Ireland has the same problem, they're waiting on getting another interconnect to france online before building out more windmills. There's enough offshore wind to power the whole island, but it's not predicable enough to power the grid 24/7
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem.
Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
Tbf the government just passed anti-blocking legislation that is meant to address exactly this - for national infrastructure projects you won't be able to sue the government over it directly anymore. Whether that's good or bad.....time will tell.
The problem is they are treating it as a free market issue with hourly auctions, but the 'free market' system ignores transmission. So the windmills can sell cheap electricity in the auctions that can't be delivered to anybody who needs it. Then after the auction you have to pay the windmill operators to switch off the excess production.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
What is this percentage-wise? Every technology will have some waste, and obviously it should be minimized if economical. But I think the efficiency is more important than just raw waste numbers.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
Norway already have this kind of solution where a companies on the same land can register to the grid companies, and the production and consumtion within the same messurement intervals is not counted as selling to the grid. This way you can use the public grid for your own "internal" transfer.
Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
Dumping excess energy into something like Bitcoin mining is an interesting way to spend excess green energy that would otherwise fizzle. Mining Bitcoin is sort of ideal for this type of situation because it doesn't matter the frequency/time/duration for which you mine Bitcoin, and the coins can be quickly liquidated to recapture revenue.
Do they shut down whole production? It looks like the setup is lacking simple PID with slowing down the turbines (by rotating blades of course) or shutting down only part of it?
Maybe I lack some of the context here, but that's the first thought.
Germany pays about the same each year: Wind is turned off, but the investors get their guaranteed profit from the tax payer. Meanwhile wind is aggresively expanded. They even go so far to now build wind in the south of Germany and then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies...
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
The Green Party around there picked up a lot of ex Conservative votes and oppose the nuclear plant at Sizewell and pylons for renewables. Its a weird alliance.
I do wonder how much nymbyism is influenced by most individuals carrying 5-10 years earnings in their home. Such a potential liability might make one awfully concerned about liabilities.
> And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
I live close to the route that this will be built and regularly get cheap/free energy from my energy provider, partially because I live close to the wind generation in question.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
A lot of thermostats already do that. Unfortunately these programs are not terribly popular. People see that the temperature is off and complain. Look up people talking about Nest Energy Shift (different but somewhat similar idea), most comments are quite negative.
It would be much more effective to even out things , and trivial (engineering wise) to stop wasting the outputs of all these heat pumps by effective integration. Ie dump heat removed by ac or freezer into hot water heating, etc
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
We have this system in Finland and whilst I was sceptical at first, it works much better. Electricity prices are published about 24h in advance for 15m intervals (was 60m up until 2 weeks ago). You can therefore time your usage dependent on demand on the grid (which is correlated to production of course).
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
Already have thermostats that move based on signals from the utilities. There were some early pioneers in this stuff over 10 years ago in the bay area. They also aggregated the power to bid it, but I imagine they could aggregate to buy as well.
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
This is already happening with electric car charging. However, part of the reason this can't apply here is that the UK doesn't have regional pricing. For this to work you'd need to vary people's prices depending on which pylon they're connected to.
I'm on the octopus agile tariff that has 30 minute pricing and an API to query it. Prices for tomorrow published at 4pm today. So the pricing bit is sorted. Just need to make the devices understand it now.
Smart thermostats and water heaters can to that to some extent. Heat or cool the room a little more and run the water heater when electricity is cheap, so that they don't have to run when it is expensive. Of course, electricity price matches supply and demand.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
Any numbers on how much energy isn’t sensitive to time? Is it reasonable to say that people can just use energy more when it’s windy to save money? Perhaps if could incentivize people to have large local batteries to eat it up during these times and use it during more costly times? But that seems very expensive.
That is the whole "smart grid" idea. Problem is that people are rightly suspicious that as usual, the "smarts" are not there to serve them, but to maximally squeeze them and maximize profits for the operator.
I'm going to have V2H installed (Vehicle-to-Home), where excess power from the solar panels will charge the car battery, and the car battery can feed the home at night. I'm planning on following a setup I saw in another house, it seemed to work very well.
It really depends on how much excess capacity the north south interconnects have. You'll have to store the energy where it is produced and then get rid of it when the windfarms are not producing (and there's demand in the south). I'm sure someone did the math on this and it is not economical at the moment, otherwise this would have been lower hanging fruit than adding interconnects.
Imagine if wind slowed down all across the country because of wind turbines. The long term effects would be less soil erosion and less mountain erosion and water turbulence. What would the short term effects be? Bird populations will find it more difficult to travel long distance with fewer winds? Temperatures would sore in some places while dropping in other places? Pollution will become more stationary instead of being distributed and diluted?
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
The entire UK energy demand is about 10% of the kinetic energy of the wind over the UK on a typical day. You'd have to extract a lot of energy to make a measurable difference. The extra energy dumped into the atmosphere from climate change makes a far larger impact.
This is called re-dispatch. The market is setup up to treat Britain like a copper plate but the grid is limited north-south.
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Well, it is not really a new problem. Stopping-starting nuclear power plants is also slow and costly. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity and industrial batteries are good ways to solve it at the grid level. In addition to the possibility of some local solutions others have mentioned.
Massive scale out of EV's should help with this - each car becomes a storage unit absorbing excess energy production. You really need a continental if not global scale grid system to constantly distribute the energy inputs. Only a few geographical units are big enough to make this happen, China being really the only one who can do it, and is doing it.
Could use an opportunistic energy load-dump like a desalination plant... Singapore had a similar situation with fresh water shortages, and had excessive waste-methane energy from Oil refineries. It eventually became a net exporter of fresh water at a profit no less. Fresh water is also easy to store off-peak hours, and distribute using existing infrastructure.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
That was tried in the late 20th century in places under oil embargo, and it failed to scale up for several reasons.
Generally, bio-fuels proved more practical using fermented alcohols or fat transesterification into B100. A genetic engineering solution for salt-water tolerant fuel crops or microbes is highly probable.
If I recall correctly, methanol powered vehicles would get significantly lower mileage per tank of fuel, and tended to damage petrol engines. =3
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
70 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 94.7 ms ] threadThere is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation
Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
Short-term profits and for-profit policy lobbying are utterly incompatible with building intelligent, robust, future-proof infrastructure.
Even food distribution?
It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.
https://www.coireglas.com/project
The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
Best of luck =3
Generally, bio-fuels proved more practical using fermented alcohols or fat transesterification into B100. A genetic engineering solution for salt-water tolerant fuel crops or microbes is highly probable.
If I recall correctly, methanol powered vehicles would get significantly lower mileage per tank of fuel, and tended to damage petrol engines. =3
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).