Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
Yes, all the things mentioned should be looked into and done when it makes financial sense but "wasting wind" is much less a thing to worry about than "burning gas", and I'd rather waste wind than waste money.
The article wasn't decrying the existence of excess wind power, it was trying to describe the best solutions for using that power.
But all the solutions are aimed at reducing the curtailment of wind. Rather than reducing the gas burnt.
If the money saved by building more wind (or solar) and not having to burn gas saves more money then who cares if more wind is "wasted"?
It would be nice to use every last drop, but I dont want to actually spend money to achieve that goal when it could be used to e.g. build yet more wind, and burn even less gas.
It's probably more typical for all available wind to be used and then gas burned on top of that.
Building more wind, even in curtailed areas will probably help those cases, even if it leads to more curtailment on other days.
It would be nice if their neat interactive graphs also clearly marked the "we burnt gas because we didn't have enough wind turbines" so we can balance the two costs correctly.
Right now it's like a medical test that only reports false negatives and ignores false positives (or vice versa). Trying to reduce one to zero without reference to the opposing problem is probably making the other one worse.
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-...
I think it's a great idea, but the system needs better controls. Many companies sign up for curtailment for e.g. heat related reasons who have heat based energy needs. When they get the call, they eat the fine and still benefit because the fine is less than the benefit for enrolling in the program.
What amazes me is the footnote that the total spending on net zero is just £50 billion. Lets assume it's more realistically £100b. That's less than the cost of HS2. It's less than the cost of decommissioning the existing civil nuclear plants when they reach their end of life. Its the cost of 12GW of nuclear power generation. It's 14 months energy subsidies.
How is paying wind farms hundreds of millions of pounds to turn off wind generation not wasting money?
*also where you are would be interesting. There's a big difference say between Scotland and Croatia.
That's very different to wasting money in a way that actually uses up physical resources or people's time.
This is needed anyway because it is already maxed out and demand will dramatically increase with the transition to EVs.
Something that is cheap can have some percent wasted and still be cheaper overall than more expensive options.
Focussing only on the waste without that bigger context is at best a false economy, at worst fossil fuel promoting propaganda.
However, turning generation on or off isn't the only way the grid is balanced in the short term - turning up/down tends to be a big part of it too and most conventional generation can do that faster (sometimes a lot faster) than startup/shutdown.
Something had to get built first, and I guess they picked the wind turbines. This seems like everything working as intended to me.
Looks like $150-$198/MWh
Despite the insistence that Closed Cycle Gas Turbines can't react quickly, because they're by far the largest component that we could start and stop the UK does in fact very quickly increase and decrease output from the CCGTs. For example this morning 2.79GW at 0600 to 3.89 at 0700.
There are much faster options, batteries, import, even the pumped storage is seconds instead of minutes - if available, but CCGT is just not that slow to change compared to the weather. In that same period the wind power went from 10.9GW to 11.4GW. 500MW is a lot of power but it's not more than 1.1GW
But doesn't wasting wind waste money if we have to pay so much for curtailment?
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."
Nope, the difference can be found in the profits made by the company that does in fact own and run the wind farms. The government could capture that should it wish to build them itself. This has been a hot topic recently with regard to fossil fuel energy generators who have been making large profits (in the billions) at the expense of people's energy bills.
the franchising sysem won't be coming back
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.
1) a lot of wind means there's too much power... that has to be used somewhere, that's why you have negative prices, to get someone to take that power off the grid and use it for something, sometimes useless, and someone has to pay for that
2) no wind means you still need gas, hydro, nuclear etc. powerplants, because you need power even when there is no wind and sun, so you need all the power generating capacity covered even without wind
1.6 GW per reactor for the latest ones under construction (Hinkley Point C) and in development (Sizewell C). Each site has 2 reactors for a total of 2 x 2 x 1.6 GW = 6.4 GW.
Although this is largely just replacing the UK's existing fleet of reactors, almost all of which will have shut down by the time Hinkley Point C comes online. Of the current 5 operating UK nuclear power stations, only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028.
> "They will need them built in the right place, because while more power cables can be built, you can't transfer a lot of power on very long distances"
One of the reasons offshore wind has been so economic & successful in the UK is they can usually plug in to existing, redundant transmission lines left behind by decommissioned coal and nuclear power stations, which are often on the coast. It's relatively cheap to connect to the grid when the infrastructure is already there waiting: you just need to build the cables from the turbines to the shore.
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...
But seriously (author of article here) I think that agile tariffs and more demand flexibility are probably a big part of the solution
Edit: for those who are curious, here is some data on prices over the last month: https://agileprices.co.uk/
Network Rail sells access to the network to train operating companies, which are private (though often state-owned by other countries).
The network was originally built by private companies until nationalisation in 1947 (railway companies were bankrupt after WW2). It was private for a while in the 90s, then went bankrupt and renationalised in 2002. Seems to be quite the money pit!
A report from a few years back (which I'm afraid I've utterly forgotten the source) examined the data on this, and argued that as a result of this changed pattern of use, these CCGT stations were now not achieving nearly the kind of efficiency figures they were designed for, which from a carbon point of view is not good news - we might still be emitting lots of the stuff, but just not getting as much practical benefit from it as we used to.
Now, I'm not meaning to suggest that this is a disaster, or that is somehow invalidates the entire of concept of renewables, but it does point to the need to be careful about what we take to be a useful measure of progress - and that merely the quantity of supply to the grid in GWH isn't necessarily it.
And the article under discussion here is of course picking away at another strand of this same idea - when we connect these generators together, it gives rise to system-level effects, and we need to be thinking about the outcomes, both beneficial and harmful, in system-level terms as well.
(Edited for spelling.)
The article describes an entirely different problem than "oh no, it's very windy/sunny and we don't know how to use all of this energy" which is not solved with better distribution, but with storage and demand regulation.
And actually, the article is in complete agreement with you that we needn't be overly worried: curtailment isn't the end of the world, but we can solve it and it turns out that some of those solutions are cheaper than just building more farms, or would incentivize building those farms closer to where the energy is needed.
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...
You could just keep it spinning nonstop without a load I suppose, but for anything but nuclear it's not gonna be economical.
Wind turbine output, although variable, is also fairly predictable: so good modelling and scheduling should ensure that when CCGTs do operate, they can run as efficiently as possible and not be spinning up and down too frequently.
What you are saying is that its possible to map out in the future when power is available for generation.
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
Agree 95%. The only valid question involving curtailment is how much must occur at each individual turbine or farm to make it a bad investment.
The thing is, they don't really want to do it if they can save fuel by shutting down.
> the National Grid pays the windfarms to turn off, and pays a (typically gas powered) alternative generator, closer to the demand, to turn on.
Curtailing wind means paying someone else to generate that energy in the “right” location, which usually means burning gas. So all the extra wind being built isn’t reducing amount of gas being burned, it’s just increasing the total cost of electricity.
> Probably the cheapest and best option is to build more wind and not care too much if it increases curtailment.
We can build all the wind we want, but if connected to consumers by nothing more than a long extension lead that barely run a kettle, then it’s totally useless. The wind needs to be located so the energy generated can actually be transported to end users. Curtailment is basically a direct measure of the amount of wind we’ve built, that can’t actually be used. Building more isn’t helpful in the slightest.
The article certainly doesn’t advocate for reducing the amount of wind built, quite the opposite, they just point out we need it built in the right places so we can actually use the energy produced. Rather than built bunch of wind turbines that will forever be pointed out of the wind.
You'll soon end up with a burning/melted generator.
> "pump some water in a loop"
OK, but you're going to need huge pumps (1000+ MW!). Expensive.
> "or discharge through some resistors"
Again, you'll need extremely large resistors, and a way to dissipate an awful lot of heat. We're talking about a huge amount of energy here!
Nordstream 1 was 1222km, and Britpipe now, is 60km shorter.
Boston to Lisbon is 5100km. Churchill Falls (home of a giant hydro dam project in Labrador Canada which got screwed by Hydro-Quebec because the only via transit was through Quebec), would be just under 4000km subsea.
The transit contract expires in 2039 I believe...
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.
That’s because curtailment does cost us money. Someone’s paying those wind operators to turn off the farms. We literally pay money to wind farms to explicitly make them produce nothing.
How do you reconcile these two statements?
> High electricity prices are a problem to be solved.
> I'm explicitly calling for more curtailment, because it isn't a problem and doesn't need to be solved.
Curtailment cost money, you still need pay the wind operators to the energy you told them not to produce, plus pay someone else to produce the energy that’s now not being produced by wind. That cost ultimately ends driving up the price of electricity.
You want to reduce the cost of electricity, a good start would be not paying people for electricity that can’t be used.
> Both of those problems can be solved by building more wind power, which almost inevitably increases the amount of wind curtailed.
Only if you can transport the energy. Otherwise you’re just building turbines that can’t be used, and paying for the privilege of not using them.
You get all the revenue, and have zero wear and tear on your equipment. In an extreme scenario you could even be paid for not turning on non-functional equipment. What a fantastic deal.
But the retail buyer doesn't usually see the negative/low electricity prices of high-supply+low-demand time periods for their "inefficient" uses that should still be economic.
Why would I want to pay for cheap wind energy I can’t use, and also pay for gas energy that I can use? Unless the cost of the wind is £0, paying for wind in addition to gas is just a waste of money.
Maybe if variable prices encourages energy intensive demand to shift to Scotland that will help, but that’s not quick either.
Could try also melting some salt on the side.
TPE is still under covid arrangements and Avanti West Coast is under a new style management contract as I described above
switching out top level boss doesn't suddenly improve underlying problems with the service
in the UK this is almost always the infrastructure, which has been nationalised since 2002
the government (DfT) had more control over the railways under the franchising system than they had when BR existed
almost all of what the hated "train companies" consists of is putting a driver in the cab, the rest is down to the DfT
why would this be necessary when the entirety of Great Britain is one synchronous grid?
The article is saying that if we built more transmission lines, or increased storage capacity, or had localized pricing, that more of the power generated would get used, and we wouldn't need to turn on the fossil-powered plants as much.
More wind wasted is precisely equal to more fossil fuel burnt right now.
Further, the article described why simply building more production doesn't solve things, because most of it would be built in Scotland, and we wouldn't be able to bring in any more power into the grid where it's needed then we do now.
The graph of the day they screenshot shows the curtailment stops as soon as people wake up and start using electricity. On many days there is no curtailment.
And... You can build wind in other places, like the offshore wind near Dogger Bank they show on the map and then forget about.
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:
I suspect NIMBYism is a big part of the explanation. Airborne AC links are efficient but ugly. Underwater AC links are tolerated by Nimbies, but inefficient. So you end up with underwater HVDC links.
Why? What are the real costs? Isn't it just a simple disconnect switch? Why do the wind operators get paid for not delivering power? Is it a contractual issue?
Because there are bottlenecks in capacity on the synchronous grid that restrict the amount of power that can be moved from north-to-south (or vice-versa).
It works out better/cheaper/easier to bypass those bottlenecks with efficient undersea HVDC links than to try and build more terrestrial AC transmission lines.
The article covers this and explains why it's not enough. Provisioning time for the links exceeds projected generation capacity increases in the Scotland.
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...
It's just another example of the hubris of the Conservative party. We've seen it play out repeatedly over the last decade and even earlier in Thatcher's neoliberalism. Labour's lurch to the right resulted in displays of similar small minded arrogance. Their undermining of the NHS through piecemeal privatisation is nothing short of a crime.
On top of the above you want to make a profit.
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.The incremental cost of keeping a gas generator working is very close to zero compared to all the other expenses involved in building the plant and buying gas to burn in it. We can keep all our gas infrastructure around and simply use it less often if we have more wind.
If we store more wind power to reduce curtailment, then that power can be used later. I end up getting a larger fraction of my overall power through wind, so my neighbor can have more access to alternative sources of power that I am not using. Their neighbors now have access to more power as well, because my neighbor is pulling more from my now unused infrastructure.
The gas burnt at peak might not change! But out of peak the balance can change (at least until, say, Scotland is running 100% on wind I guess). The nice thing with storage (especially hydro storage, which sidesteps everyone's universal answer of "batteries are expensive") is that you get to actually hold onto the energy and be "smarter".
There are a lot of details about... I suppose organizational theory? Which makes the decentralization nicer. But profits come from somewhere
There's good reason why they are hard to throttle. For starters thermal contraction shortened lifespan; but also because the nuclear cycle itself doesn't lend itself to throttling safely - nuclear products create "retarded (?) neutrons" which are the cornerstone of a stable control system (as opposed to prompt neutrons) and also significant amounts of neutrons poisons which are normally "burned" at equilibrium steady state power levels but which accumulate if you throttle down (therefore be needing even more prompt neutrons).
My understanding is that the more you need to rely on prompt neutrons for your neutron balance the more unstable your reactor (starting them up, therefore, is delicate). Throttling the power upsets this balance by at least two different mechanism.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-11/sun-cable-enters-admi...
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.
The big problem is that energy prices are set based on the most expensive unit that needs to be turned on to meet demand. Renewables do not tend to be that during periods of low supply, as low supply of energy in the eu market generally means sub-optimal weather conditions for renewables. It is going to be either fossil fuels, nuclear, or battery. If we take out fossil fuels then that leaves battery or nuclear. Neither is very economical without subsidies. Governments (and tax paying citizens) are however very keen on grid stability and thus willing to spend a lot of money to keep it running.
This is all predicated on the market operator actually having the systems in place to signal the need for curtailment effectively, of course. That’s a whole different question.
In a certain sense one should expect lowering usage to inevitably lower efficiency, as a sort of inverse corollary to Jevon's paradox (which states that as efficiency rises, total usage does too).
That's a shame, I wasn't entirely onboard with the logistics of crossing the massive fault lines along the route .. but I admired the ambition and scope of the project.
Be interesting to see if this is the end or just a pause waiting for fresh capital.
That is not a problem, it is the incentive to have supplies available so they can be turned on.
I therefore wonder if the market couldn't be structured in a better way which would still ensure that the fossil backup generators are adequately compensated but smoothes the extra cost over the remaining cheap GWh. Something like a meditating party which is aware of the production costs and buys up the daily power and sells it on at an averaged price. There are probably good reasons why this wouldn't work, but I am too stupid to figure them out.
It's worth noting there are some demand response initiatives and the like that are approaching this from the other side - they will pay a user to not use power at particular times of high load. If you don't want to pay a premium on power, I suspect there will be providers happy to oblige, so long as you are willing to forgo the 100% service guarantee.
But it was missing the most obvious long term solutions for excess wind power: carbon capture and hydrogen generation. We cannot build enough excess wind power to ever have too much for those “sinks”.
[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
One of the big points in the article is that there’s a single energy market in the UK that doesn't consider location. So it’s possible for wind providers to sell energy from locations where it can’t be used. An obvious fix is to introduce multiple energy markets for different locations, so the price of electricity drops in areas where there’s excessive production, and not enough transfer capability.
Obviously it’s a shitty deal for consumers. But they’re not investors.
With regards to fraud, doing this deliberately would be fraud (but good luck proving it). Building the equipment and then failing to maintain it, and failing to test it, that’s just bad management…
The original article is about just being able to move any amount of energy whatsoever to where it is needed. If you don't improve distribution then you hit the saturation point much faster and more often than in an intermittent peak power scenario. Seeing that the original article links to multiple pages by the energy regulator/distributor about this very issue should maybe give us a hint that they, the actual experts, do think this is important enough to merit attention?
I upvoted your original post when you said that "it is hard for people to have constructive conversations about" negative prices and curtailing, but I'm starting to wonder whether you may be the common factor in some of those unconstructive conversations you've had in the past :-) Respectfully, it's not helpful to contribute to the discussion with a robotic pattern matched "curtailment is great actually!" whenever the topic is mentioned, without engaging with the arguments that are put forth.
It isn't true, though, is it?
The curtailment payment is instead of the regular payment, not in addition to it. Possibly also instead of some tax breaks the wind turbines got contingent on being operational - but that's only shifting costs from the taxpayers to the electricity consumers, who in the large are the same people.
Paying twice is still not as nice as paying once, but it makes me wonder what other sleight of hand the author is employing in his argument.
Timestamp: 1 minute 5 seconds.
If the NREL is specifically making videos to dispel unhelpful myths about a topic then it's worth at least watching their short video before continuing to spreading those very same unhelpful myths.
The UK market maybe not, but the UK could make a truckload of money selling their wind power to France to aid their old, barely running NPPs.
It really doesn't make much sense to connect Europe and North America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
At this point there isn't really any part of the energy grid that governments do not subsidize. They subsidize companies that provide grid stability. They subsidize renewables that provide capacity. They subsidize the customer who buy energy. They subsidize the grid infrastructure that transports the energy. They subsidize the interconnection between countries that enables trade between countries. They subsidize the cleaning up and associated costs from pollution.
It's called pumped storage.
We dont need as much storage as people think. Solar and wind anti correlate and a vast amount of demand can be time shifted.
The problem is that building wind turbines in Britain has opportunity costs.
For simplicity: assume a status quo of 100% gas. We are burning 100 units of gas for that per year.
Now assume by building a crazy amount of wind turbines we could satisfy 95% of the UK's power demand with renewable. However, for the remaining 5% we'd need to burn 50 units of gas.
In this scenario, efficiency of burning gas drastically plummeted, but so did overall gas use.
However now the question is: for the resources invested into building all those turbines, could we have gotten a better climate bang than 50 units of gas saved?
(All numbers made up, obviously. In practice, we can probably make the economics work. Though we might need to deregulate the grid. It's crazy to pay wind turbines for not running. At least mine bitcoin or smelt aluminum or something.)
Alas, in the real world because of public opinion and political pressure, it's almost impossible to build new nuclear power plants. And those that get build are crazy expensive and overengineered, and invariable overrun their schedule and budget.
Could you at least mine bitcoin or something like that?
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...
Some of that is infrastructure (the cancellation of platform 15/16 at Piccadilly means the new Ordsall chord is basically useless, but they tried to use it anyway), I don't know enough about TPE to fairly attribute it, but with AWC it's franchise operation -- especially staff availability. Some of that is also government interference.
Why the left think a tory government would be any better running services than the train operators is anyones guess. When you dig down to it they seem to want more tax subsidies to big businesses (the ones who pay the £400 first class peak time returns on Manchester-London) and high income commuters (the ones with 50% discounts via season tickets who cause peak problems in the same way peak is a problem on the electric grid, and who typically earn far more than the average UK person who commutes via bus or van/car)
Fortunately the franchise system means many lines have significant competition, and you can choose based on journey time, price, and reliability.
Where privitisation does have its weakness is the financing of rolling stock.
Building any new transmission line through densely-populated England is extremely expensive. Even if you can secure the necessary land and wayleaves, nobody wants them running near their house and spoiling the views, so significant segments have to run underground in tunnels, greatly increasing costs.
Besides, the UK is not that small when linking England and Scotland. The proposed Eastern Green Link 2 (EGL2) is 440 km long: there are many existing HVDC connections much shorter than that around the world!
In their conclusion, from a decade ago, they suggest that in the future (i.e. now) with larger amounts of renewables curtailment will go up.
It's like people dying during heart operations. If the number of deaths go up because you are treating more people is that a good or a bad thing? If people come away with the idea that heart operations are too risky, when the science suggests we should be doing even more of them, because the vast, vast majority save lives is that good science communication?
It's because of this that there's a lot of talk about wild ideas like pressurizing abandoned mines and so on - there are a lot of mines around. But then we're back to the "proven technology" sticking point.
1. power available when you want it, and you can choose on the fly
2. power available when you want it as long as you know in advance
3. power available at a time that you don't choose, but you can predict
4. power available at a time that you can neither choose not predict
Moving generation up this hierarchy, or demand down it, is always going to give some benefit. Well designed power markets should make sure that there is some fair incentive for any such step.
Building additional wind generation can never be more wasteful than the costs of its construction. If it were free, it would make sense to vastly overbuild.
Nowhere is currently "well" provisioned for pumped hydro given a solar and wind grid coz while they existed for over a hundred years they have never had to store that much energy. Newer, larger ones are being built around the world. Australia will be well provisioned soon.
Go back in time 10 years when solar and wind first became economic and people made similar comments about how little of it there was (1% of total power!), ignoring the unit economics completely. We are at that exact same inflexion point with pumped hydro.
What's the longest period without wind and sun you're willing to provision for before you give up and tell the population they'll have to do without electricity for a bit? A day, a week, a month? Numerically, how much storage would that actually need? How many stations, how big? You'd need over a hundred Fengnings to power the UK for a week. Where would they go? I'm all for renewables + storage but you can't handwave these questions as FUD, it's a serious problem.
I suspect that if we committed to categorically eliminating fossil fuels, including peaker plants, the first time the lights went out because the weather was bad you'd have people clamoring to build nuclear power plants. Statistically, it'll happen at some point no matter how much storage you provision.
The popular opinions I have seen are:
- “nationalise the railways”
- more frequent, reliable and cheaper services overall
As discussed, nationalising the railways isn’t necessarily the silver bullet many people think, but if you engage with those people and don’t insult/berate them they’ll come round easily. They're not hardline communists, hellbent on the destruction of private companies - they just want better train service somehow and may not fully understand how to get there. That's not to deny the existence of "tankies" and other weirdos, they're just a very very tiny minority.
HS2 should enable the “more frequent” part over the regions it covers. I don’t know how to make services cheaper or more reliable, I imagine subsidies come into it somewhere though, and this inevitably means that yes someone wealthy at some point will benefit from a cheaper rail ticket.
They are expensive things, and typically not something left to popular vote.
Perhaps the system could be changed to be more like how you imagine it should work, or would prefer that it would work.
But not understanding how it does work and jumping off from there on the discussion means that folks end up talking past each other, rather than actually communicating.
In a simple model where there was only one company that owned everything from top to bottom across the entire electrical grid from all power plants to every single power meter and everything in between? Yes I agree 100%.
However that's not how the grid actually works, so a simple understanding of the economics of a marginal turbine isn't the same as understanding the whole system.
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.
I used to work for National Grid in the Miliband era; I worked, among other things, on theorizing a replacement to the 'circle diagram' for the (then thought to be) coming renewables regime.
> This isn't a real economic loss.
Perhaps I'm misinformed on what economic loss is. To me, paying for something and not getting it is a loss.
I go to movies, I buy popcorn, I spill popcorn. Movie theater says "tough noogies" to me that's a simple economic loss, and roughly the same. I paid for it, I didn't get it.
Worse still is paying for curtailment on both sides. From the article:
Consumers end up effectively paying three times for the power they’re getting: the original payment to the windfarm for the electricity, the payment to turn off, and then the payment to the alternative generator.
If this is true, and you're both paying a turbine operator for the power, and then again to not produce the power, well that's extra worse. That would be the initial economic loss (I paid for the thing and didn't get it) with an fee tacked on top.
I go to movies, I buy popcorn, I spill popcorn. Movie theater says "tough noogies" to me and doesn't replace the popcorn. They also charge me a fee for cleaning up the popcorn I spilled. That's worse from what I can tell.
Again maybe I don't understand what's going on here with respect to how precisely curtailment works. But it's hard to imagine that the situation
> So the grid has to pay them for electricity, even if they can’t use it.
is anything other than an economic loss.
That doesn't follow at all from your article, which is about the US. You can't just extrapolate from a different country at a lower latitude with different weather patterns and vastly more space to put things like onshore wind/solar farms without running into NIMBYIsm, not to mention more hours of sunlight just from spanning 4 timezones. 6 hours of storage is not even close to enough for reliable renewable power in the UK. It wouldn't even cover a single windless winter night.
And even if we take it at face value, the scenario you linked involves masses of overbuild, over the course of nearly 30 years ("by 2050"), and still leaves 6% of energy coming from carbon combustion. If we start building nuclear plants now, even if we accept your premise that they take 20 years to build (they needn't, especially with scale), then we can get to zero carbon almost a decade earlier - and with minimal land use.
It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
> Claiming it is, is tantamount to saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance.
I see where you're going with the example. I don't think insurance is a good example though, because insurance is decidedly different, at least to my mind.
If you pay for insurance, you got insurance. You're not prepaying for medical treatment, you're paying a small fee to be made whole again if the trip goes sideways. If you paid for insurance and didn't need to use it, you still were insured and got the peace of mind that comes with knowing you either A) have a great time on your trip or B) don't pay for an entire trip that you don't get.
Paying for curtailment is directly paying for something that you directly don't get. No intermediaries, no risk model, no nothing.
If I'm failing to understand, well, OK then! Great! Please do inform me. You rightly stated that I called you misinformed without backing it up. If you're going to say that your original example is obviously correct, maybe try explaining it then?
You computer will be obsolete before you've made a return on investment.
The same problem applies to H2, etc, if the process is rarely used and the setup to do the process is expensive, then it's cheaper not to.
A plant that can produce H2 from electricity might be more expensive than the value of the power discarded.
A better comparison would be going on holiday, pre-paying for £100,000 of medical treatment at a hospital, and then never going to hospital. Then there’s clearly an economic loss, you’ve paid £100,000 of your real cash, and got no nothing in return. You haven’t even got protection from risk, because the hospital isn’t gonna help you if your luggage goes missing, but travel insurance obviously will.
This is FUD.
You absolutely can if you are discussing orders of magnitude which we were.
Our fundamental disagreement wasnt about whether it was 8x fengnings or 6.5x but rather whether it was of the order of 65 or 6.5.
>It's not like it's impossible - France went all in on a nuclear grid.
Not impossible, just at great expense and it wasnt worth it. In 5 years less of France's electricity will be nuclear than it is now while still spending vast sums on new plants. They're officially hoping renewables will make up the difference.
The UK is leading the world in grid interconnection and offshore wind build out (though all owned by none UK entities), so if they aren’t building quickly enough I don’t know anyone who is….
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-...
Banks and investors lend/invest in things that are likely to succeed, and pay them back. But there’s no guarantee, and national grid sure as shit isn’t going to provide that guarantee, why would they take on all that risk?
The only guarantee provided to a wind farm by the grid, is that they’ll be able to participate in the market, and that the grid ensures they will take the power they sell in the market, or compensate them if they can’t (curtailment).
But there are no guarantees that there’s someone in the market to actually buy your power at the price you want to sell it. But as wind produces the cheapest electricity around, it’s a pretty reasonable bet that a wind farm can sell it energy for a profit.
Additionally the grid reserves the right to change how the markets work, within reasonable limits, and no doubt are required to take supplier and consumer issues into consideration. But if you don’t like the changes they make, your only recourse is to sue them, and prove they breached the contract. But there’s no guarantee you’ll win.
A smart bank/investor know all of these things, and will have a decent idea of changes that might impact the business model, and the likelihood of them occurring, and thus include those risks in their investment strategy. But absolutely nobody in this game goes in expecting a sure fire win, that’s just naive.
Nope, 10 years of plain simple facts and it doesn't help. It's still Richard Branson that's stealing everyones money, if only the west coast mainline wasn't run by him then it would be £20 return for Manchester to London. HS2 of course will apparently cost £600 return for every journey and nobody will be able to afford it or something.
HS2 should be cheaper than current trains, if there is the demand.
Currently to run 1000 seats London to Manchester return takes two 11 car trains, each with 3 members of staff (driver, manager, shop) on a 5 hour return trip. That's 10 hours of train and 30 hours of staff per return.
To do that under HS2 will be 2h30 return for a single train and not need a shop, so that's 5 hours of staff and train costs, so should be far cheaper operational costs.
Track costs should be far cheaper than maintaining 150 year old structure
Whether those lower train and staff costs translate to lower fares, lower subsidies, or more subsidies elsewhere on the network, is a political decision.
I fear the government is killing demand though - for 2 of my last 3 trips to London down the west coast I've hired a car and driven, and it wasn't terrible.