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United Kingdom Power

UK Renewable Energy Firms are Being Paid Huge Sums to Not Provide Power (bbc.com) 53

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-plays dept.
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."

UK Renewable Energy Firms are Being Paid Huge Sums to Not Provide Power More | Reply

UK Renewable Energy Firms are Being Paid Huge Sums to Not Provide Power

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  • Clearly their payment structure is badly screwed up. They shouldn't be paying for power they can't receive.

    • Re:Failure of their payment structure (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @10:18PM (#65436723)

      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.

      • 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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by butlerm ( 3112 )

        Grid operators are among the most heavily regulated enterprises on the planet. And they have to be because they are an actual local monopoly and at some times of the year a modern electrical grid is always five minutes away from collapse. Look at what recently occured both in Spain and in Louisiana, despite certainly some healthy effort (and planning one would hope) to keep the grid in those areas running fine under difficult conditions. The eastern U.S., Texas, and California have also suffered *major* b

        • Look at what recently occured both in Spain and in Louisiana, despite certainly some healthy effort (and planning one would hope) to keep the grid in those areas running fine under difficult conditions.

          Not sure what you mean about Louisiana...?

          I mean, we've not nothing like Spain hit us....

          A few years ago, I believe it was Hurricane Ida that hit and knocked down all transmission lines into the greater New Orleans area....power was out there about a month, but that's Hurricane damage....catastrophic dama

    • It looks like a storm in a tea cup. $100k? Seems like a rounding error for the national grid of a country like the UK. And they are worried that cheap power might encourage companies that need cheap power, most sane people actually think that encouraging business is a good thing.

      • It looks like a storm in a tea cup. $100k? Seems like a rounding error for the national grid of a country like the UK.

        You should read to the end of the sentence. That was only for one 30-minute period.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      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

      • > Power plants like coal and nuclear are slow to change

        Pointing out we have no coal power stations in the UK. We have lots of CCGT and a few OCGT and they are used to meet rapid demand spikes. There are also some pumped hydro which are also used for such rapid responses.

        The problem with nuclear is the regulations etc are stuck so much in the past it takes an age to simply start building one. Past governments have simply let the old sites whither and close, or allowed an extension after a bit if spit a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Epeeist ( 2682 )

      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.

      • Bear in mind that 90% of people dont have these "charging periods" you speak of.

        Which means 100% of their bill IS at the price of gas, regardless of if it was ever used. 100% of my bill is calculated from the price per unit as if it were only gas.

        Very few people have the ability to even consider switching tariff, let alone the ability to switch to a time of day tariff with charging periods.

    • His specialty was solar power, and he made a good thing out of not producing any. The government paid him well for every watt of solar power he did not produce. The more solar power he did not produce, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of solar power he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not producing solar power. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out o

    • 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

    • Re:Failure of their payment structure (Score:5, Interesting)

      by esperto ( 3521901 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:02AM (#65436997)

      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)

    by GooberPyle ( 9014301 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @09:55PM (#65436709)
    The fastest solution is to build a few batteries and not NMC; use LFP or sodium. Someone could turn a profit doing that. Don't they have power engineers in the UK?

    • Lots of gravity battery options, including dams.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        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.

        • Pumped hydro can do that buy you'll have to find the sites.

          > perhaps used to generate hydrogen

          I dont see a point in that. Hasnt got a use.

          Flywheels are an option. We have one in the ffestiniog power station so that would be ideal.

          > or synthesize gasoline

          It's hyper expensive already and it would also go against net zero targets. We'll have kids and pensioners in the streets gluing themselves to tarmac all over again.

      • Which rivers, I don’t think any are dammable.

        You'll probably want more pumped hydro then... That’s been floated about (pun intended). Only no sod knows where to build one. That’s the best plan, but adding more pumped hydro is a bit like building a reservoir and we haven’t done that for 50 years and now are running out of fresh water.

    • Re: Stationary Grid Battery (Score:5, Funny)

      by ihavesaxwithcollies ( 10441708 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @09:59PM (#65436717)
      No, just magical nannies and chimney sweepers.

    • 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

    • That requires a lot of batteries, and will take time to create and plug in. Storing large amounts of energy is difficult, and the excess must be handled immediately.

      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

    • > The fastest solution is to build a few batteries

      Where?

      Whos land?

      Maybe brownfeild?

      I think you'll be struggling as land is a premium asset on an island.

      Perhaps the batteries should be spread out, uner each panel in a field can be a battery. It thus gets shaded too, which helps with coolling.

      However I can imagine many trying to nick them like they do with copper.

      • >Where?

        Anywhere. Like literally anywhere.

        > Whos land?

        Yours. have your attic cleaned out by Thursday.

        More seriously though; there is no shortage of space. Utilities own or otherwise control tens of thousands of acres for their infrastructure and facilities.

        Using Australian's BESS [narroginbess.com.au] project as a rough guide, we'd need about 75 acres per GWh. That's a conservative estimate. If the UK uses about 710 GWh per day [wikipedia.org], and assuming we'd need a full day's worth of battery storage - let's just call it 750GWh - that

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Here batteries are only really used for smoothing the output of renewables, we don't have very large scale storage. I'm not sure why, maybe partly because we don't make our own batteries and don't want to buy Chinese ones for some reason.

      There are some big storage projects in the works, like turning valleys into pumped storage reservoirs, but we are also crap at big projects like that so it won't be available for a while and will likely go massively over budget.

      So yes, we need more battery storage, bought i

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by butlerm ( 3112 )

      To first approximation, environmental authorities and local opposition have made construction of new electrical transmission lines of any significance impossible. And there are a lot of places that need them, which you can see easily by looking at the difference in real time price of electricity just fifty to one hundred miles apart on online charts of those prices in areas that have and provide them. Electricity does often sell for negative prices in the United States due to production tax credits while

  • Multiple problems combining (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrightCandle ( 636365 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @11:03PM (#65436759)
    There is a few problems combining to cause this issue. The first is that in order to get Wind farms to be made capital owners are requiring a minimum price for a MWH to ensure their costs will be covered. That isn't unreasonable given government wants them built but one of the reasons is because the grid isn't actually available yet with sufficient capacity to take their power but government still wants the farm built. So a compensation deal is agreed. The various grid companies across the country are ridiculously slow in building out infrastructure, their backlog for projects goes into 2045 and they haven't expanded their capacity to compensate so even though the Wind farms are getting built and connected its often with lines not sufficient to take all their power at peak. The issue goes further than that because there are multiple companies and there is a lot of issues cross connecting the country. Scotland has lots of wind farms but no where near enough connection to England to pass the power down, so for large periods of time there is just excess wind in Scotland that no one can use and its the border between different grid companies so hence no ones fault. This backlog is also causing big issues with companies that want to install Solar too, they require permission from the grid and they aren't getting it. Since pricing is done across the country as a single price what often happens is sufficient power is available but it turns out it can't actually be transferred so they end up bringing the gas turbines online, the algorithm doesn't take account of the limitations of grid transfer. If it did then batteries would make a lot of sense and could be used to reduce some of the problem and store the power excess but the incentives for that are all misaligned at the moment and again battery requires the national grid companies to connect them and a lot of battery projects are stuck in that backlog. So the end result is paying for wind turbines to curtail while also paying for gas turbines, because the power can't be transferred from where its made to where its used and like all the private companies in the UK they are all about maximising profits and don't care if it brings the country to its knees doing it.

    • 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.

    • 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

  • 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

  • To reflect the changes in energy generation and usage. Why modernize our infrastructure? That would be stoooooopid.

  • Scale (Score:2)

    by Dantu ( 840928 )
    Articles like this that deal only in absolute numbers tend to be meaningless at a large scale like a national grid. They've told us how much The Operators are paid to curb production but not how much the overall costs are or how much they would have been paid had the production been used.

    Are the operators paid at the full rate they're capable of producing, or are they simply receiving a small stipend when the grid operator is bottlenecked?

  • Existing energy infrastructure already pays for "capacity" thats not being used, to older systems like natural gas and coal. This is necessary because energy production MUST match energy demand or someone's lights are going out. When an energy source (power plant) on a reasonably big grid suddenly goes offline ("trips out"), the grid can tolerate it but drops dangerously low. Other plants that are only putting out say 70% of their capacity quickly spin up to max production to cover this shortfall and bri

  • "(not) sufficient capacity in the wires that carry electricity around the country"

    "around the country" sounds big, but the UK is a postage-stamp sized country. You can drive the longest crossing route in like 15hrs.

    High-Voltage power lines can cover what, about 300mi at a stretch, and the UK is only 700m tip to tip. Maybe you guys should stop using extension cords from Home Depot for your power?

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