UK Renewable Energy Firms are Being Paid Huge Sums to Not Provide Power (bbc.com) 41
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)
Re:Failure of their payment structure (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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.
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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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> 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
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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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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.
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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
Re:Failure of their payment structure (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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:3)
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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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MacMann is just obsessed with finding reasons why everyone should build nuclear. Never mind that it's insanely expensive and takes 20+ years in Europe, you could use a reservoir as a heatsink to stop it melting down!
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Agree 100% with pumped hydro however there are limited sites around that can be used for it.
> Putting batteries on the grid may be fast
You have to buy the land first and that can slow things down.
> 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.
I think you mean a heat source?
> water for irrigation and municipal supplies
Pumped hydro is supposed to be a closed system. You pump the water up to the top of the mounta
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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
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> 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.
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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
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.
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As you'd probably expect, Nimbys really don't like the idea of new HT lines running through their local countryside
I don't think it's unreasonable to object to doing significant harm to the country side for the sake of green power, it's contradictory and unnecessary. No one objects to underground cables, it's cutting a massive track through the country side to fill with pylons that people object to for a variety of valid reasons. Burying cable costs more on paper, but probably not by the time you've gone through the legal processes to force it on everyone, and the cost of the delays these incur. The problem is trying to
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The devil's in the details, but my gut feeling is that much of the distribution infrastructure
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I'm not sure that cheaper energy will be enough to deal with NIMBYism. We just need to change the law so they can't stop critical infrastructure being built. Or new houses, for that matter. Sure, have oversight to make sure it is done in a way that doesn't trash the environment, but manage it centrally and have the overriding goal be to build stuff unless it's really bad.
NIMBYism is a relatively recent thing, at least on this scale. After the war we built a lot of new homes and towns, often on "green belt".
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build more power lines, batteries
The UK is doing just this, of course it would be better if we were further ahead than we are. We are paying the price of a slightly uncoordinated roll out, i.e. lots of new green power generation before power lines and storage, but we are moving in the right direction and will get there in the end. For its faults, a lot of people in parts of Europe, or even the US, would love to have a grid that works as well as ours.
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
Don’t upgrade the grid (Score:2)
Scale (Score:2)
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?