Rinse & Repeat…
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“ UK consumers are even paying hundreds of millions of pounds to turn wind turbines off, because the grid cannot cope with how much green clean electricity they generate on some days. ”
Wait what?!
Where the power is produced and where it is needed are often not the same place. That needs some rather chunky cables to move it around.
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That is not particularly uncommon with intermittent renewables, depending on contract structures for wind/solar versus contracts for other assets. Wind and PV don’t respond to merit-order pricing, their marginal cost of generation is either approaching zero, or they cannot generate. Depending on the contract governing their generation, they may receive revenues for available power not sent to the grid. Nuclear load cannot be curtailed quickly, so if baseload plus intermittent renewables exceeds demand, some of the renewable supply cannot be taken up - but some of it may get paid as if it was.
There are also natural gas plants that are receiving capacity charges, revenues for being available when not needed.
As RedWhippet says, transmission can also be a bottleneck.
This is one of the reasons why hydrogen is seeing a resurgence of interest. If renewable assets are being curtailed anyway, the energy may as well be stored cheaply.
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And helicopters burning tonnes of aviation fuel hovering over them de-icing them in the winter
Where on earth do they do that?!? Why would you use an external system when the lines themselves can act as heaters? A section running at short circuit current will easily produce enough heat to de-ice itself.
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It was somewhat tongue in cheek, as I’m sure technology has improved to eradicate the need.
But since you ask…
Canada 
We used to live near the Beauly to Denny power line. I’m sure the helicopters where only used to check it. Having said that, surely that is something that could be better achieved with drones?
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Or a rather expensive box to store it in.
The UK also has a number of strategic oil lines across the country which they will monitor with helicopters. I’ve had one land next to me twice because I was digging a hole near one.
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Ah - I misunderstood you, I thought you were referring to RedWhippet’s comments on transmission cables.
Wow, called it a few days ago with “Where is JP?”
5 mins into the first episode, he’s being written for, directed, edited and produced. Come back JP the loose cannon.
Listened to ep1. Dreadful, sadly.
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maybe just the one farm. my cousin just finished up a 10y stint as head of maint for two windmill farms (Tumbler Ridge and Bear Mountain). they had 50 windmills to maintain, they were serviced twice a year so two a week would be taken offline for maint. If I remember correctly, those ones had electric heating elements on the leading edge of the blade to prevent icing.
another cousin actually worked for same company, but in Zurich (site safety co-ordinator). he worked on the highest elevation windmill farm in Europe. he took most of the pics in this article.
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