UK Renewable Energy Firms are Being Paid Huge Sums to Not Provide Power (bbc.com) 26
The U.K. electricity grid "was built to deliver power generated by coal and gas plants near the country's major cities and towns," reports the BBC, "and doesn't always have sufficient capacity in the wires that carry electricity around the country to get the new renewable electricity generated way out in the wild seas and rural areas.
"And this has major consequences." The way the system currently works means a company like Ocean Winds gets what are effectively compensation payments if the system can't take the power its wind turbines are generating and it has to turn down its output. It means Ocean winds was paid £72,000 [nearly $100,000 USD] not to generate power from its wind farms in the Moray Firth during a half-hour period on 3 June because the system was overloaded — one of a number of occasions output was restricted that day. At the same time, 44 miles (70km) east of London, the Grain gas-fired power station on the Thames Estuary was paid £43,000 to provide more electricity.
Payments like that happen virtually every day. Seagreen, Scotland's largest wind farm, was paid £65 million last year to restrict its output 71% of the time, according to analysis by Octopus Energy. Balancing the grid in this way has already cost the country more than £500 million this year alone, the company's analysis shows. The total could reach almost £8bn a year by 2030, warns the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), the body in charge of the electricity network. It's pushing up all our energy bills and calling into question the government's promise that net zero would end up delivering cheaper electricity... the potential for renewables to deliver lower costs just isn't coming through to consumers.
Renewables now generate more than half the country's electricity, but because of the limits to how much electricity can be moved around the system, even on windy days some gas generation is almost always needed to top the system up. And because gas tends to be more expensive, it sets the wholesale price.
The UK government is now considering smaller regional markets, so wind companies "would have to sell that spare power to local people instead of into a national market. The theory is prices would fall dramatically — on some days Scottish customers might even get their electricity for free...
"Supporters argue that it would attract energy-intensive businesses such as data centres, chemical companies and other manufacturing industries."
"And this has major consequences." The way the system currently works means a company like Ocean Winds gets what are effectively compensation payments if the system can't take the power its wind turbines are generating and it has to turn down its output. It means Ocean winds was paid £72,000 [nearly $100,000 USD] not to generate power from its wind farms in the Moray Firth during a half-hour period on 3 June because the system was overloaded — one of a number of occasions output was restricted that day. At the same time, 44 miles (70km) east of London, the Grain gas-fired power station on the Thames Estuary was paid £43,000 to provide more electricity.
Payments like that happen virtually every day. Seagreen, Scotland's largest wind farm, was paid £65 million last year to restrict its output 71% of the time, according to analysis by Octopus Energy. Balancing the grid in this way has already cost the country more than £500 million this year alone, the company's analysis shows. The total could reach almost £8bn a year by 2030, warns the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), the body in charge of the electricity network. It's pushing up all our energy bills and calling into question the government's promise that net zero would end up delivering cheaper electricity... the potential for renewables to deliver lower costs just isn't coming through to consumers.
Renewables now generate more than half the country's electricity, but because of the limits to how much electricity can be moved around the system, even on windy days some gas generation is almost always needed to top the system up. And because gas tends to be more expensive, it sets the wholesale price.
The UK government is now considering smaller regional markets, so wind companies "would have to sell that spare power to local people instead of into a national market. The theory is prices would fall dramatically — on some days Scottish customers might even get their electricity for free...
"Supporters argue that it would attract energy-intensive businesses such as data centres, chemical companies and other manufacturing industries."
Failure of their payment structure (Score:2)
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They shouldn't be paying for power they can't receive.
This would give the grid operator the ability to choke companies that they don't like and effectively put them out of business.
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How would that work?
The regulator will be all over their asses just like now, where all providers have a regulated cap to the maximum price that can be charged. If they cant avoid that cap how would they attack each other?
When all those energy companies failed a couple of years ago the regulator forced the others to absorb the lost customers, on the same tarriff till such a time they could be migrated to that companies standard tarriff.
Maybe if they were to try and do what you suggest it would spice up the
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The gap that you need fill in is the issue here - renewables are producing energy in a varying volume that can't be controlled aside from shutting off the production.
Power plants like coal and nuclear are slow to change. They can produce a steady continuous power that can change slowly. With water power plants you can change the power production faster and compensate to some extent for variations from the renewables.
However the grid is the big problem - it's dimensioned and designed for a few large producti
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Clearly their payment structure is badly screwed up.
This isn't the principle screw-up. If a non-renewable source, say gas, kicks in for a charging period, then the whole of the electricity price for that period is determined by the gas price, rather than just the percentage of energy that it produces.
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Actually that is false. Their payment structure is working perfectly to follow supply and demand. People don't pay for "power" they pay to balance a system which provides energy. If that means paying money to a producer to reduce power, or paying money to a consumer to over consume then that's just the reality of realising that the supply and demand curve can actually move beyond the zero axis for any fungible traded thing (like electricity).
The question for how efficiently the payment system works is: Are
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This is a failure of transmission structure, they allow buildup of a bunch of energy production but do not provide the transmission infrastructure to export it properly, this happens a lot unfortunately.
Stationary Grid Battery (Score:4, Interesting)
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Lots of gravity battery options, including dams.
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Yes, excess energy that the grid can't accept should be stored [interestin...eering.com] for later use when possible, or perhaps used to generate hydrogen (or synthesize gasoline or whatever fuel is most appropriate) for resale.
Re: Stationary Grid Battery (Score:2)
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The benefit of pumped hydro is that it means large bodies of water that can serve double duty as a heat sink for thermal power plants. It could also mean other dual use like desalination plants, water for irrigation and municipal supplies, and so many others that I could list. Damming up rivers for flood control or such could provide the added benefit of pumped hydro storage. If artificial lakes are built for pumped hydro storage then that could provide the benefit of a lake for fishing, recreation, a heat
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The processes associated with the grid are not designed well, unfortunately. The one that you use to get permission to connect the grid is designed for large generators, such as gas or nuclear power stations. Even a small grid scale battery has to go through a slow queuing system before it can be considered and that bungs everything up.
The article also talks about zonal pricing. At the moment, you pay the same wholesale price where ever you are, meaning there is little incentive to put the batteries near th
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Wind and solar power fluctuate a lot. So when electricity production is high the price drops, and the producer has to choose between stopping production, which is difficult, or selling at a negative price.
This has led to negative prices for electricity generation becoming more common in the US and Europe. Negative electricity prices mean t
Multiple problems combining (Score:5, Informative)
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Other countries, similar problems.
I also see two problems you don't mention.
- "They" are in part ridiculously slow because they didn't start investing when they should have, going for shareholder dividends instead.
- Politicians are unable to understand and/or care about such a long term problem.
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First, paragraphs are your friend and it would be helpful to use them.
Second, this "misalignment" is likely temporary as the cost of paying windmill farms to curtail output should drive the construction of new power lines and energy storage. There is no profit motive to bring the UK economy to a halt. I expect that there will be some that want to drive up profits quickly so they can take the money and run. There are also those that look to make long term investments so they can leave a pile of money for
Re:Working as planned then? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the crux of the problem. The UK's grid was built when large carbon-fueled power stations were king, and so the distribution network is essentially a hub-and-spoke design radiating out from those to the end users, with the load carrying capacity getting smaller and smaller as you go. That means by the time you get to the rural fringes, like Scotland and Cornwall/Devon, which is where a lot of the optimal offshore wind sites are, the grid simply does not have the capacity to take large amounts of power the other way. Baseload capacity has to be pushed around the core of the grid, which - since we're talking overhead HT lines - are generally built along mostly flat routes between the carbon-fueled power stations, and only pass conveniently close to on-shore wind farms or off-shore wind landing stations by coincidence.
You know what else the UK has a lot of besides green energy it can't fully utilise? Nimbyism. As you'd probably expect, Nimbys really don't like the idea of new HT lines running through their local countryside (or nuclear plants, to touch on your other point), so the other goal of this regionalisation is to encourage them to accept the tradeoff in return for (relatively) cheaper local market prices in areas where there is a lot of existing or potential green (or nuclear) energy capacity. Supplementing that with local storage systems - batteries, pumped water, molten salt, or whatever - should hopefully be something that comes along in lockstep, but so far that doesn't seem to be integral to the plan, but is rather being left up to the generating companies to decide on.
Who dug this up? Oh, the BBC... (Score:2, Interesting)
How has this been dug up from the landfill?
This was news about 10-15 years ago. We know this, it's a frequent argument used against green taxes and over reliance on renewables vs others like concentrating on building nuclear etc.
Every time it's brought up, the far-green brigade dismiss it and go on about how its all a climate denier conspiracy etc etc.
Then they say that "green" leccy is far cheaper and so on, totally ignoring the other bit of "non-news" that everyone knows that its only cheaper for the pro