Schottische Windparks bezahlten nicht, um nicht fast 40% des potenziellen Stroms zu erzeugen
https://www.ft.com/content/e7481629-4e6b-460c-830c-d97324115aca
Von grapplinggigahertz
Schottische Windparks bezahlten nicht, um nicht fast 40% des potenziellen Stroms zu erzeugen
https://www.ft.com/content/e7481629-4e6b-460c-830c-d97324115aca
Von grapplinggigahertz
17 Kommentare
Wind just gets to externalise it’s intermittency. It’s a ridiculous situation.
There’s a timeline where we nationalised the North Sea oil and gas, used those profits to invest back into future renewables, built the windfarms ourselves and then when they were producing more energy than was needed we could just turn them off for a while without having to compensate any shareholders.
There’s the grid and there’s the generation. One is ahead of the other in terms of upgrading so the generated power is unused.
There are plans to upgrade the grid to make use of the power.
This is the story.
(£1.5b is being spent on the grid upgrade which takes longer than building a wind farm)
Wasn’t there a plan to build interconnectors to Norway to feed wind power into pumped storage in Scandinavia? Is that still the plan?
All while high energy costs are killing UK industry.
My idea to solve stuff like this is to do load balancing rather than supply balancing.
Increase base load production capacity then build fast reacting loads very close to the supplies. Think electrolysis, compression, smelting… so we overproduce but consume it to balance loads.
Advantages to this are that we can simultaneously increase our clean energy production, reduce our reliance on storage, increase our industrial output and we don’t end up in these kind of situations. Hopefully it also means we don’t need gas peaker plants to cope with variation in demand as we can instead do load balancing. It won’t remove the need for storage for base load.
I’m sure I’m missing something here but it seems like a reasonable plan.
We need infrastructure to store all that energy so that it doesn’t go to waste. No storage is 100% effective, but something is better than nothing. Battery farms, hydrogen generation, ammonia if that makes it easier to store.
We already do sell excess energy to Europe, including North Sea energy to Norway where it’s used to pump water back uphill where it’s stored as future hydro energy.
Shows how little we need old methods like oil and gas. We just need investment in the grid and in storage
IMHO there is a great business opportunity for battery farms to absorb this additional capacity at great prices.
Hmm, if there was only a zero CO2
Option that created masses of power in a small footprint that worked consistently 24/7/365 as base load
FT and The Economist have dropped their dogmatic defense of net zero, the tide is turning.
https://archive.ph/PZTO3
These headlines wouldn’t be possible in 2020, the truth is high energy prices is killing the UK industry it hit the manufacturing sector first like chemical sector its output is down over 35% in the last 3 years, it’s now feeding through to the service industry which these papers care more about.
You can’t run away from the reality forever of UK having the highest industrial energy in the world and 3rd highest domestic energy prices in Europe only behind Denmark and Germany who also went all in on wind energy.
So the conservatives had 14 years to upgrade the grid, instead they just wasted our money.
When I was at university I worked with a large energy provider to look at this. This was 6 years ago now but this has already been a problem for a few years, the problem is the farms have a right to provide the energy but the energy isn’t always needed hence these costs.
The main problem isnt necessarily that there is too much energy but the fact the grid can’t transport it to where there is demand or store it.
It’s also worth pointing out we identified the farms that cost the most money in terms of these costs and those farms we still expanding at the time. This particular farm was also located in a very poor geographical location for supplying the power ie it was nowhere near enough major cities that could consume the power generated.
As a shocker to nobody, a privatised public service is again trying to extract as much money from the system as possible rather than provide a quality service. It is a bit more nuanced than that as again the problem is the inability to transport the energy which isn’t the fault of the farm, but still if this were publicly owned the costs would be much smaller.
When you burn coal in a power plant 60% of the coal is wasted as heat.
The very best gas plants achieve only 40% waste heat.
But sure let’s attack the cheapest source of energy available for the last 15 years with yet more scary headlines. Surely that will have no financial impact on us at all.
I work in Scotland central belt on the infrastructure projects needed to increase the grid and allow the full potential of Scotland’s renewables.
There is a huge bottleneck on the transmission electricity grid which needs to catch up to electricity generation, but these projects are now being worked on. Construction in the central belt starts next year for our first new substations.
These projects span years and cost hundreds of millions. The total budget for the next 5 years is in the billions.
I’m directly managing the construction of new substations and upgrading of overhead lines from 275kV to 400kV. Less knowledgeable on the HVDC undersea cable projecte, but these are also in full swing.
Happy to answer any questions where I can.
Oh no. We did such a good job at generating electricity from thin air that the grid needs a bit of time to catch up. Oh no. Britain did something good, everyone complain!
We even export it to Norway and *still* need to turn the turbines off. When the grid catches up this will be great for Britain.
These benefits have even been passed on to me as a citizen. My energy company messages me almost weekly (sometimes twice per week) to say there is too much energy in the grid so pop the washing machine, dishwasher, drier etc on and they’ll give me the electricity for free.
Why can’t they tap that unused capacity to make green hydrogen instead? Anyone?