This morning has brought news that in many ways I consider to be welcome.
Scottish wind farms were paid not to produce 37 per cent of their planned output during the first half of this year, as the electricity could not be used locally or moved to where it was needed. ( Financial Times)
Not the news itself because that is an example of clear incompetence that I will come to in a moment. What I mean is that such issues are being reported by the mainstream media in the beginnings of what is a change of how renewable power is reported and perhaps eventually a reverse-ferret.
The size of the problem so far this year is below.
The four terawatt hours of curtailed output in northern Scotland would have been enough to power all of Scotland’s households for the entire six-month period, according to research from energy analytics firm Montel.
Wind farms in the area accounted for 86 per cent of the total 4.6 terawatt hours of electricity curtailed across Britain — 15 per cent higher than in the same period last year.
We now get to the incompetence point which the Financial Times puts like this.
The figures are likely to fuel concern about inefficiencies in the design of Britain’s rapidly evolving electricity system and the impact on all consumers’ energy bills.
We have allowed more and more wind farms to be built in the North of Scotland with no plan for getting the energy produced to where it is needed. Yes no-one had a plan for how the electricity produced was going to go down wires with much lower capacity.Most of this is the fault of the previous UK Conservative government as this happened on their watch.”Build it and they will come” thinking perhaps.
As a concept this is not alone.I follow UK defence matters and we have built the Astute class of nuclear submarines. Excellent submarines but we forgot to make sure we had sufficient dry dock facilities so in recent times at least two of them have been in port as they are not allowed to sail. So as we stand this is the state of play.
Of the 5 SSNs in commission, 1 boat operational but alongside at time of writing, 4 boats either in maintenance or long-term lay up. ( Navy Lookout)
It is hard to believe that the required maintenance dock was not ready but it is analogous to the wind power situation where we see clear incompetence. Which is exactly what the Financial Times is describing below.
The increase comes as more wind farms have been developed in remote areas in Scotland, including in the Moray Firth off the north-east coast, where there is little demand for electricity and not yet enough cable capacity to move their output to consumers further south.
Who was in charge when this began?
Power stations can agree to sell their output into the wholesale market regardless of where they are located, which in the case of wind farms often means they are planning to produce more than can actually be used given grid constraints.
You may have spotted the next part of the issue which is that consumers pay for the power produced even if we do not use it. This is one of the roads where the claims of renewable power being cheap goes wrong and if this wind power is ever to be used properly then we will need to spend billions on the infrastructure.
Over the next five years, National Grid will be investing around £60 billion in networks, cementing our position as a leader in the energy transition on both sides of the Atlantic.
Not all of that is in the UK but some £30 billion is.
Number Crunching
There is a site called Wasted Wind and this caught my eye.
Today, wasted wind has already cost Britain:
£830,621£168,024 switching off wind turbines
£662,596 buying energy elsewhere .
This is because we are not actually producing much wind power today at approximately 5GW, which is less than one-sixth of claimed capacity. I say claimed capacity as our maximum according to iamkate.com has been 22.5 GW rather than the 32 GW claimed.
Another way of looking at the waste here.
That’s 6,295 MWh of green electrons: enough to power Leeds & Bradford for a day.
According to it this is the cost so far this year.
I am not so sure about the policy suggestion though.
- Make energy cheaper where supply is strong. This makes better use of these abundant green electrons, and because there’d be less waste, bills could go down for everybody.
Whilst some of this can happen in terms of saying charging electric vehicles that assumes they are not in use. Also as someone who lives in a flat my neighbours would be underwhelmed by my washing machine switching on in the early hours even if I was up to do it.
Offshore Wind
This is an issue I noted on Friday with reference to the prospects for inflation and hence Bank of England policy. Here is the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Contracts for Difference Allocation Round 7 is now open. This will help secure more clean, homegrown power, protect British billpayers & get us off the rollercoaster of global fossil fuel markets. All while creating good, clean energy jobs.
Actually the title “Department for Energy Security” is rather an oxymoron when we are importing some 7GW of electricity via the interconnectors as I type this. I recall the claim that in a broad brush we would import via them in winter and export in summer which would help the French nukes in their maintenance cycle. The reality is that we have exported for around a week in total this summer which is very different to that.
Also there was this from Germany last week.
This was Germany’s second offshore wind auction round so far this year. Both have been “no subsidy” auctions, and both have been unsuccessful. In this case, not a single offshore wind developer bid for either of the two sites N-10.1 and N-10.2 in the German North Sea.
The auction, described as a “flop” by analysts, signaled that offshore wind power developers are wary of taking on riskier, zero-subsidy projects amid rising costs and supply chain issues. ( Offshore Power)
The issue of “rising costs” is clearly a generic one and again poses a question about the claims of this being cheap. Here is a reminder from Kathryn Porter about the latest UK auctions.
Our appetite is much lower than the £113 /MWh @Ed_Miliband
has decided to accept on our behalf.
That compares to the average price of £82.55/MWh over the past year according to iamkate. So “protecting billpayers” in fact means higher bills.
Comment
Another way of looking at the problems here comes from the companies involved. For example you might think that things could not be much better for the wind turbine manufacturer Orsted. Yet this morning has produced this.
European wind giant Orsted says it will conduct an emergency >$9 billion equity raising to shore up its balance sheet (the rights issue isn’t a surprise, but the size is nearly double market expectations). The right issue equals to ~50% of the company’s current market cap. ( Javier Blas)
So we are back to the issue of rising costs causing problems. That theme is added to by more people pointing out that the minerals required are getting more expensive.
Net Zero relies on minerals for wind, solar and batteries. However, the supply and demand outlook for silver and copper means prices are set to rise substantially… ( David Turver)
How does all of this ever become cheap? That is before we even look at the issue of storage to allow for the unreliability of supply from renewables.
