(I recently asked the same question!)
Right now, investment in infrastructure needs to be made to move power from Manapōuri to the North Island.
As to why we are not replacing the 1.8m tons of coal we import from as far away as Indonesia with wind or solar in the North Island? I don't know.
Edit: If you take a look here, as of an hour ago we are generating 90+% renewable, but with 192mw of coal generation. Wind is generating at a fraction of capacity and this probably accounts for the coal.
There is hydro capacity but that might be from dams far south.
https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/live-system-and...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_clearing [2]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105055/000110465912...
Depends on what you mean by overproducing. The energy put into an electrical grid must be balanced by demand or bad things will happen. I think the second answer in the below StackExchange is a good description.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/117437/what-...
As far as I know residential PG&E customers can't buy energy in spot market prices, or else there could be some innovative arbitrage opportunities, like only running bitcoin miners when power is cheap.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Why not install 7 more? That would allow the entire current demand for the entire of NZ to come from the south island.
10M USD per km, average 800km from centre of south island to Auckland, $8b in total. 43,000 GWh generation per years, that's just 2.5c per kWh over 10 years on your bill.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indicative-capital-cost-...
Looks like $150-$198/MWh
Maybe not: "The Transport Secretary announced on 19 October 2022 that the Transport Bill which would have set up GBR would not go ahead in the current parliamentary session."
And yeah that was a long time ago
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
... most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design)
to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once
or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated
power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-chauffeur-the-leaked-tape-an...
Publicly owned old technology is very different to attempts to publicly develop next generation power, which tends to require brave entrepreneurs historically.
The start time is long but that does not say much about the overall operations.
> Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
and https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/power-plants-cold-st...
> In France, with an average of 2 reactors out of 3 available for load variations, the overall power adjustment capacity of the nuclear fleet equates to 21,000 MW (i.e. equivalent to the output of 21 reactors) in less than 30 minutes.
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
Edit: for those who are curious, here is some data on prices over the last month: https://agileprices.co.uk/
(I know this isn’t storage, jk)
With all the electricity generated there it should be cheaper - this could incentivise accelerating the electrification of trains in Scotland, currently only 25% of the network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Sco...
I think it depends on how you define unpredictable.
Wind power forecasting[1] is used pretty extensively as I understand it by all major windfarms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_forecasting#Uncerta... [2] https://www.cerc.co.uk/forecasting/wind-energy.html [3] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved.
Burning fossil fuels is a problem to be solved. High electricity prices are a problem to be solved.
Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power, which almost inevitably increases the amount of wind curtailed.
To repeat, curtailment is not a problem and does not need to be solved. It's a normal part of running a renewable grid. Any low cost renewable plan will have some predicted degree of curtailment, because it's the cheapest way to meet our energy needs.
See:
"Reframing Curtailment: Why Too Much of a Good Thing Is Still a Good Thing"
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/reframing-curtailment...
> Video Explains How Having More than Enough Renewable Energy Capacity Can Make the Grid More Flexible
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
It's been very windy recently so we are hitting around 40-60% wind power at the moment but there were moments last year where we were only getting 3% from wind power if it isn't very windy and unfortunately that means using more gas turbines for power which is an expensive source of energy at the moment.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?
And then there are pumped hydropower storage project like this one with a proposed storage capacity of 200 GWh and 1.5GW of power:
In the worst case, couldn't the excess power simply be used in electrolyzers to generate hydrogen? They may not be very efficient but it's better than throwing free energy away.
https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/r505_deemed_ra...
But operating a nuclear plant in this fashion pushes up the price per MWh considerably given their very high cap-ex and op-ex. And while fuel cost is negligible for nuclear, creating more nuclear waste per useful MWh generated is a further drag on costs.
So as a solution, it "works" if the nuclear plant does not have to compete in terms of price with other sources of electricity. But nuclear fails to compete on cost even if operated continuously - it's uncompetitive with cheap, quick to deploy, low op-ex, modern tech like CC gas turbines or renewables in most western electricity markets and can only survive with government subsidy[2].
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0703/ML070380209.pdf [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/19/biden-adm...
Absolutely. One HVDC link between Scotland and England (actually, Wales) has already been built:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link
And more are planned:
There are electricity suppliers in the UK who offer prices linked to the wholesale price, including actually paying you to use electricity if the price goes negative. Quite useful for flexible loads such as EV charging!
https://twitter.com/DanielColquitt/status/139539635553586790...
I explore this idea further in this blog post: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
A government interested in raising national productivity would underwrite the necessary cables and expedite their installation. However, that's apparently not the UK government since 2008.
1. "Productivity and potential 2003-2012: the UK decade that decayed", 2013: https://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/productivity-and-pot...
2. "UK productivity continues lost decade", 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195
3. "The UK is facing two lost decades on living standards", 2022: https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/national-gri...
Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
projected to begin construction in mid-2023
In January 2023, Sun Cable went into administration, the equivalent of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/42a1dfd9...
Curtailment is still rare though, but if we really run into the issue of frequently having too much electricity then surely investing in synthetic fuel production will be economical, right? I mean we'll have to do it anyway sooner or later. There will always be a need to burn stuff and fossil fuels will run out.
Also don't forget that with increasingly more EVs on the road and vehicle-to-grid technology (which should be mandatory in my opinion) we are increasing our ability to time shift our energy usage to better take advantage of the volatility of renewables.
I personally don't think we can ever have too much electricity.
First, reactors are in a stable equilibrium when operating, so one will actually increase their power by increasing the rate at which heat is removed (and v.v.). Alas, that's workable only within some small range.
A reason[1] load-following with PWRs was originally difficult is that traditionally PWRs use boron concentration in primary loop to regulate power and that can be decreased only slowly. The reason it's done that way is that it's the easiest way to ensure that power is adjusted uniformly throughout the core; if instead some control rods were partially inserted, the top part of the core would operate at lower power (and thus lower fuel burn-up) than the bottom part, which would cause compounding control issues later on.
France is using their PWRs in load-following mode by (a) having additional less absorptive control rods ("gray rods") that can be inserted fully to adjust power by smaller increments (b) more complicated schemes to decide which combination of available actuations to use to change power. See https://hal.science/hal-01496376/document for a paper that tries to optimize control designs so that power changes are more possible (and describes how the control schemes work).
Note that the total heat capacity of even just the primary loop in usual reactors is quite large: in PWRs it usually requires ~0.5s of full power output of the reactor to warm it by 1degC, so this can easily cover, say, ~5% variations for something like a minute.
[1] Another is that reactors are not stateless due to xenon poisoning.
[0] - interestingly his "RailNatter" this Wednesday was titled "How to fix Britain's broken railways". I haven't watched it yet, but it will certainly feature some good insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmKhVjw1xDA
That is the whole idea of a robust and efficient transmission network: to transfer power from where it is cheaply generated across even countries; and mitigate any power production or transmission network failures.
Say there is bad weather/physical catastrophe/heat wave in X area? No problem, we produce it in Y and deliver via Z. Pricier to produce in Y on time t, no problem produce in cheaper X and send to Y.
My read: Somehow U.K. managed to cheapskate on that front and we are now surprised it is more costly when extremely cheap gas is a thing of the past.
I am simply surprised that Scotland and England are not extra tightly interconnected. We can't really afford wasting or curtailing energy in Europe. Ideally U.K. should have been exporting that extra power.
P.S. It seems to me that U.K. has a quite fragmented transmission network "by design." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_network_operator#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Power_Networks I think that is a terrible idea. P.S.2 To the U.S. readers: they pulled a "Texas."
It really doesn't make much sense to connect Europe and North America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
I still feel like you're failing to engage with the issue here:
* NREL, just like the UK grid operator, is worried about curtailment and is taking active steps to limit it, the only difference is that while some uninformed schmucks think that any curtailment is bad, grid operators think a little curtailment is to be expected and they just want to keep it within bounds with an awareness of the opportunity costs that you mention -- sometimes it may be cheaper to just build new capacity and not worry about it at all, sometimes not. See for example this 2014 report: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60983.pdf They're saying: "relax, a little curtailment is nothing to worry about, let us do the worrying", they're not saying it's a non-issue. If it's not an issue, why are new interconnections being built at all? Why is locational pricing being considered at all?
* unless renewables are already 100% of the energy mix at a given point in time then any kind of curtailment has to logically be due to either congestion or some other technical limitation (a hiccup in planning/projection or inflexibility of other generators) and strictly speaking cannot be due to overproduction; that said, the original article describes a situation where transmission capacity is not just insufficient for peak production (even if it could have been used) but may slowly get to the point where it's insufficient for average production... both are technically "congestion" but do you really not see the difference?
https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Drax-LCP-Ren...
6.5 Fengnings or equivalent should be enough for a 94% renewable grid in the UK.
It is well within the same order of magnitude.
>the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants
because why build a solar or wind farm this year when you can instead wait 20 years for hinkley c to be finished at FIVE times the LCOE cost?
it's absurd. the people dont clamor for nuclear power. only the military industrial complex does.
Arguably, if cost effective, nuclear is best run at full output as consistently as possible, with other systems buffering that supply with demand (hydro storage, batteries, demand response, etc).
https://www.laka.org/nieuws/2022/so-how-flexible-is-nuclear-...
https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/french-report-nuclear-power-...
Edit: would have been. Looks like they lost funding. :(
Bitcoin has one of the highest % of renewables of any industry i.e. solar, wind, hydro etc.
As an absolute value the amount of energy it consumes is less than 0.1% of global energy consumption.
Those two things taken together mean that Bitcoin contributes what amounts to a rounding error in total global CO2 emissions.
And that's not even mentioning its GHG emissions reducing effects on the capture of methane, which could turn it CO2eq negative emissions.
On top of that it has an important role to play in balancing grids by consuming excess energy that the market doesn't want or need, or can't be stored.
And the utility of Bitcoin? Well, some people see value in a form of money that can't be arbitrarily debased, is open to all on a global and neutral network that can't be changed or controlled by any central or corrupt authority, and that is censorship resistant.
You might not see value in that, but many people do.
Maybe you see more value in Christmas lights which consumes more energy than Bitcoin.
https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1512493813218123786?s=2...
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...