As Demand Plummets This Weekend, UK Renewable Energy Projects May Be Asked To Turn Off (theguardian.com) 95
"Hundreds of renewable energy projects may be asked to turn off this weekend," reports the Guardian, "to avoid overloading the grid as the UK's electricity demand plummets to record lows."
Britain's demand for electricity is forecast to tumble to a fifth below normal levels due to the spring bank holiday and the shutdown of shops, bars and restaurants mandated by the coronavirus lockdown... Meanwhile, the sunny weather is expected to generate more renewable electricity than the UK needs...
The National Grid control room plans to use a new scheme this weekend that will pay small wind turbines and solar installations to stop generating electricity if the UK's renewable energy sources threaten to overwhelm the energy system. About 170 small-scale renewable energy generators have signed up to the scheme, with a total capacity of 2.4GW. This includes 1.5GW of wind power and 700MW of solar energy.
Other companies have also signed up to boost their electricity use when demand falls too low.
The National Grid control room plans to use a new scheme this weekend that will pay small wind turbines and solar installations to stop generating electricity if the UK's renewable energy sources threaten to overwhelm the energy system. About 170 small-scale renewable energy generators have signed up to the scheme, with a total capacity of 2.4GW. This includes 1.5GW of wind power and 700MW of solar energy.
Other companies have also signed up to boost their electricity use when demand falls too low.
The pressure on the electricity grid increased for (Score:1)
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The amount of energy falling on the earth's surface is essentially limitless compared to the human population's need for energy.
Indeed, all the energy in coal and fossil fuel came from sunlight in the first place.
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all the energy in coal and fossil fuel came from sunlight in the first place.
Over hundreds of millions of years.
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Most in about 60 million years.
And it won't happen again outside of peat bogs because fungi and bacteria know how to eat/break down fallen plant matter these days.
The 60 million year time frame is why the idea of growing trees is kinda daft. You can't use 1 year's tree growth to balance carbon released from burning 10,000 years of plant growth.
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Mod this up. The processes that created coal do not exist today. There will be no more coal. In the past, dead plants just accumulated and eventually turned into coal. That doesn't happen anymore. Fungi break down dead plants, and it's all recycled! There will be no more coal.
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You can't use 1 year's tree growth to balance carbon released from burning 10,000 years of plant growth.
This, pretty much. We can't sit around for millions of years for those trees to turn into coal either. Assuming the bacteria don't get them first. What we may be able to do is to harvest the trees and use them as an input to produce biofuel*. Speeding up the process and preventing their consumption by bugs and bacteria. We would have to figure the process requirements and grow enough trees in one year to produce one year's worth of fuel.
*That might be some fancy conversion process. Or just chipping the woo
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Watch the action here (Score:5, Informative)
Real-time status of UK National Grid:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.... [templar.co.uk]
Re:Watch the action here (Score:5, Informative)
Less busy version of the UK data [iamkate.com]
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The steady drop in demand over the last 7 years is an eye-opener, at a time when there have been increasing electric vehicles and increasing population. OK, just checked, we still only have about 3% of vehicles are electric, good job there isn't any global warming or anything~.
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Nice link, it shows that they could sell the surplus to France by the French Interconnector, or to Holland by the Britnet Interconnector, Scotland or Ireland by the Moyle Interconnector, Belgium via the Nemo Interconnector and so on.
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"Assuming that those countries had a need for any. They are probably in much the situation as the UK."
It doesn't matter, in those cases the prices get below zero and the neighbors will shut down nuclear reactors (or coal or whatever is expensive) because it's cheaper that way. Switzerland complains every year because of the German surplus doing it to them.
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There are many systems in place in each country that can predict energy consumption per household, given the patterns of previous years, environmental conditions, holidays etc for any given period.
These work well in Holland. Energy companies there buy in advance what they think they need. Also, the maintainer of national and regional grids operate under the assumption that the amount of energy produced must be as close as possible to the energy being consumed at any given moment.
Companies in error need to p
Why not let the price fall below zero? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would you do if you were paid to use electricity? Would you mine bitcoins? Desalinate water? Make cement?
Re: Why not let the price fall below zero? (Score:2)
Use it fill batteries. Water batteries are super inefficient, but can scale pretty well.
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There's the problem... renewable energy sources are ahead of demand... who has enough batteries to solve this?
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"Water batteries are super inefficient, but can scale pretty well."
That's called pumped storage and the single biggest problem with them is the number of suitable sites that can be used (ie: not many)
So no, they don't scale well
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And use a pipe to transfer the heat into an underground air tank to use in the winter.
Genius!
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I get that you are not serious, but hot water is being stored from summer to winter in Denmark, for use in district heating. In most cases the hot water is created from thermal solar, but adding an "immersion boiler" is reasonably easy.
Re:Why not let the price fall below zero? (Score:4, Interesting)
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-because excess nuclear is the obvious option.
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Texas wind.
Re:Why not let the price fall below zero? (Score:4, Interesting)
"This is not a drill — tomorrow is a mega plunge! An unprecendented combination of low demand with surplus wind and solar means there‘s 12.5 hours of plunge pricing tomorrow, with prices dropping below -10p / kWh in some areas."
Re:Why not let the price fall below zero? (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how it works unfortunately. You'll have to pay even MORE when there is excess electricity because that excess has to go somewhere.
For example Germany regularly produces too much electricity due to the unreliable and unpredictable nature of renewables. German energy companies have to pay other EU countries to take that excess electricity. Which in turn increases electricity prices for German consumers. That's the "beauty" of an EU-wide grid/electricity market.
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That's not how it works unfortunately. You'll have to pay even MORE when there is excess electricity because that excess has to go somewhere.
For example Germany regularly produces too much electricity due to the unreliable and unpredictable nature of renewables. German energy companies have to pay other EU countries to take that excess electricity. Which in turn increases electricity prices for German consumers. That's the "beauty" of an EU-wide grid/electricity market.
This is total made up bullshit (I'd be interested to know where you heard it from). Wind turbines can be switched off instantly (stop accepting power into the grid, feather the blades reasonably quickly so they don't overaccellerate, but you have plenty of time to do that). Solar could just be stopped. Because of the subsidy structure, this currently, normally happens later than it has to and may end up pushing some fossil fuel generation negative. Electricity is fungable so that's kind of the same as s
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That's not how it works unfortunately. You'll have to pay even MORE when there is excess electricity because that excess has to go somewhere.
For example Germany regularly produces too much electricity due to the unreliable and unpredictable nature of renewables. German energy companies have to pay other EU countries to take that excess electricity. Which in turn increases electricity prices for German consumers. That's the "beauty" of an EU-wide grid/electricity market.
This is total made up bullshit (I'd be interested to know where you heard it from). Wind turbines can be switched off instantly (stop accepting power into the grid, feather the blades reasonably quickly so they don't overaccellerate, but you have plenty of time to do that). Solar could just be stopped. Because of the subsidy structure, this currently, normally happens later than it has to and may end up pushing some fossil fuel generation negative. Electricity is fungable so that's kind of the same as someone paying to dump the renewable energy, but it deliberately transfers money to help investment in future, more flexible, renewable energy and is completely different from this being caused by the power source. This never happens at the level where Germany pays other countries to take renewable energy.
Almost all of the time, when Germany generates an excess it gets paid handsomely for it. Which is the real beauty of an EU-wide grid/electricity market.
If you made a minimal amount of research into "germany negative energy price" before posting "total made up bullshit": https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1... [nytimes.com] https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com] https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com] https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
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I'm not claiming that Germany has never had negative power prices. I'm claiming that the reason for it has nothing to do with the way that renewable energy sources work. They can all be turned off instantly. The negative price comes from a) limitations of things like coal power stations which take hours to shutdown b) limitations of nuclear which takes weeks to shutdown and c) the structure of the finances which mean that renewable can be profitable even when the wholesale prices are negative.
None of
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I'm not claiming that Germany has never had negative power prices. I'm claiming that the reason for it has nothing to do with the way that renewable energy sources work. They can all be turned off instantly. The negative price comes from a) limitations of things like coal power stations which take hours to shutdown b) limitations of nuclear which takes weeks to shutdown and c) the structure of the finances which mean that renewable can be profitable even when the wholesale prices are negative.
None of your articles contradicts that. Renewable energy sources are great for dealing with negative prices as long as you agree a price structure for the renewable provider which means that they lose money if they generate at moments of negative pricing. That normally means that you have to pay them a bit more as a flat fee for having available dispatchable energy (otherwise they lose out, effectively subsidising the problematic sources like coal and nuclear because the other energy sources get to be spun up more of the time).
You do walk in to these things: https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
Renewables have made negative prices increasingly common
The rising share of renewable power has made power prices much more volatile in Germany and negative prices have become a fairly common phenomenon.
In 2017, electricity reached its lowest average price on 29 October, when a combination of strong wind power output and low demand pushed the daily average down to minus 52 euros per megawatt-hour.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1... [nytimes.com]
Power prices plunged below zero for much of Sunday and the early hours of Christmas Day on the EPEX Spot, a large European power trading exchange, the result of low demand, unseasonably warm weather and strong breezes that provided an abundance of wind power on the grid.
Do I need to go on? I'm all for wind and solar and I think we should all have more of it (and I don't doubt your claim that it can be turned off), but that doesn't give me carte blanche to ignore facts. Wind and solar has caused negative pricing in Germany and every source that I've posted agrees with that.
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Prime opportunity for someone to build a big battery.
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Actually I'm getting paid to use electricity this weekend.
My supplier, Octopus, invited me to take part in a scheme where I'm paid when there is excess renewable energy. They call it "The Big Switch On".
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What would you do if you were paid to use electricity? Would you mine bitcoins? Desalinate water? Make cement?
Charge batteries like a sane person not looking for an excuse to simply screw the environment?
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What would you do if you were paid to use electricity?
Make popcorn and wait for the bubble to explode.
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What would you do if you were paid to use electricity?
Make popcorn and wait for the bubble to explode.
And I should mention that I'd be short-circuiting the breaker box ...
Such a shame they don't have more storage (Score:5, Insightful)
All that extra electricity could be going to lift heavy weights, pump water to higher reservoirs, heat molten salt, and even charge some batteries to use later.
Re: Such a shame they don't have more storage (Score:2)
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Generate hydrogen!
Why not methane - easier to store. Very easy to use in existing peaker plants when the power is needed back. Less mature conversion technology but it seems the efficiency is more or less there.
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Until there is very low cost hydrogen storage (ie. injecting it in gas fields) it doesn't make much sense.
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Even when it can be done to get say 10% yearly ROI at current prices, constructing the facilities for it is extremely risky with the power market being in so much flux.
That said, outside of the small niche of arbitrage for very short term battery storage I doubt there is any way to get good ROI for storage for the moment. Most of the spots for cheap hydro are already being used.
Maybe at some point the infrastructure for production and storage of power to gas/fuel will be cheap enough it can just be turned o
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This is an area where the government should step in. The entire "ROI" type of thinking leads to *extremely* short term thinking. Having a national power reserve is just the kind of thing the government excels at like road systems, police, and fire fighters, etc.
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All that extra electricity could be going to lift heavy weights, pump water to higher reservoirs, heat molten salt, and even charge some batteries to use later.
I used to think the same thing. Then I did some research and found out that the required amount of storage is so insanely high that the only real choices are extraction of methane to produce synthetic natural gas and the sea water to diesel fuel scheme that the US Navy developed. Batteries are way to much mining, molten salt doesn't last long enough (unless you dissolve Thorium in it), pumped storage is only economically on rare occasions and we already have it pretty much everywhere we could do it alread
Turning Off Renewable Energy Projects? (Score:2)
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I'm wondering this myself too. I could understand this if most base generation were nukes, in this case it's very difficult to shut them down or put them back online, and they are only efficient when delivering 100% capacity, so often they can't be dialed down to generate less.
Fuel oil stations are similar though not as hard to shut down and restart.
Maybe they're worried about peaks in demand? Solar is unpredictable: a few clouds and you have a 10% decrease in generation which is hard to compensate if your
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Fuel Oil is not used to generate Power in the UK.
The big supplier Fossil Fuel in the UK is Natural Gas (Not fracked)
As I write this, Renewables account for 55% of UK Electricity Generation. 19% Gas , 24% Nuclear/Pumped Storage
he combination of clear skies (Solar) and String winds (Wind power) are the reason for this issue.
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Then why are renewables not considered reliable and dispatchable? They are intermittent sources without any means of control on availability of output.
It's pure propaganda by the nuclear industry. The power source which is not dispatchable is actually Nuclear where it's unable to change up or down quickly, sometimes taking weeks to reach full power or power down to zero. The only fully dispatchable power sources are things like a peaker gas plant or (within the limits of it's water reserve) hydro plants.
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Totally get that, and that's why renewables aren't dispatchable.
This is true for wind and solar, but not biomass or hydro. Tidal can be a pretty continuous source of power, depending on technology, but the ones that provide continuous power are expensive.
You need to keep enough dispatchable capacity around to cover for when renewables don't generate power.
It depends on what you build. It's vanishingly unlikely that there would be no wind, no sun, no tides, no water and nothing to burn, and so renewables in their entirety definitely don't have to be replaced. You then need to look at the balance you have and what likelihood there is of shortfall and mitigate with other so
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+1
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Do you like having 24/7/365 electricity, or do you find acceptable to have blackouts a few times a week on a good week?
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They aren't designed to scale quickly.
There are ways to bridge that, but it won't be cheap.
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Re:Turning Off Renewable Energy Projects? (Score:4, Informative)
They have. Coal power was the first to go. It was shutdown 2 months ago. The only thing left running is a base load of nuclear and quite a lot of smaller combined cycle gas plants. The fossil fuels is currently only making up 20% of their energy mix, all gas.
The environmental impact electricity generation wise in the UK is currently looking very admirable to say the least. http://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com]
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Yep, nuclear is the problem here, harder to ramp down to make way for cleaner energy. It will be a while longer until we can get rid of that but it's coming.
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Yep, nuclear is the problem here, harder to ramp down to make way for cleaner energy. It will be a while longer until we can get rid of that but it's coming.
You would think that wouldn't you. There are plenty of dispatchable and/or load-following nuclear designs, some which can't meltdown (as in its not a possible failure mode). Meanwhile, its nuclear's fault even though those designs can't be build due to the opposition of environmental groups. That's rich. The problem is that its easy to convince a scientifically illiterate public of infeasible ideas like you can replace fossil fuels with renewables and storage. That and the fact that you never seem to f
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There are plenty of dispatchable and/or load-following nuclear designs, some which can't meltdown (as in its not a possible failure mode). Meanwhile, its nuclear's fault even though those designs can't be build due to the opposition of environmental groups.
In the UK they most recent nuclear plant, which is also the most expensive form of electrical generation and the most expensive object on Earth, is being built on an existing site so there were issues with environmental objections or planning permission etc. In fact there were only two issues, the EU investigated if state aid rules were broken because it is so insanely expensive and unprofitable the government had to introduce equally insane subsidies, and an objection from Ireland over the potential for ac
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If any of these new designs were more than paper exercises or had any practical chance of being economical they would get built, but they are all fantasies that can't find investors willing to pump in billions to a technology that appears to be on the way out.
This is real MSRE [wikipedia.org]. Hell, I've even told you specifically about it. We can't get these built due to your team's obstructionism. Then you have the gall to say its the technology. Dude, do you ever think about the consequences of your actions or are you a truly pure sociopath?
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The "E" stands for experimental. It produced less power than a wind turbine. They still haven't figured out how to decommission it.
Not exactly a commercially viable production ready design.
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Why exactly would you want to get rid of cleanest, safest energy available?
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Because it's the most expensive, it's suffered numerous serial safety problems in the UK and it produces difficult to handle waste. Plus it's not even British owned and we need some inward investment right now to help recover from C19, and to export some of our own expertise.
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It's cheapest or one of cheapest. The cost you see comes from extreme caution, and from catching every bit of possible pollution. For a fair comparison, you'd need to put a condom on every single chimney and store the products forever (unlike nuclear waste which decays), build a huge dome with a condom attached on the whole dammed lake for hydro -- and intermittedly irrigate the whole land downstream, etc.
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The high cost of Hinkley C is down to two factors. Firstly the supposedly cheap reactor design turned out to be extremely expensive due to oversights in the design process leading to necessary modifications later.
Secondly no-one wanted to build it. They asked British companies, they asked Hitachi, they asked Toshiba/Westinghouse because that collapsed, they asked several European companies, they asked Canadian companies. In the end it only got done because they guaranteed an extremely high price for the ene
Good time to pump water uphill. (Score:2)
Re: Good time to pump water uphill. (Score:1)
Seconded. Also, a good time to turn some water into hydrogen (and oxygen) with electrolysis.
And into methane etc. Depending on the needs. Even into gasoline, if that is economically a good idea.
Re: Good time to pump water uphill. (Score:3)
So ... are Brits going to see falling prices? (Score:1)
Or is this a put-up job?
So renewables are now real (Score:2)
So why aren't they (Score:1)
shutting down the coal-fired plants? Neither the link nor another referenced link say. Has Great Britain completely come off of coal?
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They have switched off all the coal plants. They now generally only run during times of peak demand in the winter.
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Some of the coal-fired plants are being converted to use biomass. Drax power station currently has 2.6GW capacity for biomass and 1.29GW capacity for coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:So why aren't they (Score:4, Informative)
They have. Coal accounted for 0% of electricity usage in the UK and has since about March. The only fossil fuels left are gas plants and they are currently providing only 20% of the energy mix. http://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com]
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Here is what you can do (Score:3)
Turn on all lights in recognition of those who in the past protested and warned us about nuclear power.
Thats enough power to ... (Score:1)
Run a flux capacitor. Lets divert that power and do a little repair of today. 1.21 gigawatts
Why not instead... (Score:3)
...turn down some of the unneeded oil and/or coal/natural gas power plants?
When it's "Use it or Lose it"... (Score:2)
Although this is a relatively narrow "edge case" today, Scotland, for example, probably has numerous other geographic features that could be turned to this model with a bit of e
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I mean if the Chinese can do it....
Clearer Air = More Solar Power? (Score:1)
I have noticed that my solar panels SEEM to be generating more electricity. I have not done an advanced analysis of this but it is the impression I get.
Making more sense (Score:1)