UK's National Grid Plans £54B Wind-Power Network Upgrade (bbc.com) 79
"There are now more than 11,000 wind turbines on and offshore, which produce nearly a quarter of the UK's electricity," reports the BBC.
But rather than rely on future windfarms to build their own connections to the grid, the country's national grid operator, National Grid ESO, plans to spend £54 billion ($64B) on its biggest network upgrade in 60 years: National Grid ESO, which runs the electricity network, said the plan it has laid out would enable the government to deliver 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030 — a third of the UK's electricity demand — while creating 168,000 jobs. It claimed the network could lead to more than £50bn of investments over the next eight years.... These network upgrades are deemed essential to accommodate and integrate a new raft of renewable energy projects also announced on Thursday. A total of 23 gigawatts (GW) of electricity — 24 million homes worth at current power usage — worth of contracts were awarded this morning to bidders wishing to build new renewable facilities.
The auction saw offshore wind prices hit a new record low at a quarter of the current cost of gas generated power.
The article notes 21,000 people signed a petition urging longer offshore networking instead. One advocacy group complains that building onshore power lines through regions like rural East Anglia is "short-sighted and shameful."
But rather than rely on future windfarms to build their own connections to the grid, the country's national grid operator, National Grid ESO, plans to spend £54 billion ($64B) on its biggest network upgrade in 60 years: National Grid ESO, which runs the electricity network, said the plan it has laid out would enable the government to deliver 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030 — a third of the UK's electricity demand — while creating 168,000 jobs. It claimed the network could lead to more than £50bn of investments over the next eight years.... These network upgrades are deemed essential to accommodate and integrate a new raft of renewable energy projects also announced on Thursday. A total of 23 gigawatts (GW) of electricity — 24 million homes worth at current power usage — worth of contracts were awarded this morning to bidders wishing to build new renewable facilities.
The auction saw offshore wind prices hit a new record low at a quarter of the current cost of gas generated power.
The article notes 21,000 people signed a petition urging longer offshore networking instead. One advocacy group complains that building onshore power lines through regions like rural East Anglia is "short-sighted and shameful."
I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:4, Insightful)
... that renewables can't possibly work and that nuclear power is the only one true solution to UK's power problems.
I'm sure someone will provide a post in here soon with a bunch of links to articles from Dr MacKay showing that its all a big waste of time.
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:1)
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:5, Interesting)
Offshore wind is pretty consistent, especially in an area as large as the British Isles. That's what much of the cabling is for, to get it from wherever it is available to wherever it is in demand.
Nuclear isn't reliable enough. In France it has a capacity factor of about 70%, although right now a full half of all reactors are offline there. Offshore wind is about 60%, but because you can built vastly more of it for the same price as nuclear, the actual availability of energy is higher. It's more predictable as well, since we are good at forecasting the weather over the space of a few days, but not good at predicting nuclear plant failures that knock gigawatts off the grid instantly.
Best of all, with enough wind to meet demand 24/365 you will have an over-abundance of energy much of the time, meaning cheap power for energy intensive projects that can boost the economy and tackle climate change.
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't read TFA I see. Last week the UK auctioned off-shore wind opportunities. The winning bids were one quarter (25%, 1/4th) the cost of gas generated electricity. It's difficult to even calculate how much cheaper than nuclear it is.
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:1)
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Go on, tell me more about contracts for building nuclear plants and the costs of waste disposal. Because that was what you were writing about, right?
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Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:4, Informative)
LNG prices are not nearly as high as you might think. The export price in the US is pretty cheap and the price paid in the UK is way down from the highs.
https://tradingeconomics.com/c... [tradingeconomics.com]
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Looking at a longer-term graph though, natural gas prices are currently ~5x where they were a year ago. At best that makes natural gas potentially competitive with wind on an energy basis, with most profit (if not all) coming from ancillary grid services.
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No. One year ago, on July 10 2021, they were in the 90s. Today, LNG prices are at 255.52. Yes, they're higher today, but if you look at that graph, they spiked when Putin was ramping up his invasion and have been trending in the right direction.
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Go back further. $50 was about where it sat for a long time.
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Perhaps you should read a recent publication and not a 30 old one?
Onshore is far below 4 cents ... no idea about offshore.
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Off shore wind is crazy expensive to build AND maintain.
No, it's not. It used to be, but costs per MWh have come down dramatically. Condition monitoring and pro-active maintenance, along with new materials and using bigger turbines has very much changed the equation over the last 15 years. It's actually cheaper, per MWh to build than nuclear, but the cost of maintenance is higher, but if evens out such that the current headline cost per MWh is similar. It would be fair to say that there are things not in those headline costs, namely the intermittency of wind is
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Canada has tonnes of uranium that can be mined. Unfortunately it is run by people even more left than much of Europe. The kind of people who prefer to virtue signal rather than provide Europe with more ethical fossil fuels than from Russia. And for the environmental nazis who just had a brain haemorrhage over that last statement, you are the ones forcing reliance on Russian fossil fuels. You are only half a step ahead of concentration camp guards.
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Nuclear isn't reliable enough. In France it has a capacity factor of about 70%,
But that is France, what is the capacity factor of nuclear power in the United Kingdom? My guess is it is better than what France gets, if only moderately so. France has a famously terrible capacity factor on their nuclear power because they use nuclear power to load follow, meaning they ramp down nuclear power production at night, and because they have old power plants that need more down time than newer plants. Both issues could be rectified with newer nuclear power plants. You assume new nuclear powe
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UK is only a little higher, mid 70s.
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK is part of the European Grid already. There is a 1000MW pair of interconnectors between the UK and Ireland about 3000MW interconnector between France and the UK. The direction of flow depends on the price and the amount of Wind makes quite a big difference.
I don't know how the figures for the UK (their Electricity demands are at least 10x that of Ireland) but i can tell you that the maximum amount of renewable energy allowed on the grid is around 75%
The daily cycle for Ireland runs between 3000MW off peak to 6000MW at peak. The current record for wind generation in Ireland is about 4,500 MW.
So that 4,500 figure would have been produced around the time of Peak demand (about 75%) Perhaps more interesting is when there is high Wind and low demand. When demand is low about 3000MW there is at least 4,500 MW of potential Wind generation available. it depends on weather and time of year. It can be as low as 100MW. more typical would be above 1000MW.
Anyway lets take a scenario where its the middle of the night demand is around 3000MW and there is an excess of Wind in Ireland . As you need grid stability you are limited to around 75% wind so around 2250MW but you have the interconnectors which can take around 1000MW so if the price is right which it usually is with wind Ireland would be exporting so now the demand is 4000MW and now you can use 3000 MW of wind and 1000MW of that goes to the UK. If there is less wind available than upto a 1000MW flows into Ireland. So you could have a situation where 60 percent of generation is from Irish Wind farms and most of the rest is via the inter connectors between UK and Ireland.
It's also worth bearing in mind that fuel for conventional generation is mostly imported so using Wind when its available is a good thing. Ireland also has battery sites as well which can dump a lot of Electricity onto the grid in a fraction of a second and then maintain that output if needed for 2 or 3 hours, This covers the period needed to bring up more conventional generation.
The future is quite interesting, there is already ongoing construction of an interconnector between Ireland and Spain (which is a great location for Solar) There are a couple of interesting projects for storage.
In Berlin at one generating station they are building a large water tank which is mainly for district heating but is going to hold water at up to 90 degrees C (about 200 MW) it's intended that excess Wind generation will be used to generate the heat. However conventional generation needs to raise steam to run and if the water is at 90 degrees to start with rather than say 10 degrees. You don't need to burn so much fuel. The article I read said they can keep it hot for around 13 hours. Which would help shift wind generated power generated off peak to on peak. The German site looks to be ready for September just a few months really for the construction.
There is also another project I read about where the idea was to heat sand to 500 degrees C. Electric Cars are going to need charging and the time to do so is overnight when demand is low. We already have plenty of capacity since we have to be able to generate enough for peak times.
At the very least realise that national grids do not work in isolation and Electricity can be supplied where its needed. You still need infrastructure in place, and some of it needs to be beefed up to carry higher capacity loads. Even Brexit hasn't changed things much if it all about Electricity generation. In Ireland we have 2 countries but one grid sometimes control is in Dublin and at others it's in Belfast.
Electricity is Electricity, how it's generated is not a simple black and white issue.
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Random question, but does Ireland have any interties to continental Europe?
Seems like that is needed, along with maybe a few hundred MW of battery storage for long-term grid stability.
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Not yet i know there is one which is being built direct to spain which will increase the interconnector capacity. It's not unusual to have 3000MW coming into the UK from France and at the same time the UK can be exporting 1000MW via the 2 interconnectors to Ireland.
It is a European Grid Network so Electricity gets pushed to where it is wanted, it depends on price. It's not unusual for a generator to have a contract to supply a retail company X amount of power , now if there is a lot of wind on the grid.
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If there is a 75% limit them how did the UK run entirely on renewable electricity briefly last year?
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Well one thing they could do is export power. Which allows you to produce more safely. So it may have been they produced enough to power the UK's requirements with renewable and then exported the excess generated by conventional. I don't know the UK grid code so they may allow more on it's generally going up year on year.
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Nuclear isn't reliable enough. In France it has a capacity factor of about 70%,
In the US Nuclear is 92%.
although right now a full half of all reactors are offline there. Offshore wind is about 60%, but because you can built vastly more
Presently highest for offshore wind in the world is low 50s with the average being in the mid 40s. Current offshore farms in the UK operate in the mid 30s. Offshore is 3x as expensive to build and maintain than onshore.
of it for the same price as nuclear, the actual availability of energy is higher. It's more predictable as well, since we are good at forecasting the weather over the space of a few days, but not good at predicting nuclear plant failures that knock gigawatts off the grid instantly.
As with all human endeavors preventative maintenance (and ditching reprocessing) is the key to uptime.
If you are good enough at it you can even make one of these work reliability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: I guess they didn't get the memo... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wind is inconsistent and does not provide 24/7/365 controlled electricity.
100% true. However, mass energy storage could easily level out those inconsistencies.
Wind has its place as a supplement but not a primary source of energy.
I don't think anyone was suggesting it be anything but supplemental.
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This is the UK, far far more cost effective than nuclear would be tidal. There are gobs and gobs of potential tidal resources available. Just a Severn Barrage could supply ~7% of the UK's total energy needs at cost comparable to a *SINGLE* nuclear power station. There are several other really really good sites for tidal power in the UK, the best two sights being the River Mersey and the Pentland Firth. In total with some more pumped storage they could supply ~40% of the UK's total energy need in an utterly
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Any future independent Scotland is going to want to sell that power to someone else, and the most sensible option would be the R-UK. It's potentially a large long term revenue stream for any future independent Scotland and the SNP are not going to want to mess that up. I would add almost all the electrons in Scotland are already low/zero carbon with the exception of a single CCGT plant that uses the flare gas from North Sea oil production. So much of this network is to move electricity generated by offshore
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UK also has nice options for tidal flow power plants, aka "under water wind turbines", utilizing the heavy currents.
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Tidal flow is a way to take a massive tidal power potential and turn into a much much smaller one. In the context of the UK it is nearly as dumb as building new nuclear.
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Tidal flow is a way to take a massive tidal power potential and turn into a much much smaller one.
And then? You have extracted the tiny amount of its flow power into electricity.
Do you actually have an idea how much energy there is in a tidal flow? I guessed so.
In the context of the UK it is nearly as dumb In the country with the most and strongest tidal streams? Ah-ha ... interesting.
Anyway, I award you with the price: "dumbest comment of today" - I doubt anyone will top it.
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Wind has its place as a supplement but not a primary source of energy.
It is the other way around. Consider wind to be *baseload* - it just runs 24/365 at full output. Now you only have to orchestrate the load balancing power around it. Actually simple when you have enough wind.
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I guess they didn't get the memo that renewables can't possibly work and that nuclear power is the only one true solution to UK's power problems.
Well this is a stupid hot take. Nuclear is a large part of the solution but it's not the solution. Should they invest in nuclear, yes. However, even if they decide to do that today, there is still a decade in which you could be taking the more polluting aspects of the grid offline before the first new nuclear plant will come online.
Read the article: "The auction saw offshore wind prices hit a new record low at a quarter of the current cost of gas generated power." This is just the market doing what it do
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If renewable + hydrogen backup becomes cheap enough to outcompete nuclear then it's the solution. If not then nuclear is the solution.
There really isn't much middle ground for net zero.
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Hydrogen is waaay too inefficient to be used as a storage medium. Seriously, anything but hydrogen.
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Few countries have enough goldilock hydro to store say a winter month worth of electricity. Almost all countries can store enough hydrogen underground to do it. The alternatives for seasonal storage are an even bigger shitshow. Power to hydrocarbon/ammonia? Sucks. Pumped hydro in non goldilock locations? Sucks. All the options suck, hydrogen sucks least.
No seasonal storage is simply not an option, the 5 carbon credit army has managed to mostly shout down the use of dunkelflaute as a term, but they were too
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Yeah but this is the UK and there is gobs and gobs of goldilock pumped storage locations that have not been tapped yet. We certainly should be able to get to a week if we built all the proposed pumped storage.
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The round trip for hydrogen is 50% efficiency. If we talk about "electric".
However you can burn it in a gas plant. Then every hydrogen you have saves you: gas.
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I guess many of these people didn't understand that in order to get renewables from wind farms will require billions of upgrades to the grid, and the grid has to be built to where people live. And from all the studies that are done this upgrade won't even come close to what is needed. This is delivering 50GW more power. That is enough to provide adequate additional power for maybe 10 million people. There are 80+ million in the UK. And that is starting with a modern electrical grid. How about for the 5+ BIL
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> "There are 80+ million in the UK"
No, there aren't. Don't know whose particular arse you pulled that number from.
What is of concern, however, is the maintenance cost for offshore wind. It needs completely replacing nearly every ten years. On the biggest offshore wind farm, they hadn't even finished building it before having to start replacing the first installed turbines.
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50 GW is 50,000 MW. Your estimate of enough for 10 million people is way off. Ireland as an Island uses around 6000 MW peak with a population of around 5- 6 million in total. So as a back of a cigarette packet calculation maybe a million people per GW i am not saying my figure is accurate but it's closer than yours
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If you can't even get the UK population right, I think the rest of us are pretty justified in ignoring the rest of your wittering
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Maybe they looked at the memo that details how long it takes to build a nuclear plant (15 years, 10 if you really rush it) against how long it takes to throw up a bunch of wind turbines (days if you have the parts on hand)
We want to stop importing Russian gas now, not in 10 to 15 years. We also want to stop burning anything for power now, not after a complete ecosystem screw-up.
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... that renewables can't possibly work and that nuclear power is the only one true solution to UK's power problems.
I'm sure someone will provide a post in here soon with a bunch of links to articles from Dr MacKay showing that its all a big waste of time.
As a UK resident, why not both.
Nuclear is good for baseline power, but terrible for dealing with demand that fluctuates.
Wind and other renewables are good at ramping up and down to cover for fluctuating demand, not only seasonally (higher usage during winter) but also during different times of the day.
The problem with new nuclear plants is that we needed to start them 20+ years ago. Hence we keep extending the life of existing ones. They are incredibly expensive and time consuming to build, even if
Look carefully at the numbers (Score:2, Insightful)
At the moment there are 11,000 turbines which account for about 25% of UK electricity supply.
Yearly peak demand is about 40GW, not 50GW.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.... [templar.co.uk] - see bottom left.
Current wind production varies from about 13GW to close to zero. The average is probably around 8GW, or one third of faceplate. See above link, bottom, second from left for production. Total wind capacity in the UK from the 11,000 turbines is about 25GW faceplate. But the actual amount delivered fluctuates wildly.
So t
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Managed correctly, EV's can be part of the solution.
There's about 10% of cars on the go at any particular time - most of the rest of them are sitting parked somewhere.
This wont be instant to build out, but I think the best solution would be for all EV's to have bidirectional charging, so they can either charge from the grid, or sell power back to the grid.
Power should be supplied or bought with demand pricing - low during off-peak times when there is spare power capacity, and high pricing during peak demand
Re:Look carefully at the numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
They are the national grid. Explaining about storage is not their job. Their job is ensuring that we have suitable levels of interconnect and that we can, for example, ship energy generated off Scotland to East Anglia, or from East Anglia to Wales. That's the point of all of this, to move the grid from serving a few concentrated powers sources, that we can even the intermittency. And, so that when we have more grid scale batteries, we can ship power to and from them. And, if any of the newer technologies which are current prototype on the grid become more widespread as storage, so that they can ship this power around.
There is nothing hare brained about that. What they are doing is exactly what you are asking. They are working out how to deal with the peaks and troughs and to keep grid stability.
Re:Look carefully at the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
New offshore wind has a capacity factor of about 60%, not "one third" as you suggest. Existing farms are already showing 55%, and the new ones are further out to sea where the wind is more consistent. Out in the North Sea it never stops. Never.
So you should expect around 30GW additional by 2030. And all costing 1/4th the price of electricity generated by gas, and an even smaller fraction of that generated by coal or nulcear.
China installed slightly more, 51.5GW, in 2021. Not in 8 years like the UK is planning to, in a year. During COVID. The UK should have no trouble meeting this goal.
Some existing capacity will become backup, only rarely used when there isn't enough wind and demand shaping isn't enough. Thing is, the this is a tiny fraction of the UK's available off-shore wind energy. The total is estimated to be around 2,200GW average output. The UK could become a massive exporter of energy. Scotland probably will one day.
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No, it does not have a capacity of 60%.
https://energynumbers.info/uk-... [energynumbers.info]
30% may be a bit low, not sure, over the life of the parc its probably not far off. Current is 40% from the above link but a lot are lower.
On China, they were not installing in the North Sea. Here is wikipedia on Chinese wind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Capacity factor of the installed base under 20%.
Only 52 GW offshore by 2030. Offshore is harder than people think. As the Chinese experience shows.
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Existing Scottish wind farm already at 57%. Never designs and further out to sea are even better.
https://energynumbers.info/uk-... [energynumbers.info]
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You do not know the capacity factor until you have measured the plants performance.
So no idea why you idiots on /. pull CFs out of yur ass that are completely meaningless.
A CF of 30% is ridiculous, no one would build a plant a site where he only expects a CF of 30%. Would not make any sense.
"Buy a generator." (Score:3)
...
Buy a generator. You are going to need it if they keep on with this insanity.
I don't see anywhere in the article that the National Power Grid are touting this as the only energy input.
We know the UK are also investing in Nuclear power.
It's also not insanity, just another part of an energy mix for the the future, with the hope that we can eventually wean ourselves off fossil fuel based energy production.
Re:Look carefully at the numbers (Score:4, Informative)
Peak is much closer to 50GW than 40GW. The templar site has daily averages over the last year. Gridwatch [gridwatch.co.uk] is better for peaks.
Peaks in recent years were:
Lots of your assumptions about past installations matching future installations aren't accurate. Newer installations use higher-power turbines, which are taller and have higher capacity factors. You suggest 50GW (nameplate) would be 20,000 turbines. This is only 2.5MW/turbine, but newer turbines are far larger. Hornsea Two, currently under construction, is using 165 x 8MW turbines [hornseaprojects.co.uk], with turbines up to 12MW being propsed for Hornsea 3. This could be as few as 4-6 thousand turbines, not a huge increase over the already installed 11,000 that you cite.
I appreciate that there are significant challenges in the market, but it's nowhere near as impossible as you seem to be making it out.
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and that delivery will be about one third of that
That's not a good assumption because new UK off-shore delivers significantly higher capacity factors than the current UK mixture of off-shore and on-shore.
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So how much gas backup?
ZERO
The UK already has a grid that runs. Why the funk would anyone build new back up plants for new wind turbines, when he already has a running grid?
No idea why you anti renewables assholes are so damn stupid.
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This only seems hare brained because you're only looking at part of the picture. There's not only going to be wind; there's also going to be tidal, nuclear, some solar, etc. There'll be distributed load smoothing with EV batteries and V2G.
And most importantly of all, the economics are just too compelling to ignore. Wind is down to a quarter of the cost of natgas, and falling further. We can and will build huge amounts of overcapacity and use "excess" electricity for new things, eg H2 production.
Onshore Works for us (Score:2)
The last time I heard an official figure, onshore wind turbines in Orkney produced 125% of our daily KWH use. This is a sign of what can be done over the rest of the country but it is also a sign that wind turbines are only part of the solution. There used to be a nuclear power station a few miles away. It was built there (Dounreay) because it was a long way from London and the rest of the remote south east.
It is not feasible to build all the wind turbines needed down there. We are happy to double our w
Live information (Score:2)
https://energynumbers.info/gbgrid
And reports by month (a graph would be nice:https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electricity-and-me/great-britains-monthly-electricity-stats
11% to 40%, but typically closer to 25%
And by the way... Levelised cost anyone? (Score:1)
Notice by the way that this huge cost is not for the turbines, but only for the upgrade to the transmission network to allow their power to be connected.
A cost which the proponents of wind have always denied, and which is omitted from so called 'levelised cost' comparisons between wind and conventional.
As is the cost of storage, though one investment banking firm for a while was calculating the 'levelised cost of storage'. Turned out to double the cost of wind.
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this huge cost is not for the turbines, but only for the upgrade to the transmission network to allow their power to be connected.
If you build a nuclear plant, you have to do big upgrades as well, because they put so much generation in one place — usually somewhere where there wasn't anything formerly. And that's the proposed alternative, so the comparison is reasonable. No matter what you need grid upgrades when you add a lot of capacity with anything but rooftop solar.
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If you want to add transmission costs to wind energy you can also apply the environmental damage resulting from fossil fuels to their price, it would be astronomical.
Grid storage is not usually associated with particular energy sources. A battery bank can be connected to the grid anywhere and acts as its own power plant. These days they are supplanting gas turbine peaker plants.
https://www.powermag.com/world... [powermag.com]
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I think this is not the case. Offshore wind farms have always paid for lines to shore and upgrades to the onshore machinery to enable grid connection. What this expenditure is doing is saying that, if instead of connecting farms one by one, the overall shape of the grid is considered and connectivity is added in a way that the grid is planning for future wind turbines also, they should be able to both reduce the costs of connecting while producing greater levels of interconnect meaning a more stable grid.
So
Oh my god! (Score:2)
Rates? (Score:2)
Will this brilliant investment increase or decrease rates that people pay for electricity in UK? Not mentioned for some odd reason. I wonder why.