Britain Sets New Record, Generating Enough Wind Power for 22 Million Homes (thetimes.com) 113
An anonymous reader shared this report from Sky News:
A new wind record has been set for Britain, with enough electricity generated from turbines to power 22 million homes, the system operator has said.
The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November... enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes powered, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said. The country had experienced windy conditions, particularly in the north of England and Scotland...
Neso has predicted that Britain could hit another milestone in the months ahead by running the electricity grid for a period entirely with zero carbon power, renewables and nuclear... Neso said wind power is now the largest source of electricity generation for the UK, and the government wants to generate almost all of the UK's electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030.
"Wind accounted for 55.7 per cent of Britain's electricity mix at the time..." reports The Times: Gas provided only 12.5 per cent of the mix, with 11.3 per cent coming from imports over subsea power cables, 8 per cent from nuclear reactors, 8 per cent from biomass plants, 1.4 per cent from hydroelectric plants and 1.1 per cent from storage.
Britain has about 32 gigawatts of wind farms installed, approximately half of that onshore and half offshore, according to the Wind Energy Database from the wind industry body Renewable UK. That includes five of the world's biggest offshore wind farms. The government is seeking to double onshore wind and quadruple offshore wind power by 2030 as part of its plan for clean energy....
Jane Cooper, deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, said: "On a cold, dark November evening, wind was generating enough electricity to power 80 per cent of British homes when we needed it most.
The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November... enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes powered, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said. The country had experienced windy conditions, particularly in the north of England and Scotland...
Neso has predicted that Britain could hit another milestone in the months ahead by running the electricity grid for a period entirely with zero carbon power, renewables and nuclear... Neso said wind power is now the largest source of electricity generation for the UK, and the government wants to generate almost all of the UK's electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030.
"Wind accounted for 55.7 per cent of Britain's electricity mix at the time..." reports The Times: Gas provided only 12.5 per cent of the mix, with 11.3 per cent coming from imports over subsea power cables, 8 per cent from nuclear reactors, 8 per cent from biomass plants, 1.4 per cent from hydroelectric plants and 1.1 per cent from storage.
Britain has about 32 gigawatts of wind farms installed, approximately half of that onshore and half offshore, according to the Wind Energy Database from the wind industry body Renewable UK. That includes five of the world's biggest offshore wind farms. The government is seeking to double onshore wind and quadruple offshore wind power by 2030 as part of its plan for clean energy....
Jane Cooper, deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, said: "On a cold, dark November evening, wind was generating enough electricity to power 80 per cent of British homes when we needed it most.
undeniable (Score:1)
Renewables are undeniably a good idea. The energy is just right there.
Sure they are not without problems, and in a country the size of the UK, there's not enough to be energy independent, but even with that we should build more.
Re:undeniable (Score:4, Informative)
Renewables are undeniably a good idea. The energy is just right there.
Sure they are not without problems, and in a country the size of the UK, there's not enough to be energy independent, but even with that we should build more.
Denying it: Trump - Trump blames renewable energy for rising electricity prices. Experts point elsewhere [apnews.com] (and other sources):
Trump called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social site.
So short-sighted... (sigh)
Re:undeniable (Score:5, Funny)
That would be a fitting epitaph for him. Wishful thinking, but nevertheless.
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I think (hope?) the age of Donaldian Decadence will end soon. The YOB seems more likely to implode each day...
But not the joke I was hoping for. These days most of the crossovers or callbacks seem to depend on looping AI into the joke.
Re: undeniable (Score:2)
Does it though? (Score:2)
Where wind power is harnessed [eia.gov] shows that the top 5 states for wind power are: Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois.
Where solar is found and used [eia.gov] shows the top states for solar power are: California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina (the 4 dark orange states in utility scale map).
Per here [electricchoice.com] the average electric rate in the US is 15.83 cents/kWh.
The 6 Republican states have a rate lower than that: Florida 13.44, Iowa 14.45, Kansas 13.36, North Carolina 12.30, Oklahoma 12.15, Texas 12.27.
The 2 Democr
Re: Does it though? (Score:2)
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And I live in Texas where solar + wind provided 34% of our electricity last year (ERCOT Fuel Mix [ercot.com] report for 2024), which is higher than the US average of 21.4% for renewables(Electricity generation, capacity, and sales in the United States [eia.gov]). Despite that, our prices in Texas are lower than the US average.
This suggests its not the renewables themselves that are causing the prices to go up, but something else. By looking at other US states that generate large amounts of wind and/or solar power that something
Re: Does it though? (Score:2)
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We've been investing in our grid as well: $7 Billion Wind Power Project Nears Finish [texastribune.org]
Re: Does it though? (Score:2)
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Yep. Trump's nonsense got old decades ago. He's jumped the shark on nonsense dozens of times since then.
Re:undeniable (Score:5, Informative)
The UK has at least 20x as much wind power available than its current electricity consumption. Energy independence is entirely possible, if not particularly desirable.
The UK could be a massive exporter of clean energy. Scotland in particular could be getting rich off it, but like with the oil they aren't seeing as much of the benefit as they should be seeing.
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The UK has at least 20x as much wind power available than its current electricity consumption.
Where do you get that figure from? That sounds high, probably like a multiply-total-land-and-sea-area-by-energy-density kind of figure, and then build to the maximum density under optimal conditions.
Note that the Seagreen 1A (deep water) is about 0.1x the power density the power density as the London array (~25m deep). Your figures are I reckon predicated on everything built like the latter.
I think more realistic f
Re:undeniable (Score:4, Informative)
https://claverton-energy.com/t... [claverton-energy.com]
It's actually much more than 20x for just all available offshore wind, but if you restrict it to just the most economically viable parts and including onshore, it works out at around 20x. I've lost the reference I had for that.
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Their numbers look pretty dubious to me, or at least deeply theoretical. The W/m^2 numbers are quite high, and the big numbers are predicated on some really deepwater building, something that's expensive, difficult and as yet not exactly well proven yet.
Take for example the recent Seagreen 1A farm, in up to 60m of depth. That's running at under 1/10 the power density of the given numbers.
These numbers:
http://www.inference.org.uk/su... [inference.org.uk]
are a bit more in line with what makes sense to me.
What I don't think for
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Hmm, I think that book has been discredited. Either way, there is a massive amount of wind energy available to the UK. We have the best wind resources in Europe, we could be raking it in from exports.
We should have a sovereign wealth fund based on wind power.
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Hmm, I think that book has been discredited.
My whom and based on wgat? His numbers for offshore wind in terms of W/m^2 are pretty much spot on wind farms that were installed after publication. I looked up the numbers for the London Array and it's well within error bounds?
We have the best wind resources in Europe, we could be raking it in from exports.
We should certainly be building more, a lot more really. We don't have the heavy industry, though with the amount we should be building we'd be best off spinni
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We don't have to make everything domestically. It would be nice, but right now we should just import the turbines we need and get them deployed. The climate can't wait, and we shouldn't wait to start raking in that cash.
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We don't have to make everything domestically. It would be nice, but right now we should just import the turbines we need and get them deployed.
I agree.
The climate can't wait, and we shouldn't wait to start raking in that cash.
I think you're underselling the complexity, but yes we should continue. But super deep water and probably even normal deep water turbines aren't a goldmine, not yet. Shallow ones however...
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You just referenced Dr. MacKay's book. That is one of MacMann's favorite references. I've been over it and t is full of faulty information. Aside from that, the information in it is just old. Dr. MacKay died about a decade ago and wrote the book about two decades ago largely with data from about a decade before that. Too much has happened both in terms of technological change and data collection since then for the book to be taken seriously.
MacKay was surely an intelligent man and he had some real accomplis
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You just referenced Dr. MacKay's book.
Yep.
I've been over it and t is full of faulty information. Aside from that, the information in it is just old.
So you say. And yet, his figures for wind farms match closely what the London Array which was commissioned in 2018. Tech does advance, but it's not going to yield an order of magnitude change in energy density.
Too much has happened both in terms of technological change and data collection since then for the book to be taken seriously.
Like what? Now floating turb
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So you say. And yet, his figures for wind farms match closely what the London Array which was commissioned in 2018
Which figures? Land usage figures? Because that is mostly what he focuses on and he exaggerates the land usage of wind turbines to a fantastical degree, pinning it at 2 Watts per square meter. Obviously this is off by orders of magnitude and is a manipulated figure obtained by using the entire land area of a wind farm rather than just the land area that a turbine takes up, ignoring the fact that wind farms don't consume the land they sit on except at the very base of the tower. For a back of the envelope ca
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Which figures? Land usage figures? Because that is mostly what he focuses on and he exaggerates the land usage of wind turbines to a fantastical degree, pinning it at 2 Watts per square meter.
He has it at 3 offshore. The London Array runs at about 3.2.
You've given a lot of reasons why he's wrong but the figures disagree. All I did was divide the yearly output buy a year and the land area.
Bu the way, Seagreen 1A is about 0.3 W/m2.
That would be around 107 Watts per square meter
You need to leave space betwee
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He has it at 3 offshore. The London Array runs at about 3.2.
Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms? The point of using it in his book was to tell the reader that a renewable uses X amount of land and that nuclear only uses some fraction of X land, therefore nuclear is better while ignoring that the land can be used for multiple purposes at the same time. He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things, so he's not a reliable source. Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to have
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Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms?
I already told you how it was measured.
And now you're moving the goalposts. You said Mackay's numbers were old and wildly off. Mackay's numbers match modern wind farms.
He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things
Aaaaaaahahahahah pull the other one, mate, it's got bells on.
You picked two things he "fudged the numbers" on. Both of them were fine. So now it's other, nonspecific numbers
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Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms?
If you mean by drawing some geometric shape around all of the wind turbines in a farm and then dividing the total power output by the area of that shape, I've already pointed out that it's nonsense. You also ignored the "means what in real world terms" part. Maybe you're not just selectively editing that out and you didn't know what I meant. To elaborate, the point is what is the actual significance of that number? What is the real world relationship between that number and, for example, how densely you can
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Scotland in particular could be getting rich off it
It's very hard to get rich of green energy. The return on investment for these kinds of projects are a pittance of fossil fuels projects. Green energy is more a target of necessity than of profit. It's why you have countries simultaneously putting solar panels up while at the same time sanctioning endless new oil production projects.
These articles are cool and all but (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do we get submissions bragging about renewable capacity expansion and/or generation milestones? Where are the submissions boasting of everyday Britons saving money from their power bills being lowered by these installations? For the average consumer (and the economy of a nation), cost is the biggest factor.
Re:These articles are cool and all but (Score:5, Informative)
It will newsworthy if or when the UK wholesale market changes rules to break the link between gas price and electricity price. Until then we can be impressed with our world leading wind generation.
https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/o... [ecotricity.co.uk]
What is the ‘link’?
We have a bizarre system for setting the price of electricity in this country. It’s tied directly to the price of the most expensive source on the grid, which is almost always dirty fossil gas.
What this means is that even cheap green electricity (generated by the wind and the sun at a fraction of the cost of gas) has to be sold at the price of electricity generated by fossil gas.
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This sounds to me like a (somewhat) hidden subsidy for the cheap power sources and will likely encourage more construction as it will be quite profitable. If the goal is to have clean energy it seems like a good way to encourage it - guarantee profits for cheap sources. Eventually the market will get saturated with cheap electricity and nobody will be able to sell the excess capacity at which point the subsidy should be reduced/withdrawn. (The rule as it stands might encourage the big producers to keep one
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You are spot on about the original intent behind spot pricing for energy markets -- it's designed to encourage investment into the cheapest sources.
It is possible to construct a different system that would provide reasonable incentives for producers while also cutting prices for consumers, although it's tricky -- you'd need to buy out the existing older renewables contracts that were used prior to the CfDs being put in place, and replace them with PPAs, and then you'd need to maintain a spot market for disp
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We have a bizarre system for setting the price of electricity in this country. It’s tied directly to the price of the most expensive source on the grid, which is almost always dirty fossil gas.
This isn't a bizarre system. It's actually a pretty common system around the world that incentivises producers who can provide grid stability. This isn't even exclusive to grid use. Marginal Cost Pricing (what this model is called) is used in many industries which have dis-economies of scale, where the production of the next unit is more expensive than that of the previous one.
You will find this model in many resource distribution systems around the world. The exception are those with heavily fixed regulato
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Why do we get submissions bragging about renewable capacity expansion and/or generation milestones? Where are the submissions boasting of everyday Britons saving money from their power bills being lowered by these installations? For the average consumer (and the economy of a nation), cost is the biggest factor.
A typical Briton will only see lower energy bills when wholesale prices stay low, grid congestion costs stop wiping out those gains, and OFGEM ensures those savings actually reach the meter. While these record wind outputs are absolutely real and frequently drive wholesale generation costs down to near zero, the price Brits pay is currently dominated by the archaic rules of the UK energy market and the physical cost of moving power from Dogger Bank to London.
The primary culprit is the sad fact that dead din
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The cost of electricity in the UK is dictated by gas prices, and despite having our own North Sea gas we pay the international market rate. That went up when Putin started his war in Ukraine. The faster we get off gas, the sooner the bills can come down.
Before then we really need to break the link between gas prices and electricity prices. Currently the way the auction works, everyone gets paid the amount offered to gas generators (nuclear has a special deal that is insanely expensive but doesn't set a pric
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Why do we get submissions bragging about renewable capacity expansion and/or generation milestones? Where are the submissions boasting of everyday Britons saving money from their power bills being lowered by these installations?
While I can't say that I know the specifics of Britain's electricity billing, there is a general answer to that question that usually holds true in most places. Part of that answer is that a significant part (frequently the major part) of people's electricity bills tends to be distribution, not supply. Another part is that energy projects generally have a long tail when it comes to financing. The electricity bill is being used to pay for energy projects (including plenty of failed ones which were theoretica
Re: These articles are cool and all but (Score:2)
i don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
if they can generate most of their electricity by wind, why is their electricity so expensive? you would think with so many energy sources, competition would be fierce and they would get cheaper energy
Re: i don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why the sooner the better? The price isn't pegged to natural gas, the market has made natural gas the outcome of the system used to price power. That's two very different things (and natural gas doesn't set the spot price always, but it does the majority of the time).
The UK uses marginal cost pricing, just like the EU, many places in the USA, and several other countries. The system is an absolute boon to green energy as well as grid stability. Having the highest marginal cost set the price means that green
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The price of electricity is pegged to the price of gas, the sooner they break that link the better
That implies that someone is raking in huge amounts of profit...
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if they can generate most of their electricity by wind, why is their electricity so expensive? you would think with so many energy sources, competition would be fierce and they would get cheaper energy
Our wholesale energy market uses the marginal pricing model. That means that any moment in time the wholesale price is based on the most expensive form of generation needed to meet demand, gas. So even if just 1% of demand is being met by gas and 99% by renewables it will all be priced at the same as gas. Successive governments have said we need to change that but they're too addicted to the tax revenues to do so.
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it's not the tax revenues. It's that marginal cost encourages investment in cheaper energy. However, that's not been true for a long time, because CfDs mean that most renewables producers don't see the benefits of high gas prices. It's only the operators of the oldest renewables projects (pre-CfDs) who make bank. I think that's stupid and we should just buy them out. It would be cheaper.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, it's worth talking to ChatGPT about this. Energy markets have some unique charac
Re: i don't get it (Score:2)
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Privatisation. Thatcher's legacy continues to fuck us over.
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However (Score:2)
The Brits continue paying electricity prices on par with the price of gold. Because greedy bastards running electricity companies and the cost of all the green incentives have fucked us over.
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>The Brits continue paying electricity prices on par with the price of gold
What are you comparing? The average annual household electricity bill to the average annual household expenditure on gold? Yeah, the electicity bill is probably higher, but only because the gold expenditure is quite low even if you include the few cents worth in that new tv/computer/phone/gizmo the household just bought.
If you are comparing "monthy average household power bill to the price of X amount of gold" then what is "X"?
Re: However (Score:2)
Looks like that metaphor was completely lost on you. Take a deep breath, walk away from the calculator, don't follow the light of a white Excel spreadsheet...
Doesn't really matter (Score:3)
The UK has HIGH electricity prices for reasons that have nothing to do with whether wind sets a record on a particular evening.
The root problem is structural.
First, the market design. The UK uses marginal pricing, meaning the price for all electricity is set by the last, most expensive generator needed to meet demand. That generator is almost always gas. Even if wind covers 40 percent, if one gas turbine is running, gas sets the price for everyone. Continental Europe often softens this with regulated nuclear, hydro, or state-controlled price caps, so the wholesale spike is dampened.
Second, the UK is gas-dependent. Around 40 percent of generation capacity is gas, and the UK deliberately avoided long-term gas storage. When global gas prices explode, UK power prices explode. France can lean on nuclear, Norway on hydro, the UK cannot.
Third, the UK penalises renewables through grid charges. Offshore wind farms in Scotland pay the highest transmission fees in Europe to send power south. In France or Germany producers often receive money for being in the right region, in the UK they pay extra, so costs get baked into prices.
Fourth, slow build-out and investor uncertainty. Policy swings between “go big on wind” and “block onshore wind for nine years” scare investors. If capital costs rise, the strike prices in Contracts for Difference rise too, and those end up on bills.
Fifth, the retail system is fragile. The UK let dozens of small energy suppliers enter with almost no capital requirements. When gas prices skyrocketed, more than 30 collapsed, and the bailout cost was smeared across consumer bills.
Wind records look impressive, but the system still behaves like a gas market with some wind attached. Until the UK builds storage, reforms marginal pricing, reduces grid penalties in Scotland, and stops policy whiplash, high prices will continue.
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I agree with most of that, but it's worth pointing out that this is really a time-limited blip.
Today, about 60% of renewables capacity (35GW) and a higher percentage of generation comes from renewables sites operating under pre-CfD support schemes or merchant projects. While later rounds of CfD include huge projects, those aren't yet fully online.
What the government should do, in my opinion, is buy those contracts out and shift them to some sort of capped mechanism, because this problem only goes away once
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Until the UK builds storage, reforms marginal pricing, reduces grid penalties in Scotland, and stops policy whiplash, high prices will continue.
The pumped storage in Wales is pretty cool. Zero to 1.8GW in 16 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What's the environmental impact? (Score:1)
Estimated Trees Felled for UK onshore wind farms: Approximately 17 million trees have been felled since the early 2000s (over ~24 years of major development).This figure comes from a 2024 Scottish Government-commissioned review of public land projects, covering ~1 million trees cut in 2023 alone.
Context: Many turbines are sited in commercial plantations (e.g., Sitka spruce) scheduled for harvesting anyway, but felling accelerates for turbine bases, access roads, and power lines. Not all are "ancient" forest
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The UK has about three *billion* trees. Sit back down, you nobber.
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If you're worried about trees, the real villain here is the "biomass" power station, Drax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
From the wiki link: " requires 1,200,000 ha (4,600 sq mi; 12,000 km2) of forest to supply on a continuous basis."
Most of the "biomass" for Drax comes from North America, so add to that the costs of transporting all that fuel to a port, then shipping it across the Atlantic.
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
For how long exactly? (Score:2)
These stories always say "Wind generated X at a specific moment in time" but never seem to put it in context.
Was it one second? One minute? Hours?
Good news, Comrades! (Score:1)
Last night, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station fulfilled the five-year plan for energy production in 46 microseconds!
It ain't the amount of energy or the peak power that matters. It's having it available when needed. Sometimes the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine, but molecules always oxidize and uranium atoms always split.
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The UK has always had excellent availability all the way through the transition. It’s not surprising you focus on this, because the US does not. But that’s really just table stakes in the civilised world. We can and do focus on more than just that.
Re: Good news, Comrades! (Score:2)
More meaningless hype and fantasy unfortunately (Score:1)
Go to www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind to see what is really going on. As an example, this is last year's numbers, day averages:
minimum: 0.16 GW
maximum: 17.342 GW
average: 7.343 GW
This is from about 30GW installed capacity, on- and off-shore. And yes, that was 0.16GW. And if you look you'll see that 10 days or ao under 5GW is not uncommon. 4 or 5 days is frequent. Especially in winter, which, amazingly enough, is when peak demand is.
Whatever /. editors and owners want to believe, you cannot run any number of h
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You’ve not accurately described how the UK covers mismatches between supply and demand in its energy market. What matters is not matching each GW of wind with a GW of dispatchable backup, because that focuses on matching suppy not demand. If we do a wind overbuild of 3x demand, we don’t need 3x of dispatchable backup.
What matters is to ensure there’s enough supply to meet demand even when wind output is low. The dispatchable element of that is achieved through gas peakers, pumped hydro, BE
Bad news for renewable enthuisiasts (Score:1, Troll)
Sorry, good numbers, but the important number is the minimum, not the maximum. The minimum tells you how much more stuff you need to install. Incidentally the Royal Society's report said that the UK needs 11 weeks of storage to get around one in 37 year dunkelflautes. Or of course as many nukes as you can, done with a will they can be up and running for about $10/W and built in 10 years. This does involve getting rid of a lot of green tape and lawfare. The UK designed the first commercial reactor in 1 year
Re: Bad news for renewable enthuisiasts (Score:2)
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Why do we need to build enough storage to avoid a 1-in-37 year Dunkelflaute through storage alone? We don’t ever just use storage, we use a whole bunch of mechanisms including demand shifting, interconnectors, demand reduction, dispatchable low carbon (eg CCS gas, biomass), firm renewables, overbuild, curtailment-to-fuel, and gas peakers. If we use gas peakers once in 37 years instead of several times a year, we are still going to be way ahead of where we are today
Octopus UK (energy company) free electricity hours (Score:2)
I have Octopus Energy as my provider (in the UK you can pick your energy provider for gas, electricity or both) and because I have a real-time smart meter, every so often they give 1 hour free electricity "fill your boots" periods. They send an email out a few days before, you click a button to sign up, then on the day and time you can use as much electricity as you can for no cost. I imagine this is to offset supply and demand issues within the grid. It's a cute perk but doesn't really save much money over
million gigawatts (Score:2)
Flash! We generate a million gigawatts for a femtosecond. No, wait, that was lightning. Never mind.
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The sort of people who think base load generation wont be required in the future are deluded.
No one has said that. But thanks for playing.
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Actually the former head of the National Grid said that. The guy running the UK's grid said that the concept of base load was obsolete, and he was right.
Re: Well on this cold November evening... (Score:1)
I'd love to know how he plans to power the country during a windless anticyclonic night then. Batteries? Hydro? Dont make me laugh.
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There has never been a point in recorded history when the British Isles and territorial waters were windless.
And yes, we have hydro, we have storage, and we could have a hell of a lot more.
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Indeed, and the environmentalists are on board with it because although it will disrupt the local wildlife, it will create new habitats, and in the end the reduction in damage from not using fossil fuels to generate that energy far outweighs the downsides.
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the environmentalists
Perhaps some, but I suspect not the ones who are concerned about preserving natural habitat. Just the ones who are interested in promoting electricity at all costs.
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I'd love to know how he plans to power the country during a windless anticyclonic night then.
No such thing has ever been recorded in the UK. Most of our wind power is generated in the world's largest offshore windfarms sat in the North Sea.
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I'd love to know how he plans to power the country during a windless anticyclonic night then.
The idea of baseload power is that it produces power all the time. Then other power sources are used to supplement it. I think that idea of how to build a reliable grid is what people are now questioning. You still need alternatives for when the baseload power source is down for any reason. So a mixture of smaller sources, even some that are intermittent, can be more resilient.
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Yes, nuclear advocates usually won't tell you this but load-following is more important than baseload.
And the solution that upgrades both baseload and intermittent sources like solar and wind into load-following is the same: more grid storage!
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Right. They also ignore is that you need redundant alternative sources even for nuclear power plants since they need to go down for maintenance and refueling.
But the advocates of storage as an "emission free" solution is also misleading. As you point out, storage allows you to follow load use electricity when you need it regardless of when it was generated. The storage that is portrayed as emission free is sometimes actually using cheap fossil fuel power to charge the batteries and then using it during pea
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[Citation needed]
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I think what's happening there is that, like a nuclear power plant, a coal plant takes so long to spin up and down that it can still be generating electricity while the sun is charging the batteries.
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The most financial benefit is the shift is from off-peak when power is least expensive to peak demand when buying power off the grid is most expensive. As you note, part of the reason that power is cheap during off-peak is that some baseload plants, coal or natural gas, can't be easily completely shut down. But they can be turned up to produce more power. So often charging your batteries at night and then discharging that power during peak is going to provide the greatest financial payback for the batterie
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here natural gas turbines can be shutdown and powered up very fast (in the area of minutes).
Which is why natural gas is used for peaker plants. But there are also base load natural gas plants that can't be.
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When we have low wind nights (not "windless", that never happens):
1. We turn on fucking gas peakers and don't worry about it. These nights are a small proportion of the overall year
2. We do, in fact, use storage, and we can use much more of it in the future, as costs continue to drop rapidly
These things aren't all or nothing. If we turn on the gas peakers 100 times in year X and then 50 a decade later and then 10 a decade after that, that's a great improvement. If we can eventually get it down to zero, that
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>The sort of people who think base load generation wont be required in the future are deluded
Base-load generation can be provided by storing power. For hours-long scales we can do that with batteries, heat storage, and things like flywheels. The technology isn't feasible everywhere and it's not without its down-sides, but it is worth considering when you are looking at how to build a power grid.
The problem of longer-term energy storage needs more research.
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Base load is the wrong concept -- dispatchable backup is what's needed. Can be provided from gas peakers or storage.
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I mean that's hydro
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Re: More Power! (Score:2)
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It's always gusting somewhere. Especially when the North Sea is right on the doorstep.
Re: So... (Score:2)
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Despite the snark, I’ll treat this as though it’s good faith and describe the actions needed to lower energy prices for consumers in the UK:
1. Reform or buy out a chunk of the 35 GW RO fleet
2. Rebalance levies and system charges so cheap wholesale prices can actually flow through
3. Make time-of-use pricing the default, not an opt-in
4. Accelerate flexible storage and demand response by creating some carefully targeted contracts for availability
5. Re-tune the CfD regime so consumers capture fallin