Your posts read to me as though they were suggesting that wind power is the issue here.
Not my fault you’ve since decided that my replies are targeted at you personally.
That’s the capacity market. Most of the plants paid this are using fossil fuels. The reason wind will be used is that it is very easy to switch off. You can’t just shut down a nuclear plant on a whim.
Obviously, the same applies to hydro, but the difference is that the energy source isn’t wasted.
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Seems a waste to be throwing hundreds of million away to shut down wind farms because the grid cant handle their output.
Almost like the horse is pushing the cart
I don’t think the grid is the issue. It’s demand management. The solution is to find uses for excess capacity. A bit like they did with Economy 7, but more flexible.
This is what smart meters are meant to handle, but there is scope for other uses. There is a plant near us in Germany that is looking at using excess generation for hydrogen production. Electric vehicle charging is another obvious one.
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Isn’t part of the answer grid-scale storage?
The article also implies that it is the grid that’s the problem, that there isn’t enough transmission capacity for the full output because it’s being made up north whereas the demand is mainly in the south, but the production in the south is mainly fossil fuels based. Or at least that’s what I read from it.
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Transmission losses are proportional to the distance travelled, so it will always be cheaper to produce nearer to demand.
There is a big storage facility in North Wales but if there is more excess capacity, they have to stop producing somewhere. Wind and hydro can be switched off very easily.
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That’s the other argument made in the article, from Octopus Energy, that energy costs should be allowed to vary by region so producers are incentivised to build closer to the demand.
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I suspect the majority of capacity payments go to combined cycle natural gas turbine plants. Do you think those should be shut down too?
Capacity fees are a simple fact of grid reliability. Funds are not being ‘thrown away’, facilities needed on a stand-by basis are seeing the revenue they need to stay in operation. No one is building wind farms to earn capacity fees alone.
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I would be startled to find that transmission losses are a significant cost factor in UK power markets. The UK just isn’t that big. North to south it is less than 1000km, which for HVDC is a modest level of loss. The issue is much more likely to be the actual transmission capacity. Most of our grids are still fundamentally based on a design that was intended to push power out from a small number of thermal power plants into a large network with voltages that gradually step down. Most good wind locations are in areas that were never meant to be moving power outward at any sort of scale. While ISOs have been working on increasing that capacity, it is a slow process.
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Only to the homes of old people
This is also a thing. Lack of investment again
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Fascinating stuff, really worth watching.
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Without watching it, I’m trying to figure out if there’s something new or if it’s part of the coverage in the last year or so.
Probably not anything new but some really good info on what it could mean, and how they’re tracking back through history and using various data sources to observe previous similar events.
Big takeaway for me is that a weakened AMOC results in a colder UK and Europe, but also the impact on monsoon areas. Thats potentially a huge population of people that rely on that for food security (for example)
A weak AMOC could reverse within decades. A collapsed one is potentially done for centuries, maybe a lot more.
It’s not a tipping point we can ignore but at thr same time we need more data on its current direction of travel.
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I think that also underrates the impact it’ll have in Europe? I can’t remember where I’ve read it, but an AMOC collapse would kill agriculture in the UK at least, let alone its impacts elsewhere.
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Absolutely. The global impact would huge.
Some models are predicting a collapse by 2060ish.
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Found the article, sadly it’s by an apologist for Russia and China: