec where it's using the Hydro-Québec Rate Flex D [2] to automatically stop the heating during peak demand.
> With Rate Flex D, you can save quite a bit of money, since most of the time in winter, you’ll be charged less than the base rate, except during occasional peak demand events, when you’ll be charged more than the base rate.
"Ripple control" is vintage technology - hourly usage meters are not necessary.
Everyone imagines that consumers would change their behaviour if they were given price information. In my experience, I've yet to see any good data showing that on average consumers save electricity due to smart meters.
In New Zealand, I think the power companies design their consumer products to be unhelpful (what's the equivalent term here for dark patterns in marketing?). I believe few consumers watch their instant usage or review their hourly usage. Personally I changed away from a plan that used spot prices (after seeing the debacle from snow in Texas, and realising the rewards were low and that judging/managing the risks was hard).
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C.
It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once.
And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
You might find the crossover for hot water heating is higher than 0p; your boiler is likely only around 70% efficient. So at 6p/therm for gas, you'd break even with resistive electric heating at around the 10p/kWh mark.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
Sure, I use Home Assistant running in a little raspberry pie in the lift.
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
> The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc...
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
It does, but people are really bad at understanding it.
It's like how there's a substantial portion of the population that counts the best commute time ever as their commute time, and are perpetually late. "How can it take 30 minutes to get to work, one time it was only 15!" - ignoring the reality of traffic, subway delays, etc.
For your old appliances you still pay the same on average. A fixed price contract isn't cheaper, it just smooths prices into a long-term average. And many of the changes can be done manually. On your old dishwasher or washing machine you decide when they start, and most of them even already have buttons to start with a fixed-time delay. Instead of starting them at the end of day you can just start them when the wind is strong or the sun is shining, or watch the price feed. You even get to feel smart for saving money
I agree on the popularity, but you'd absolutely see an effect even without anyone buying new appliances
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
This will probably take a little longer for private use, but the industrial sector is already doing this. Cooling chambers being cooled down further during cheap electricity prices (or sunshine when they have their own solar) or storing heat/"cool" underground
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.
No. Steering demand will not work. Unless by steering demand you suggest forcibly moving millions of people to Scotland.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production).
I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])
We have this system in Finland and whilst I was sceptical at first, it works much better. Electricity prices are published about 24h in advance for 15m intervals (was 60m up until 2 weeks ago). You can therefore time your usage dependent on demand on the grid (which is correlated to production of course).
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
Already have thermostats that move based on signals from the utilities. There were some early pioneers in this stuff over 10 years ago in the bay area. They also aggregated the power to bid it, but I imagine they could aggregate to buy as well.
Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
I'm on the octopus agile tariff that has 30 minute pricing and an API to query it. Prices for tomorrow published at 4pm today. So the pricing bit is sorted. Just need to make the devices understand it now.
This is already happening with electric car charging. However, part of the reason this can't apply here is that the UK doesn't have regional pricing. For this to work you'd need to vary people's prices depending on which pylon they're connected to.
It would be much more effective to even out things , and trivial (engineering wise) to stop wasting the outputs of all these heat pumps by effective integration. Ie dump heat removed by ac or freezer into hot water heating, etc
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
Good water heaters are key. Mine is 200 liters and I've experienced cold water exactly once in three decades: One day 3 guests took hour-long showers each. Normally a family of five will never experience cold water.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
A lot of thermostats already do that. Unfortunately these programs are not terribly popular. People see that the temperature is off and complain. Look up people talking about Nest Energy Shift (different but somewhat similar idea), most comments are quite negative.
With flexible rate agreements, that's already possible, and some DIYers already are doing this - the problem is the interfacing. Heat pumps (and central heating systems in general) are notorious for being walled gardens, most freezers run on analog technology (i.e. a bi-metal strip acting as a thermostat).
I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
You are correct. Some devices expose local API's, most have walled garden cloud API's
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem.
Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
Tell me about it. I live in a region of the country which has had a very active "no pylons" campaign running for several years now with no resolution in either direction yet. The latest proposal is to bury the lines instead which results in far longer build times, destruction of land, and inconvenience for everyone along the route, and they don't seem to like that idea either.
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
"NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything"
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
I live in inner London so maybe it's a regional thing, but developments here usually include consultations from more organisations than I knew existed. Here's a recent one from near me: https://anewcentreforlewisham.com/planning/
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?
There are a huge number of statutory consultees who are asked - they don't have to respond. It is an enormous list. Just as an example any and all of these can be statutory consultees depending on site location:
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
A recent battery planning application got objections from the fire service on the grounds that its location might be difficult to reach (narrow lane) if it catches fire. Which is actually a reasonable objection? Fire codes are a thing for a reason.
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
One of the other comments noted that a lot of organisations may be asked - but they don't have to respond. I was looking at the actual submitted documents for planning applications...
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
Tbf the government just passed anti-blocking legislation that is meant to address exactly this - for national infrastructure projects you won't be able to sue the government over it directly anymore. Whether that's good or bad.....time will tell.
The problem is they are treating it as a free market issue with hourly auctions, but the 'free market' system ignores transmission. So the windmills can sell cheap electricity in the auctions that can't be delivered to anybody who needs it. Then after the auction you have to pay the windmill operators to switch off the excess production.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
Thanks. This make it even more crazy. Paying for not produced energy (probably some great deals secured there - with guarantees from both sides no matter the reality) and also same owners of both types of production sites.
Funny how such deals get done, probably only to meet the magic "2030" rules, without taking into account situations like the one happening right now.
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
I've only heard about this, but do I understand correctly that:
- Norwegian hydro-electricity is normally quite cheap
- 'They' built a cable from Norway to the rest of Europe to couple the markets
- Since the markets are coupled, mainland Europe buys the hydro-electricity from Norway, driving up prices in Norway.
- People are pissed, understandably I guess.
Correct. One additional problem beyond the price hike was also the fact that the price came to be wildly unstable. One day it was bascially free and the next day it was approaching 1 euro per kwh, where as before, the price usually came to about 1 NOK (10-12 eurocent) per kwh after taxes and such, and hadn't moved significantly from that in over 10 years.
See Fig 2 here[1] for just how spiky the market became after the price hike.
Also bear in mind that Norway does most of its residential heating with resitive heating, precisely because electricity has historically been so cheap. Heat pumps are getting more popular, and burning firewood got very popular during the price hike, but basically no-one heats with gas, as there's no infrastructure to support it.
That is correct. The historical price for consumers is by my guesstimate $0.03-0.05 USD, now it’s at least double. Grid fees come on top of that.
The anger is completely out of proportion, IMO, as the net effect is probably very positive. 1. Hydro is typically state owned and taxed at a very high rate 2. 50% of the price difference between markets is pocketed by the public grid operator (reducing grid fees) 3. We also import power when needed and typically at a net profit.
Norway already have this kind of solution where a companies on the same land can register to the grid companies, and the production and consumtion within the same messurement intervals is not counted as selling to the grid. This way you can use the public grid for your own "internal" transfer.
It looks like UK, like many other countries, already have grid that can't cope with casual usage and transferring power from farms to users. Adding "renting" of grid sound like it could make it even worse (if possible).
The Norwegian grid is divided up into different regional grids and they each have different electricity prices. Those who build interconnects between the areas can get some of the price difference. It's very different from the UK market, which pretends to have a single area, runs auctions to determine the price and then has to make post-auction adjustments (in the billions) to fix the fact that electricity can't be transmitted across the grid.
Those 4 "Eastern Green Link" projects look interesting - pretty sensible given how close most places in the UK are to the sea to go for subsea cables. Fewer problems with planning permission as well...
The craziest thing about UK energy is that it uses marginal pricing, where the price of energy is dictated by the most expensive generator to meet demand i.e. gas. Doesn't matter if your energy is coming from wind or solar, you're still going to be charged according to the price of gas. Until this can change, consumers are always going to suffer and think green energy isn't cheaper.
This is the main issue. People simply cannot afford to use this extra power. If power was cheap then all kinds of devices would switch to electric, especially heating and cars.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
Massive scale out of EV's should help with this - each car becomes a storage unit absorbing excess energy production. You really need a continental if not global scale grid system to constantly distribute the energy inputs. Only a few geographical units are big enough to make this happen, China being really the only one who can do it, and is doing it.
But we do have decentralized grid generation. What we do not have is fixed price transit rights and the ability for smaller generators to make direct deals with local customers.
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines?
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.
Well, unless you invest non-trivial extra work, you're going to start showing up on grid monitoring and finally someone will drill down in problem looking for broken substation and find you doing exactly the things that caused the problems and the reason for it being illegal to "just hook up".
It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)
A disconnect isn't a huge deal, most houses have one but they don't have a lock-out position and that's a must for an islanding operation and you'll need inverters that are happy to produce power even when the grid isn't present. Those are not the norm, but you can buy them (I'd recommend Victron). You'll also need a fairly large battery to stabilize the whole thing, without a battery you'll see massive voltage fluctuations as the inverters try to adapt to load without the required low internal resistance backing, so I would definitely recommend against that unless you like buying new stuff every other week.
Hypothetically for obvious reasons, I would put a socket on the outer wall of my garage with a sign saying 'do not use'. This would enable an enterprising person to siphon off up to 3600 Watts continuously while the breaker in my garage would be in the 'on' position. I could use my home automation setup to determine whether there is a surplus generated and only enable that socket through remote control as well.
Direct neighbour as in your properties touching might be a different matter, but to get right of way to cross public or another entities property as a random person or company, that will most certainly be problematic.
It is illegal to sell electricity directly to someone else. To sell electricity you need to be licensed as an energy supplier.
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't expect that kind of scenario to work for the vast majority of people, but on a remote island it could be the kind of solution that gets engineered to keep homes working when an official solution takes a long time to arrive.
There are plug-in batteries these days. Charge it in one home, then chuck an extension cord over the fence to discharge to another home (ignoring safety concerns...)
They lower the prices a lot when they are producing at full tilt. This means that prices, at least to some degree, go up when wind turbines are not producing at full capacity, since the other power sources need to amortize their fixed costs across fewer kilowatt hours sold.
Going up or down: there is more supply, so prices go down wrt. a situation without wind turbines, at least momentarily until the wind drops down indeed when we go back to a system w/o wind.
If you can store the energy, your energy cost goes down (but storage is not free of course, though getting cheaper).
Amortizing the fixed cost will mean the 'fossil' power is more expensive per kWh indeed, making it more and more attractive to buy storage as to bridge the gap between windy/sunny periods that do have cheaper electricity.
Some electricity markets have or a re looking at capacity mechanisms, they pay simply to have the capacity to generate power at any given time, even if not generating, eg. to be a backup. Eventually, that will be the business case for any fuel-powered power plant I suppose
Well, it is not really a new problem. Stopping-starting nuclear power plants is also slow and costly. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity and industrial batteries are good ways to solve it at the grid level. In addition to the possibility of some local solutions others have mentioned.
People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.
Ireland has the same problem, they're waiting on getting another interconnect to france online before building out more windmills. There's enough offshore wind to power the whole island, but it's not predicable enough to power the grid 24/7
"Hooray! No wind has been wasted today (so far)."*
This week the northern-ish parts of europe are hitting one of the highest price point for electricity in recent time, with prices going for around $0.5 per kw/h. Calm weather in combination with low production from solar is creating a shortage in production, at the same time as the weather is getting colder.
There is a lot of money on the table to get energy produced at the right time and right place. Having energy produced at the wrong time and in the wrong place is not worth anything.
I think the idea of connecting wind turbines directly to hydrogen electrolysers when they are producing an excess is an interesting idea.
Stops the power being wasted ( though obviously hydrogen generation is less efficient than direct use ), and also creates a stored form of the energy for less windy days.
BTW also not suggest a hydrogen everywhere energy economy - use it centrally to augment/replace gas powered backup.
It's going to be fun when most everybody who has a detached or semi-detached house installs solar panels and batteries, and nearly stops paying for grid power.
What is this percentage-wise? Every technology will have some waste, and obviously it should be minimized if economical. But I think the efficiency is more important than just raw waste numbers.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business.
If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
pumped storage efficiency is 70-80%, so too for batteries. Probably not a completely fair comparison, but for example that appears to make curtailment more efficient than storing the power.
Any numbers on how much energy isn’t sensitive to time? Is it reasonable to say that people can just use energy more when it’s windy to save money? Perhaps if could incentivize people to have large local batteries to eat it up during these times and use it during more costly times? But that seems very expensive.
That is the whole "smart grid" idea. Problem is that people are rightly suspicious that as usual, the "smarts" are not there to serve them, but to maximally squeeze them and maximize profits for the operator.
I'm going to have V2H installed (Vehicle-to-Home), where excess power from the solar panels will charge the car battery, and the car battery can feed the home at night. I'm planning on following a setup I saw in another house, it seemed to work very well.
Do they shut down whole production? It looks like the setup is lacking simple PID with slowing down the turbines (by rotating blades of course) or shutting down only part of it?
Maybe I lack some of the context here, but that's the first thought.
Actual execution of curtailment depends on mechanism of individual turbine and various support equipment at provider.
Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".
Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
It really depends on how much excess capacity the north south interconnects have. You'll have to store the energy where it is produced and then get rid of it when the windfarms are not producing (and there's demand in the south). I'm sure someone did the math on this and it is not economical at the moment, otherwise this would have been lower hanging fruit than adding interconnects.
Dinorwig is an amazing place to visit. Not sure if they're open right now but go if you can.
Yeah, I like pumped hydro and even with its lower efficiency, it's cost effective... but I live in the Fens and I'm looking at solutions that work everywhere. Local storage is going to be more important once a significant portion of the country has an EV and heat pump.
I suspect what they are alluding to is the perverse incentives that materialize when the market does not have an ability to adapt to real costs incurred based on the relative location between generators and consumers.
Food is a bad counter example here, as retailers are not prevented from adjusting their prices the further away you choose to live off major population hubs. OTOH electricity in many cases costs the same in the entire country (incl. UK.) This means that energy consumers are not incentivized by these expenses to consider the real costs of the grid. They will rather build a new factory/etc close to London where they might expect to have access to better workforce pool instead of in Scotland right next to the overproducing turbines.
NIMBYism against new grid infrastructure would also largely disappear overnight if the market actually made economic incentives (in a form of reduced electricity prices/fees) for people to accept infrastructure bringing that electricity to them. The way things stand today – when electricity costs the same to everybody in the country – of course you wouldn't want any works in your vicinity.
Germany pays about the same each year: Wind is turned off, but the investors get their guaranteed profit from the tax payer. Meanwhile wind is aggresively expanded. They even go so far to now build wind in the south of Germany and then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies...
Why wouldn't you build wind turbines in Southern Germany? "Generally less wind" does not mean "wind power is infeasible", which it is absolutely not. There are fewer good spots, but that's why, say, the state of Bavaria aims for less than one fifth of the total capacity than the state of Lower Saxony, despite being almost twice as large.
It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)
Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.
Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.
Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7
New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.
Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming
I wrote aggressively expanded. It doesn't make sense to build wind in a region where it's only profitable due to subsidies.
> Wind power is so cheap
Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)
France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
Electricity prices are only very tangentially related to production cost. As you say yourself, grid costs are a factor.
> France has lower electricity prices
France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).
If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).
France doesn't have high subsidies for nuclear. EDF financial reports are public, please don't spread misinformation.
In fact they have an additional tax for it called arenh.
You could consider nationalization a subsidy(albeit it wasn't) but that was a one off 9bn payment. Germany spent double of that last year alone on EEG ren subsidies and still had highest household prices in EU.
German wind gets about 70€/MWh.
New french nuclear CFDs aren't clear. Fla3 doesn't have cfd and has a prod cost of 90-120€/MWh. But that's a failed project which got delayd and had supply chain issues. If EPR2 will have the same problems - yes, it'll cost similarly. Otherwise it'll be cheaper, like eg building a unit in 10y instead of 20
Well the whole clean energy transformation in Germany has a tax payer burden of 3 trillion or more till 2045. Frances nuclear plants didn't even receive 1 trillion of subsidies in total since their existence (according to my quick research). But let's say France and Germany are even in subsidies or France pays slightly more: I thought it's about Co2? Again: France has 1/6 of the Co2 emissions compared to Germany. Just by that metric it's a colossal failure!
When you say Germany can't just build nuclear plants now you are right. But the solution can't be to expand solar and wind, while destroying coal and nuclear plants - which is what they do. The last minister for these matters had the unironical idea to shutdown industry when the renewables don't produce. The idea was to move from a demand driven industry, to a supply driven industry. Total madness. The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
You're mixing up historic costs with current costs. As an illustration: the moon landing cost just $25 billion dollars, the Manhattan project even just $2 billion, what do you think a project of these scales would cost today?
You're also mixing the status quo with your (unclear) desire of how the world should be. Germany spent the last 80 years to build up an energy grid built on coal – nuclear peaked at 30%!. Of course they emit more CO2 today compared to the French!
But if anything, that's an argument for why Germany should start agressively building out renewables (aggression there was abandoned 20 years ago by the Merkel admin).
> 3 trillion or more till 2045
Looking at decades is a surefire way to get big numbers. But depending on your starting points (I guess 1999 during SPD/Greens coalition), that's just €60 billion per year. A lot of money but not exactly shocking.
> The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
Even the state of Bavaria - not exactly known to be mad for wind power - classifies more than half of its area as containing locations suitable for wind power. Of course that's nothing compared to Lower Saxony, but that's why they aim for total installed capacity of just 6 GW by 2050 (source for all that is the Bayrischer Windatlas issued by the, again, very sceptical of wind power, CSU government of Bavaria).
You're really just decade old fud against renewables. Do you really think that in the whole of 70 thousand square kilometres of Bavaria there are no points where the wind is strong enough 150 m above ground to produce power profitably? Because that's just not true. And 6 GW, by the way, are just one to four thousand modern turbines. Across the largest state of Germany. There's nothing mad about that at all.
Germany spent over 360bn on eeg alone till now, not adjusted to inflation. That's about 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. And EEG is projected to rise further.
In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer
So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)
> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies
If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.
Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
I don't know what the name of the internet law is, but I think it goes something like: when someone tells you about a regulation and how outrageously stupid it obviously is, they probably misrepresented it or frames it in an adventurous way.
In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not forerunners for wind power, with Bavaria's governing party being downright hostile. They are not increasing subsidies, that's for sure.
My best guess is that this refers to either differences in subsidies between the states - Lower Saxony has lower to no subsidies because building wind turbines is popular and profitable there without additional funding. Bavaria meanwhile probably lacks experts and has to bring them down from Lower Saxony or NRW, increasing building costs even at locations just as suitable as in Lower Saxony. So yeah, they might still have state subsidies, but not because they want wind power where it's infeasible. You wouldn't find an operator for that.
Another guess is that maybe this about the process for bidding on subsidies. This is a method where for large-scale projects operators can bid on executing projects not just with money but also by the amount of subsidies. For off-shore power, that subsidy often goes negative now, i.e. it's practically a license cost now. That does indeed mean that less desirable projects, which are probably less ideal for power generation, receive more subsidies, but that's a far cry from building wind power in "infeasible" locations.
> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.
Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.
I thought you were referring to that. But what's so bad about highly profitable places receiving less subsidy? Framed that way it's not as outrageous, right?
There's no malicious encouragement to build wind power where it does not make sense.
But why are there subsidies anyway? Well, all forms of power are subsidised, nuclear power the most, and renewables and coal about to the same tune (in Germany). Also, the electricity price is very low in Germany. Often lower as in France. You know, neither coal plant operators nor wind power operators profit from the extremely high consumer price point. So even though wind power is the cheapest form of energy to produce (in Germany), even it can't break even all the times, which is a scary prospect for investors.
Imagine if wind slowed down all across the country because of wind turbines. The long term effects would be less soil erosion and less mountain erosion and water turbulence. What would the short term effects be? Bird populations will find it more difficult to travel long distance with fewer winds? Temperatures would sore in some places while dropping in other places? Pollution will become more stationary instead of being distributed and diluted?
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
The entire UK energy demand is about 10% of the kinetic energy of the wind over the UK on a typical day. You'd have to extract a lot of energy to make a measurable difference. The extra energy dumped into the atmosphere from climate change makes a far larger impact.
Could use an opportunistic energy load-dump like a desalination plant... Singapore had a similar situation with fresh water shortages, and had excessive waste-methane energy from Oil refineries. It eventually became a net exporter of fresh water at a profit no less. Fresh water is also easy to store off-peak hours, and distribute using existing infrastructure.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
This is called re-dispatch. The market is setup up to treat Britain like a copper plate but the grid is limited north-south.
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
Because curtailment is about the available pickups not being able to take the energy. If you had a sink for it, you wouldn't be paid for curtailment so long as it was send through the grid. I bet if you used an alternate local grid the grorious (sic) (in)efficiency of capitalism will figure out how to be paid double.
The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suitable for wind and a lot of the places that are are less densely populated and so it affects people less there too.
16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore
and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore
To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW.
We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast.
It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
Yes, there is a prevailing south-westerly wind in the UK. The air comes in from the tropics and comes over the UK.
From wiki:
> Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy
But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards:
https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/
It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.
It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"
> Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.
That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.
You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
Dumping excess energy into something like Bitcoin mining is an interesting way to spend excess green energy that would otherwise fizzle. Mining Bitcoin is sort of ideal for this type of situation because it doesn't matter the frequency/time/duration for which you mine Bitcoin, and the coins can be quickly liquidated to recapture revenue.
Even of we agree it's a good idea most likely this doesn't make financial sense.
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
You don't need to run it 24/7 to make a profit because the energy is essentially free or stranded, therefore the only cost is that of the equipment. I think the amount here is more than enough to pay for a few SHA256 specific CPUs attached.
That would work if the energy was actually free. Instead, since it is a single market, as soon as curtailment kicks in you do not get the energy for free anymore, you get it for the price you pay for the gas plants that replace the wind generation which can't be transmitted.
This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.
Texas does this. They have lots of deals with data centers to consume additional base load where they basically get load shed first in the summer. Presumably these crypto miners are happy with the arrangement or they wouldn’t have entered into it.
Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-....
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.".
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
The government were mooting "we'll give you free electricity for life if you let us build the pylons near you" in 2024
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...
It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts".
NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.
Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons".
Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value?
Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).
Yes, but you have to factor in that you can't eat houses.
Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.
It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
EGL2 was proposed in 2015 and was meant to be operational by 2023. It wasn't even approved until August 2024. Construction began a month later.
EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus...
> The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances.
We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect.
It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?
Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.
If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.
Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.
On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
One solution is to have several markets. Norway also has transmission problems. The land is divided into 5 areas, each with its own price.
What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.
Is there a rational reason to do that?
The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same
E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible
If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot
The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift.
You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed.
So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.
Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.
In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them.
OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.
On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…
> if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely
What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?
I feel like I discussed that in the second half of my post, so I’m not sure how to respond to this question.
How would users make their demands dispatchable? The demand is the demand. The supply has to match
It depends on the specific load, dishwashers can be configured to run when the price drops a bit, heating can be configured to allow your house to get a little colder, and if the market provides enough incentive, adding insulation will become economical.
I mean it is a big pile of interests that needs to be optimized. One option is to expose it to the market and let the supply and demand optimization process have a go at it.
What makes you think they haven't? At least half a dozen operators have more than one data centre in Scotland, and many more have one.
Are you sure?
> Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue...
Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling.
I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling.
If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
Agreed! That was what I meant, sorry for any ambiguity.
spawn more overlords!
Who opposes Power lines?
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
People oppose everything.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them.
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
>> feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
There are a LOT of wind turbines in the US.
For some more hope [1][2].
Times are tumultuous but potential exists all around us.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g80av4zlDco
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUVoWxvvJ5Y
I can’t stand the fact that we put everything to committee when we’re trying to do something good, but not otherwise. I live near a highway, I can hear the cars all day, where’s my veto? I’ve lived near trains—but they were freight trains, so I didn’t get the “public transit is helpful for the little people” veto, I guess.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
I feel like a lot of our (EU) legal structures are totally inadequate for long term periods of peace. Eventually everything gets bloated and ossified and vested interests gain more and more influence/control.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7u4rhjVJoI
> The young folks that I've talked to...
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
I live about a mile down from two large wind turbines and you can absolutely hear them, especially at night - it's a low droning noise that especially on quiet nights and in the summer when you have your windows open it actually bothers me to a point where I considered selling the house multple times already - but decided that rolling the dice on noise pollution and ending up with something even more annoying just isn't worth it.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
I'm assuming it depends a fair bit on the model of the turbine. The park near us is rather new so I'm sure they are using the latest options.
May also depend on the age of the people nearby - am reaching an age with some level of hearing loss and I don't hear many low frequency - or high-pitch noises much anymore (drone of insects, or mosquitoes - squeaky voices of small children, etc.), so I probably wouldn't hear the turbines as much as a person with better hearing.
I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
Yeah, I get why people don't want wind turbines right next to their house, but also in my country I see people in the countryside complaining about turbines that are literally in middle of a forest, many kilometers away. It's just pathetic, especially since we're talking about economic backwater, where tax revenue and jobs from those turbines are a significant plus.
I don't mind them in the distance. I would love if these stupid things were 40km away. The closest is like 500 meters away from my house.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
Is that NIMBYism?
500 meters is very close, if it ACTUALLY affects you negatively I'd say your concerns are valid, but at 2km it's only going to be the skyline, which isn't your property unless you're in NYC.
> Is that NIMBYism?
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
I live in the country near a highway, if we could ban anything louder than a cicada I’d be quite happy to save us all a lot of fossil fuels!
> tendentious bunch of wankers
Lovely turn of phrase. I'm going to work it into my next tech talk.
I assume from context that the "house values" you and several other apparently British posters are using is what in the US we would call "home prices"? Or have I guessed wrong and it is being used more like "family values"? If the latter, what kind of values are meant?
It's home prices indeed AFAICT. It's fairly bloody-minded ti think house prices will go down with nearby renewables, it'd be a small blip if any at all. Give me wind turbines around and take away the cars and delivery motorcycles.
There is no need to speculate on Reform members being on the take when they are literally pleading "guilty" in court: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
Scum.
Saw multiple people on HN literally 2 days ago complaining about how noisy solar is. Absolutely baffling.
What's noisy about them? The transformers? Or something else?
I have a residential solar installation, and the inverter makes some noise when the relays are switching between import and export. I'm not complaining - although it was indeed surprising
Yeah they claimed the associated hardware for it was noisy. I don’t want to link to the actual comments because that’s kind of mean spirited, I’m just pointing out that I’ve heard people complain about the noise from solar and it’s pretty wild to me. I’ve been in close proximity to pretty large arrays and in plenty of homes with them on rooftops. You don’t notice them at all. They also don’t make the air around them unbreathable
House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.
Specifically, concern for house prices in a really myopic way. It's 'preferable' to hamstring the place you live in than to turn it into somewhere with a functioning economy that people want to live in.
If it makes you feel better, it's the same in the US. Some cities self destruct in pursuit of maintaining real estate prices. Of course, once they self destruct, prices plummet. Nobody considers that part.
The problem is, and always has been, land owners and their ego.
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
Even without new physical cables - very recently Nordic power markets switch to Flow Based Market Coupling (FBMC) - which basically takes physical properties of the existing lines (coupling points) in grid balancing operations, which allowed some underused lines to be used more (practically) - which made electricity cheaper in some locations, and more expensive in others (because cheaper electricity flew from that region to more expensive ones). It is akin to blocking train lines to a holiday resort because poorer people will be able to access it.
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
Germany is very weird in a certain way of total belief in power of free market.
So you see, the market was supposed to correct that.
But profit laid with cheap gas turbines to backstop wind and buying from france ;)
It's not a real free market, though, if you ignore transmission. Since transmission is a scarce resource it needs to be part of the market to send the signal to build more of it (or more battery storage, or better located production). The national auctions obscure the actual resource shortage and therefore the market can't work.
sshhhh, you're breaking the perfect invisible hand of market Germany wants to dogmatically push in EU grid
The mandatory EDI platform to interact on German market is also a bit annoying, though it's in details theory is theoretically /s solid
Dynamic pricing is often touted as the solution, since it will encourage both transmission and building generation where its needed the most.
It’s so prevalent there’s a dedicated term for people who oppose it: NIMBY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
And at its extreme BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
Mine's buried; was dug up and replaced overnight a few years ago. If it's slow I think that's just under-resourcing and scheduling rather than it actually taking that long to deal with the specific circumstance.
People that like the look of the countryside without ugly infrastructure sprawling across it.
https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/undergrounding/
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
Power lines that cut over your property? I can buy that - thats a nuisance. I'm not saying I would I am saying that as a rural property owner that would be annoying.
Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
Me. If it literally in my back yard. It's a tradegy of the commons game theory thing. I benefit from the power but please rig it somewhere else.
We have a similar situation in Italy with garbage.
Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.
Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
Long term a waste dump (landfill) can be good. Cap it off and it becomes park land or sports field.
I would, overhead powerlines are not something you want near any houses for various reasons. Underground is fine.
Norwich-Tilbury doesn't go near many houses at all, and certainly not 400,000 peoples' houses. Check out the route: https://norwichtotilburymap.nationalgrid.com
> Who opposes Power lines?
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
Who do you think campaigns against power stations?
Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
Always has been.
Do you want to have power lines instead of a garden?
I mean just read the link and they're objecting to a 120m-wide trench being dug through their countryside. Which is easy enough to sympathise with.
The consultation area is 120m wide, not necessarily the trenching. The working width is often far less than that: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/340431/download
In this drawing, you can see the area in the map and it is not 120m wide along the trench: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download. For scale, the grid squares are 1000m.
A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).
Why do trenches need to be dug across the countryside? Put them alongside existing roads and rail lines. Same with above-ground power lines. It might make them a bit longer, but the ‘eyesore’ is already there, and we can avoid making new ones.
(Re rail lines — if you build power lines over existing rail lines you could also electrify the rail route at the same time, and get rid of the diesel locomotives).
To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried.
Roads also go to places with buildings and have junctions, plumbing, foundations and are generally hard to dig past. But there are places where they do follow motorways: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M6_motorway,_northbo... (also canals).
Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.
120m would be an absolutely insane width for a trench. It seems more likely that you’ve misinterpreted that.
[dead]
Let me introduce you to Nigel Farage.
It all links back to preventing renewable energy and maintaining our dependence on fossil fuel imports from autocratic nations and "big enough to lobby" O&G industry. The locals and their dislike of power lines are just convenient pawns.
Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
I do wonder how much nymbyism is influenced by most individuals carrying 5-10 years earnings in their home. Such a potential liability might make one awfully concerned about liabilities.
The Green Party around there picked up a lot of ex Conservative votes and oppose the nuclear plant at Sizewell and pylons for renewables. Its a weird alliance.
I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.
Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.
Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...
I live close to the route that this will be built and regularly get cheap/free energy from my energy provider, partially because I live close to the wind generation in question.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
Wait Green Party MP - that has to be the height of idiocracy.
> And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
> You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
There's a program called Hilo [1] in Québec where it's using the Hydro-Québec Rate Flex D [2] to automatically stop the heating during peak demand.
> With Rate Flex D, you can save quite a bit of money, since most of the time in winter, you’ll be charged less than the base rate, except during occasional peak demand events, when you’ll be charged more than the base rate.
[1] https://www.hiloenergie.com/en-ca/ [2] https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
"Ripple control" is vintage technology - hourly usage meters are not necessary.
Everyone imagines that consumers would change their behaviour if they were given price information. In my experience, I've yet to see any good data showing that on average consumers save electricity due to smart meters.
In New Zealand, I think the power companies design their consumer products to be unhelpful (what's the equivalent term here for dark patterns in marketing?). I believe few consumers watch their instant usage or review their hourly usage. Personally I changed away from a plan that used spot prices (after seeing the debacle from snow in Texas, and realising the rewards were low and that judging/managing the risks was hard).
> Tell me your wonderland where this has happened
Plenty of grids had started paying consumers for excess solar generation exactly in this manner.
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C. It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
> Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C.
For small sizes, yes it is.
But also, capex vs opex. Even if it's twice the cost, you only pay it once.
Most normal home freezers have a way of setting temperature, e.g. mine can go from -16 to -24
So maybe -30 is difficult but it wouldn't be that hard to have the existing temperature range on new models be dynamic based on electricity pricing
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
I do similar, but without the batteries.
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
[0] https://www.homewizard.com/energy-socket/
You might find the crossover for hot water heating is higher than 0p; your boiler is likely only around 70% efficient. So at 6p/therm for gas, you'd break even with resistive electric heating at around the 10p/kWh mark.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
Having just had solar and a battery fitted by Octopus I'm interested - would you mind sharing what you use for automation here please?
Sure, I use Home Assistant running in a little raspberry pie in the lift.
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
I’m not a programmer, it’s all fairly easy to do.
Not op but may I suggest looking at Home Assistant, Octopus Energy Addin and Predbat: https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
Electricity contracts with 1-hour pricing are already pretty popular at least in Finland, even for consumers. I myself have one.
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
> The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc...
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
> Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
No it doesn't. The customer has low risk appetite and would rather pay a premium for predictability.
Clearly the consumer should automatically trade futures as a hedge!
It does, but people are really bad at understanding it.
It's like how there's a substantial portion of the population that counts the best commute time ever as their commute time, and are perpetually late. "How can it take 30 minutes to get to work, one time it was only 15!" - ignoring the reality of traffic, subway delays, etc.
Even if such a system was set up, it would take years before the appliances where all updated to take advantage of it.
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
For your old appliances you still pay the same on average. A fixed price contract isn't cheaper, it just smooths prices into a long-term average. And many of the changes can be done manually. On your old dishwasher or washing machine you decide when they start, and most of them even already have buttons to start with a fixed-time delay. Instead of starting them at the end of day you can just start them when the wind is strong or the sun is shining, or watch the price feed. You even get to feel smart for saving money
I agree on the popularity, but you'd absolutely see an effect even without anyone buying new appliances
Years isn't that long.
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
Each year is a significant fraction of a government mandate though.
This will probably take a little longer for private use, but the industrial sector is already doing this. Cooling chambers being cooled down further during cheap electricity prices (or sunshine when they have their own solar) or storing heat/"cool" underground
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.
No. Steering demand will not work. Unless by steering demand you suggest forcibly moving millions of people to Scotland.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
There are multiple issues, transmission is one, but supply+demand being out of sync is another
E.g peak solar is around 2pm, peak demand is around 7pm
Grid storage (including EVs and smart heat pumps) absolutely help with this second problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production). I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])
[0] https://ngenic.se/en/tune/
We have this system in Finland and whilst I was sceptical at first, it works much better. Electricity prices are published about 24h in advance for 15m intervals (was 60m up until 2 weeks ago). You can therefore time your usage dependent on demand on the grid (which is correlated to production of course).
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
This is called demand/response: https://www.openadr.org/
A lot of thermostats support it
Is there a list of supported thermostats? Would be very interested in implementing this ahead of the winter.
Already have thermostats that move based on signals from the utilities. There were some early pioneers in this stuff over 10 years ago in the bay area. They also aggregated the power to bid it, but I imagine they could aggregate to buy as well.
Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
I'm on the octopus agile tariff that has 30 minute pricing and an API to query it. Prices for tomorrow published at 4pm today. So the pricing bit is sorted. Just need to make the devices understand it now.
This is already happening with electric car charging. However, part of the reason this can't apply here is that the UK doesn't have regional pricing. For this to work you'd need to vary people's prices depending on which pylon they're connected to.
It would be much more effective to even out things , and trivial (engineering wise) to stop wasting the outputs of all these heat pumps by effective integration. Ie dump heat removed by ac or freezer into hot water heating, etc
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
Good water heaters are key. Mine is 200 liters and I've experienced cold water exactly once in three decades: One day 3 guests took hour-long showers each. Normally a family of five will never experience cold water.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
> 3 guests took hour-long showers each
WTF showering for one hour? That's a great way to quickly become persona non grata in my house.
A lot of thermostats already do that. Unfortunately these programs are not terribly popular. People see that the temperature is off and complain. Look up people talking about Nest Energy Shift (different but somewhat similar idea), most comments are quite negative.
I work for a company that does exactly that (for heating systems, especially heat pumps). If anyone is interested: https://www.kapacity.io/
This is not the issue discussed here. The generated power can not be transmitted to where it is used.
With flexible rate agreements, that's already possible, and some DIYers already are doing this - the problem is the interfacing. Heat pumps (and central heating systems in general) are notorious for being walled gardens, most freezers run on analog technology (i.e. a bi-metal strip acting as a thermostat).
I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
You are correct. Some devices expose local API's, most have walled garden cloud API's
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
Already works, you tie in your battery storage to lower costs. That already works.
The problem here is
1) the excess power is not near the demand
2) the cost of electricity near the excess power is no lower than where there's no excess
3) nimbys prevent the extra interconnects being built which equalise power availability and power demand
You can get price into home assistant and control any kind of device that it supports it, or hack it on your own.
It's good to raise awareness of this.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
UK domestic electricity is roughly equal to industrial (94 vs 82 TWh). Commercial is 62. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a286564785...
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
Absolutely. I had imagined green hydrogen production or something similarly intensive to be the solution.
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem. Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
Tell me about it. I live in a region of the country which has had a very active "no pylons" campaign running for several years now with no resolution in either direction yet. The latest proposal is to bury the lines instead which results in far longer build times, destruction of land, and inconvenience for everyone along the route, and they don't seem to like that idea either.
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
I don't know why we bother. Just don't ship electricity to them.
The UKs level of bureaucracy makes Brussels look like a breeze.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
The UK government are trying to address this known issue through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. You can find some info on this here - https://open.substack.com/pub/samdumitriu/p/the-planning-and...
NIMBYs dragging things down as usual
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
"NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything"
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
I live in inner London so maybe it's a regional thing, but developments here usually include consultations from more organisations than I knew existed. Here's a recent one from near me: https://anewcentreforlewisham.com/planning/
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?
There are a huge number of statutory consultees who are asked - they don't have to respond. It is an enormous list. Just as an example any and all of these can be statutory consultees depending on site location:
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
A recent battery planning application got objections from the fire service on the grounds that its location might be difficult to reach (narrow lane) if it catches fire. Which is actually a reasonable objection? Fire codes are a thing for a reason.
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
One of the other comments noted that a lot of organisations may be asked - but they don't have to respond. I was looking at the actual submitted documents for planning applications...
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secured_by_Design
Yup.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-12-september-2025/
>>West Oxfordshire District Council
Are these the same people who refused to let Clarkson open a pub because - and I quote - "it would be too popular"?
Everyone knows battery installations radiate 5G vaccines. Subscribe to my Kennedy-adjacent newsletter.
A vaccine against 5G? That'd really blow some peoples' minds!
Big vaccine and big telco just want to get their claws into you and then you will need boosters for 6G and 7G
It of course makes sense when you consider that statistically NIMBYs are mostly the property-owning class, which are mostly boomers.
Tbf the government just passed anti-blocking legislation that is meant to address exactly this - for national infrastructure projects you won't be able to sue the government over it directly anymore. Whether that's good or bad.....time will tell.
This website doesn't provide much context if you're not familiar with the situation.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
The problem is they are treating it as a free market issue with hourly auctions, but the 'free market' system ignores transmission. So the windmills can sell cheap electricity in the auctions that can't be delivered to anybody who needs it. Then after the auction you have to pay the windmill operators to switch off the excess production.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
Not that obvious when some tax payers will pay for new energy infrastructure and then also watch their prices go up because it wasn't built near them.
You mess with the markets at your peril. If you pay people to produce electricity that can't be consumed then you will waste a lot of money.
If the transmission capacity is limited you need to expose that signal to the market, not attempt to hide it.
Thanks. This make it even more crazy. Paying for not produced energy (probably some great deals secured there - with guarantees from both sides no matter the reality) and also same owners of both types of production sites. Funny how such deals get done, probably only to meet the magic "2030" rules, without taking into account situations like the one happening right now.
Thank you! This needs to be the top comment because I had no idea what this site was about, and I'm sure most people outside the UK don't either.
Thanks!
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
I've only heard about this, but do I understand correctly that: - Norwegian hydro-electricity is normally quite cheap - 'They' built a cable from Norway to the rest of Europe to couple the markets - Since the markets are coupled, mainland Europe buys the hydro-electricity from Norway, driving up prices in Norway. - People are pissed, understandably I guess.
Correct?
Correct. One additional problem beyond the price hike was also the fact that the price came to be wildly unstable. One day it was bascially free and the next day it was approaching 1 euro per kwh, where as before, the price usually came to about 1 NOK (10-12 eurocent) per kwh after taxes and such, and hadn't moved significantly from that in over 10 years.
See Fig 2 here[1] for just how spiky the market became after the price hike.
Also bear in mind that Norway does most of its residential heating with resitive heating, precisely because electricity has historically been so cheap. Heat pumps are getting more popular, and burning firewood got very popular during the price hike, but basically no-one heats with gas, as there's no infrastructure to support it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
That is correct. The historical price for consumers is by my guesstimate $0.03-0.05 USD, now it’s at least double. Grid fees come on top of that.
The anger is completely out of proportion, IMO, as the net effect is probably very positive. 1. Hydro is typically state owned and taxed at a very high rate 2. 50% of the price difference between markets is pocketed by the public grid operator (reducing grid fees) 3. We also import power when needed and typically at a net profit.
Norway already have this kind of solution where a companies on the same land can register to the grid companies, and the production and consumtion within the same messurement intervals is not counted as selling to the grid. This way you can use the public grid for your own "internal" transfer.
It looks like UK, like many other countries, already have grid that can't cope with casual usage and transferring power from farms to users. Adding "renting" of grid sound like it could make it even worse (if possible).
The Norwegian grid is divided up into different regional grids and they each have different electricity prices. Those who build interconnects between the areas can get some of the price difference. It's very different from the UK market, which pretends to have a single area, runs auctions to determine the price and then has to make post-auction adjustments (in the billions) to fix the fact that electricity can't be transmitted across the grid.
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
This is a layer way lower than that, this is between solar farms and buildings, solar farms and close factories. Not big electric zones like that.
Multiple transmission network upgrades are planned to reduce excessive curtailment: https://www.nationalgrid.com/the-great-grid-upgrade/where-it...
Those 4 "Eastern Green Link" projects look interesting - pretty sensible given how close most places in the UK are to the sea to go for subsea cables. Fewer problems with planning permission as well...
The craziest thing about UK energy is that it uses marginal pricing, where the price of energy is dictated by the most expensive generator to meet demand i.e. gas. Doesn't matter if your energy is coming from wind or solar, you're still going to be charged according to the price of gas. Until this can change, consumers are always going to suffer and think green energy isn't cheaper.
This is the main issue. People simply cannot afford to use this extra power. If power was cheap then all kinds of devices would switch to electric, especially heating and cars.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
The pressing question is, how much £ per £ lost need to be invested in grid infrastructure to reduce this number?
A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
Massive scale out of EV's should help with this - each car becomes a storage unit absorbing excess energy production. You really need a continental if not global scale grid system to constantly distribute the energy inputs. Only a few geographical units are big enough to make this happen, China being really the only one who can do it, and is doing it.
You still need an expansion of the grid to get the energy to the EVs.
A family member lives on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
But we do have decentralized grid generation. What we do not have is fixed price transit rights and the ability for smaller generators to make direct deals with local customers.
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines?
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
10% of turnover (Electricity Act 1989).
Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/4
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/27O
> or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
That would be a stupendously bad idea.
Well, unless you invest non-trivial extra work, you're going to start showing up on grid monitoring and finally someone will drill down in problem looking for broken substation and find you doing exactly the things that caused the problems and the reason for it being illegal to "just hook up".
It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)
A disconnect isn't a huge deal, most houses have one but they don't have a lock-out position and that's a must for an islanding operation and you'll need inverters that are happy to produce power even when the grid isn't present. Those are not the norm, but you can buy them (I'd recommend Victron). You'll also need a fairly large battery to stabilize the whole thing, without a battery you'll see massive voltage fluctuations as the inverters try to adapt to load without the required low internal resistance backing, so I would definitely recommend against that unless you like buying new stuff every other week.
Hypothetically for obvious reasons, I would put a socket on the outer wall of my garage with a sign saying 'do not use'. This would enable an enterprising person to siphon off up to 3600 Watts continuously while the breaker in my garage would be in the 'on' position. I could use my home automation setup to determine whether there is a surplus generated and only enable that socket through remote control as well.
Direct neighbour as in your properties touching might be a different matter, but to get right of way to cross public or another entities property as a random person or company, that will most certainly be problematic.
Is that Eigg? I thought they had their own micro-grid, but it sounds like they are subject to National Grid authority nonetheless?
> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation
Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.
It is illegal to sell electricity directly to someone else. To sell electricity you need to be licensed as an energy supplier.
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't expect that kind of scenario to work for the vast majority of people, but on a remote island it could be the kind of solution that gets engineered to keep homes working when an official solution takes a long time to arrive.
What you want is an electric car with "V2G" (vehicle to grid) technology. Still not quite publicly available yet.
There are plug-in batteries these days. Charge it in one home, then chuck an extension cord over the fence to discharge to another home (ignoring safety concerns...)
Wind turbines are not base load, so they do not lower electricity prices.
That is just false. Of course wind turbines can and do lower prices, regardless of wether or not they‘re base load not
They lower the prices a lot when they are producing at full tilt. This means that prices, at least to some degree, go up when wind turbines are not producing at full capacity, since the other power sources need to amortize their fixed costs across fewer kilowatt hours sold.
Going up or down: there is more supply, so prices go down wrt. a situation without wind turbines, at least momentarily until the wind drops down indeed when we go back to a system w/o wind.
If you can store the energy, your energy cost goes down (but storage is not free of course, though getting cheaper).
Amortizing the fixed cost will mean the 'fossil' power is more expensive per kWh indeed, making it more and more attractive to buy storage as to bridge the gap between windy/sunny periods that do have cheaper electricity.
Some electricity markets have or a re looking at capacity mechanisms, they pay simply to have the capacity to generate power at any given time, even if not generating, eg. to be a backup. Eventually, that will be the business case for any fuel-powered power plant I suppose
They lower electricity prices by a lot in Spain.
Well, it is not really a new problem. Stopping-starting nuclear power plants is also slow and costly. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity and industrial batteries are good ways to solve it at the grid level. In addition to the possibility of some local solutions others have mentioned.
People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.
Ireland has the same problem, they're waiting on getting another interconnect to france online before building out more windmills. There's enough offshore wind to power the whole island, but it's not predicable enough to power the grid 24/7
So much energy being left on the table. Grid scale batteries will really help here.
"Hooray! No wind has been wasted today (so far)."*
This week the northern-ish parts of europe are hitting one of the highest price point for electricity in recent time, with prices going for around $0.5 per kw/h. Calm weather in combination with low production from solar is creating a shortage in production, at the same time as the weather is getting colder.
There is a lot of money on the table to get energy produced at the right time and right place. Having energy produced at the wrong time and in the wrong place is not worth anything.
The author has a few of these wind curtailment dashboards, like this one, https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment which breaks down the total by month and by specific windfarm.
I think the idea of connecting wind turbines directly to hydrogen electrolysers when they are producing an excess is an interesting idea.
Stops the power being wasted ( though obviously hydrogen generation is less efficient than direct use ), and also creates a stored form of the energy for less windy days.
BTW also not suggest a hydrogen everywhere energy economy - use it centrally to augment/replace gas powered backup.
It's going to be fun when most everybody who has a detached or semi-detached house installs solar panels and batteries, and nearly stops paying for grid power.
What's the possible demand drop, 20%? More?
What is this percentage-wise? Every technology will have some waste, and obviously it should be minimized if economical. But I think the efficiency is more important than just raw waste numbers.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
A quick search points to: https://tamarindo.global/insight/analysis/uk-storage-need-in...
Which claims curtailment is about 10%
That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business. If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
pumped storage efficiency is 70-80%, so too for batteries. Probably not a completely fair comparison, but for example that appears to make curtailment more efficient than storing the power.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46756
Any numbers on how much energy isn’t sensitive to time? Is it reasonable to say that people can just use energy more when it’s windy to save money? Perhaps if could incentivize people to have large local batteries to eat it up during these times and use it during more costly times? But that seems very expensive.
That is the whole "smart grid" idea. Problem is that people are rightly suspicious that as usual, the "smarts" are not there to serve them, but to maximally squeeze them and maximize profits for the operator.
I'm going to have V2H installed (Vehicle-to-Home), where excess power from the solar panels will charge the car battery, and the car battery can feed the home at night. I'm planning on following a setup I saw in another house, it seemed to work very well.
Do they shut down whole production? It looks like the setup is lacking simple PID with slowing down the turbines (by rotating blades of course) or shutting down only part of it? Maybe I lack some of the context here, but that's the first thought.
Actual execution of curtailment depends on mechanism of individual turbine and various support equipment at provider.
Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".
Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
And here's how this is spun by the media:
https://archive.is/WLKm0
A couple of days ago it says wind cost us £1m.
It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.
It really depends on how much excess capacity the north south interconnects have. You'll have to store the energy where it is produced and then get rid of it when the windfarms are not producing (and there's demand in the south). I'm sure someone did the math on this and it is not economical at the moment, otherwise this would have been lower hanging fruit than adding interconnects.
Pumped hydro is an approach that is in use on the grid today, and has future proposals earmarked for development.
https://www.coireglas.com/project
The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.
Dinorwig is an amazing place to visit. Not sure if they're open right now but go if you can.
Yeah, I like pumped hydro and even with its lower efficiency, it's cost effective... but I live in the Fens and I'm looking at solutions that work everywhere. Local storage is going to be more important once a significant portion of the country has an EV and heat pump.
This is why you don't let "markets" run things at national scale.
Short-term profits and for-profit policy lobbying are utterly incompatible with building intelligent, robust, future-proof infrastructure.
> This is why you don't let "markets" run things at national scale.
Even food distribution?
I suspect what they are alluding to is the perverse incentives that materialize when the market does not have an ability to adapt to real costs incurred based on the relative location between generators and consumers.
Food is a bad counter example here, as retailers are not prevented from adjusting their prices the further away you choose to live off major population hubs. OTOH electricity in many cases costs the same in the entire country (incl. UK.) This means that energy consumers are not incentivized by these expenses to consider the real costs of the grid. They will rather build a new factory/etc close to London where they might expect to have access to better workforce pool instead of in Scotland right next to the overproducing turbines.
NIMBYism against new grid infrastructure would also largely disappear overnight if the market actually made economic incentives (in a form of reduced electricity prices/fees) for people to accept infrastructure bringing that electricity to them. The way things stand today – when electricity costs the same to everybody in the country – of course you wouldn't want any works in your vicinity.
Germany pays about the same each year: Wind is turned off, but the investors get their guaranteed profit from the tax payer. Meanwhile wind is aggresively expanded. They even go so far to now build wind in the south of Germany and then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies...
Why wouldn't you build wind turbines in Southern Germany? "Generally less wind" does not mean "wind power is infeasible", which it is absolutely not. There are fewer good spots, but that's why, say, the state of Bavaria aims for less than one fifth of the total capacity than the state of Lower Saxony, despite being almost twice as large.
It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)
Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
German nuclear did provide for about 4-5ct similar to the swiss one https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
Or alternatively merit order data https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.
Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.
Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7
New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.
Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming
I wrote aggressively expanded. It doesn't make sense to build wind in a region where it's only profitable due to subsidies.
> Wind power is so cheap
Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)
France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
Electricity prices are only very tangentially related to production cost. As you say yourself, grid costs are a factor.
> France has lower electricity prices
France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).
If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).
France doesn't have high subsidies for nuclear. EDF financial reports are public, please don't spread misinformation. In fact they have an additional tax for it called arenh.
You could consider nationalization a subsidy(albeit it wasn't) but that was a one off 9bn payment. Germany spent double of that last year alone on EEG ren subsidies and still had highest household prices in EU.
German wind gets about 70€/MWh.
New french nuclear CFDs aren't clear. Fla3 doesn't have cfd and has a prod cost of 90-120€/MWh. But that's a failed project which got delayd and had supply chain issues. If EPR2 will have the same problems - yes, it'll cost similarly. Otherwise it'll be cheaper, like eg building a unit in 10y instead of 20
Well the whole clean energy transformation in Germany has a tax payer burden of 3 trillion or more till 2045. Frances nuclear plants didn't even receive 1 trillion of subsidies in total since their existence (according to my quick research). But let's say France and Germany are even in subsidies or France pays slightly more: I thought it's about Co2? Again: France has 1/6 of the Co2 emissions compared to Germany. Just by that metric it's a colossal failure!
When you say Germany can't just build nuclear plants now you are right. But the solution can't be to expand solar and wind, while destroying coal and nuclear plants - which is what they do. The last minister for these matters had the unironical idea to shutdown industry when the renewables don't produce. The idea was to move from a demand driven industry, to a supply driven industry. Total madness. The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
You're mixing up historic costs with current costs. As an illustration: the moon landing cost just $25 billion dollars, the Manhattan project even just $2 billion, what do you think a project of these scales would cost today?
You're also mixing the status quo with your (unclear) desire of how the world should be. Germany spent the last 80 years to build up an energy grid built on coal – nuclear peaked at 30%!. Of course they emit more CO2 today compared to the French!
But if anything, that's an argument for why Germany should start agressively building out renewables (aggression there was abandoned 20 years ago by the Merkel admin).
> 3 trillion or more till 2045
Looking at decades is a surefire way to get big numbers. But depending on your starting points (I guess 1999 during SPD/Greens coalition), that's just €60 billion per year. A lot of money but not exactly shocking.
> The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
Even the state of Bavaria - not exactly known to be mad for wind power - classifies more than half of its area as containing locations suitable for wind power. Of course that's nothing compared to Lower Saxony, but that's why they aim for total installed capacity of just 6 GW by 2050 (source for all that is the Bayrischer Windatlas issued by the, again, very sceptical of wind power, CSU government of Bavaria).
You're really just decade old fud against renewables. Do you really think that in the whole of 70 thousand square kilometres of Bavaria there are no points where the wind is strong enough 150 m above ground to produce power profitably? Because that's just not true. And 6 GW, by the way, are just one to four thousand modern turbines. Across the largest state of Germany. There's nothing mad about that at all.
Germany spent over 360bn on eeg alone till now, not adjusted to inflation. That's about 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. And EEG is projected to rise further.
In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer
You can check out today how nicely is that investment performing https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)
But he said
> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies
If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.
Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
I don't know what the name of the internet law is, but I think it goes something like: when someone tells you about a regulation and how outrageously stupid it obviously is, they probably misrepresented it or frames it in an adventurous way.
In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not forerunners for wind power, with Bavaria's governing party being downright hostile. They are not increasing subsidies, that's for sure.
My best guess is that this refers to either differences in subsidies between the states - Lower Saxony has lower to no subsidies because building wind turbines is popular and profitable there without additional funding. Bavaria meanwhile probably lacks experts and has to bring them down from Lower Saxony or NRW, increasing building costs even at locations just as suitable as in Lower Saxony. So yeah, they might still have state subsidies, but not because they want wind power where it's infeasible. You wouldn't find an operator for that.
Another guess is that maybe this about the process for bidding on subsidies. This is a method where for large-scale projects operators can bid on executing projects not just with money but also by the amount of subsidies. For off-shore power, that subsidy often goes negative now, i.e. it's practically a license cost now. That does indeed mean that less desirable projects, which are probably less ideal for power generation, receive more subsidies, but that's a far cry from building wind power in "infeasible" locations.
> In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions"
https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...
> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.
Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.
I thought you were referring to that. But what's so bad about highly profitable places receiving less subsidy? Framed that way it's not as outrageous, right?
There's no malicious encouragement to build wind power where it does not make sense.
But why are there subsidies anyway? Well, all forms of power are subsidised, nuclear power the most, and renewables and coal about to the same tune (in Germany). Also, the electricity price is very low in Germany. Often lower as in France. You know, neither coal plant operators nor wind power operators profit from the extremely high consumer price point. So even though wind power is the cheapest form of energy to produce (in Germany), even it can't break even all the times, which is a scary prospect for investors.
Nuclear power in EU is least subsidized per IPEX. Renewables get about 15x more subsidies. Fossils about 30x more. Again, data is open
German household prices are highest in EU https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And industrial ones in top 5. All this despite EEG subsidies. Without them the price would be about 6ct/kwh higher
Imagine if wind slowed down all across the country because of wind turbines. The long term effects would be less soil erosion and less mountain erosion and water turbulence. What would the short term effects be? Bird populations will find it more difficult to travel long distance with fewer winds? Temperatures would sore in some places while dropping in other places? Pollution will become more stationary instead of being distributed and diluted?
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
The energy comes mostly from the Atlantic. You're not going to cover that in turbines.
The entire UK energy demand is about 10% of the kinetic energy of the wind over the UK on a typical day. You'd have to extract a lot of energy to make a measurable difference. The extra energy dumped into the atmosphere from climate change makes a far larger impact.
Could use an opportunistic energy load-dump like a desalination plant... Singapore had a similar situation with fresh water shortages, and had excessive waste-methane energy from Oil refineries. It eventually became a net exporter of fresh water at a profit no less. Fresh water is also easy to store off-peak hours, and distribute using existing infrastructure.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
Best of luck =3
Or start creating eFuel which is very energy intensive but might become necessary for aircraft.
This is called re-dispatch. The market is setup up to treat Britain like a copper plate but the grid is limited north-south.
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Bitcoin could be the solution here.
"The solution to, and cause of, all power problems."
Stranded energy is ideal for the bitcoin network.
The UK seems like one giant HOA.
Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
It would make sense for energy to be given away locally before we have curtailment used. Why is that not a thing?
Because curtailment is about the available pickups not being able to take the energy. If you had a sink for it, you wouldn't be paid for curtailment so long as it was send through the grid. I bet if you used an alternate local grid the grorious (sic) (in)efficiency of capitalism will figure out how to be paid double.
The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suitable for wind and a lot of the places that are are less densely populated and so it affects people less there too.
We're a windy island surrounded by sea - which seems to be pretty ideal for wind generation going by the number of huge projects underway?
Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml
16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore
To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW.
We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast.
It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
The north of the UK is definitely windier than the south, but I'm not sure that the west is windier than the east - it's certainly wetter?
e.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...
Yes, there is a prevailing south-westerly wind in the UK. The air comes in from the tropics and comes over the UK.
From wiki:
> Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy
But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/
It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.
It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"
> Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.
That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.
You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
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Dumping excess energy into something like Bitcoin mining is an interesting way to spend excess green energy that would otherwise fizzle. Mining Bitcoin is sort of ideal for this type of situation because it doesn't matter the frequency/time/duration for which you mine Bitcoin, and the coins can be quickly liquidated to recapture revenue.
Even of we agree it's a good idea most likely this doesn't make financial sense.
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
You don't need to run it 24/7 to make a profit because the energy is essentially free or stranded, therefore the only cost is that of the equipment. I think the amount here is more than enough to pay for a few SHA256 specific CPUs attached.
That would work if the energy was actually free. Instead, since it is a single market, as soon as curtailment kicks in you do not get the energy for free anymore, you get it for the price you pay for the gas plants that replace the wind generation which can't be transmitted.
This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.
Oh well.
Texas does this. They have lots of deals with data centers to consume additional base load where they basically get load shed first in the summer. Presumably these crypto miners are happy with the arrangement or they wouldn’t have entered into it.
True. But if the energy is free then you could probably use last gen hardware too. It must not be worth it still since no one is doing it.
People are doing it, it's just early.
And from the heat of bitcoin mining you could heat homes.
This still faces the rather fundamental problem of getting the excess power from point of generation across the grid to somewhere than can consume it.
Decentralize by throwing out the heater in each house and putting a miner there instead?
You can put up bitcoin miners anywhere.