Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

michaels

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Instead of the wind farm selling to the 'grid' at a wholesale price they contract to sell directly to a customer at a negotiated price, which will be higher than wholesale (good for the wind farm), but lower than retail (good for the customer).

Imagine a leccy generator, or your leccy supplier offering to sell you discounted leccy from a PV system built on your roof or land, or on their land nearby to you, at a cheaper price than typical retail rates.

It's very much the same model as small scale RE generators selling into the grid, just with pre-negotiated customers, rather than the usual auction market.




Nothing stopping the existing grid suppliers from building out renewables and selling onto the grid, or directly via PPA's. The object here is to reduce the amount of CO2 we produce, not to protect the older companies nor the older mechanisms. Things change over time, and the rollout of RE is a good thing.

But the aluminium smelter will only want say 20% of the leccy that it previously wanted from the grid and its demand will be when the wind isn't blowing so the grid supplier will struggle to supply at those times - so lower volumes to support the same infrastructure and increased variability of demand - both of these surely make the 'per unit supplied' price for the grid much higher, for everyone not just the aluminium company?

Martyn1981

michaels wrote: »

But the aluminium smelter will only want say 20% of the leccy that it previously wanted from the grid and its demand will be when the wind isn't blowing so the grid supplier will struggle to supply at those times - so lower volumes to support the same infrastructure and increased variability of demand - both of these surely make the 'per unit supplied' price for the grid much higher, for everyone not just the aluminium company?

Does it, I thought the average wholesale price of leccy had been driven down by renewables eating into peak prices, not higher, and certainly not 'much higher' as you claim?

Net cost of renewable subsidies nearly two-thirds less than LCF states, claims Good Energy report

Obviously the aluminium plant could have built the RE generation themselves if they had the CAPEX available, so are they not 'allowed' to generate their own leccy at times?

Doesn't aluminium production typically look for a cheap source of generation in order to be viable, so in your standard grid provided model, would the aluminium plant even exist?


Storage will balance out price fluctuations even more.

Solar intermittency costs removed by 2030 with the help of battery storage argues new report

.... and don't call me Shirley.

lstar337

Mart, I think (could be wrong) that michaels is talking about long term grid use dwindling.

I think he is saying that as grid use drops (if more people/companies are able to secure their own supply), the costs to use it will increase as there will not be so many people to spread the load.

Simplistically, if the grid costs £100 to service/maintain/use, and 100 people/companies are using it, then it costs the all £1 and they are all happy. However, if 90 people/companies go off and secure their own local renewable supply, then only 10 people are left using the grid and they all pay 10 times what they were paying before, then they are not happy.

It will be interesting to see if/how renewables disrupt the grid in the future. At what point is the grid no longer viable?

As renewables/energy consumption reduction/storage improve, will domestic properties even need or want to be grid connected? I don't see why they would.

michaels, feel free to tell me to shutup if that wasn't the point of your post/question.

Also, sorry for all the //////'s in my post. I don't really know why I did that.

silverwhistle

I take your point, but the companies, by and large, aren't going to have a dedicated cable from their particular supply and the grid, as a means of transmitting power from A to B or Z will still exist. EDIT The grid will still get paid for providing this service.


What the issues are, who is going to feed the grid, how they will be paid to ensure they make a profit, and what ensures security of supply. This latter is not the concern of any particular company in our current set up. The warnings by the Drax boss may be reasonable ones to make in terms of their national importance, but what lies behind them are efforts to make sure they're going to be paid enough to maintain the company and the requisite profits.


The old CEGB had a remit for maintaining security of supply but I'm not sure if any such oversight still exists. As was noted in the gas shortage this last winter the market mechanism doesn't always work, and the strategic (tactical?!) reserve that some countries have doesn't exist in the UK and the government has made no move to require one.

zeupater

lstar337 wrote: »

Mart, I think (could be wrong) that michaels is talking about long term grid use dwindling.

I think he is saying that as grid use drops (if more people/companies are able to secure their own supply), the costs to use it will increase as there will not be so many people to spread the load.

Simplistically, if the grid costs £100 to service/maintain/use, and 100 people/companies are using it, then it costs the all £1 and they are all happy. However, if 90 people/companies go off and secure their own local renewable supply, then only 10 people are left using the grid and they all pay 10 times what they were paying before, then they are not happy.

It will be interesting to see if/how renewables disrupt the grid in the future. At what point is the grid no longer viable?

As renewables/energy consumption reduction/storage improve, will domestic properties even need or want to be grid connected? I don't see why they would.

michaels, feel free to tell me to shutup if that wasn't the point of your post/question.

Also, sorry for all the //////'s in my post. I don't really know why I did that.

Hi

Possibly, but I don't think that there was mention of disconnection from the grid, so if 90 of the 100 people/companies contract to a direct relationship with a generator as opposed to a supplier then all they're effectively doing is cutting out the cost & profit made by the middle-man .... a number of large manufacturing sites have been reducing their energy purchases by introducing their own renewable sources for quite some time ... Ni55an for example have around a dozen wind turbines and tens-of-thousands of solar panels of their own which effectively lead to the same grid-supply issues as raised, but they still need to pay for grid connectivity ....

If you think about it, the effect described is only the same as consumers contracting with any of the energy suppliers for a renewable energy tariff, or with a specialist 'Green Energy' supplier that invests in their own generating capacity ... the supply market really needs to accept & react to the reality of distributed generation as that's how things are moving we'll be seeing more schemes such as this - it's inevitable ...

There's always been excess generating capacity which is taken off-line for extended periods, it's simply a case that as the proportion of energy provided by renewable sources increases, much more legacy capacity will need to do this ... that is until the government realise that the solution is to promote the development of large-scale storage capacity - that's both centralised (strategic reserve) and distributed ....

HTH
Z

lstar337

silverwhistle wrote: »

I take your point, but the companies, by and large, aren't going to have a dedicated cable from their particular supply and the grid, as a means of transmitting power from A to B or Z will still exist. EDIT The grid will still get paid for providing this service.

The example michaels gave above specifically mentioned a company installing their own turbines and using the power.

If they can install a turbine and be self sufficient, why would they need the grid?

I think that was the main point.

Even people here (at this early-ish stage of renewables) talk about going 'off grid'. When the economics permit, why wouldn't everybody? Granted, we are talking some time into the future.

lstar337

zeupater wrote: »

until the government realise that the solution is to promote the development of large-scale storage capacity - that's both centralised (strategic reserve) and distributed

Now that sounds very sensible!

Martyn1981

lstar337 wrote: »

Mart, I think (could be wrong) that michaels is talking about long term grid use dwindling.

I think he is saying that as grid use drops (if more people/companies are able to secure their own supply), the costs to use it will increase as there will not be so many people to spread the load.

Simplistically, if the grid costs £100 to service/maintain/use, and 100 people/companies are using it, then it costs the all £1 and they are all happy. However, if 90 people/companies go off and secure their own local renewable supply, then only 10 people are left using the grid and they all pay 10 times what they were paying before, then they are not happy.

It will be interesting to see if/how renewables disrupt the grid in the future. At what point is the grid no longer viable?

As renewables/energy consumption reduction/storage improve, will domestic properties even need or want to be grid connected? I don't see why they would.

michaels, feel free to tell me to shutup if that wasn't the point of your post/question.

Also, sorry for all the //////'s in my post. I don't really know why I did that.

Yes, that's what I thought he meant, that companies procuring RE generation from PPA's would impact the grid cost.

But, the same could be said for companies like the big auto makers having giant wind turbines installed, or take it one step further, customers using less leccy as they become more efficient.

Is deploying low energy lighting anti-social if you reduce grid demand?

If the UK supermarkets fitted doors on their chillers they would reduce their demand by 20%, and UK leccy demand by 1%, so is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Regardless, it's academic since UK leccy consumption will begin to rise again in the medium term as we deploy more EV's and move to electrical space heating.

But going back to my original response, the deployment of RE, be it customer based, PPA based, or supply side based, has actually helped to smooth out pricing and looks to be a benefit to us all. On a larger social scale, what if our leccy costs go up a small amount, but the cost of dealing with AGW (government spending), or pollution (NHS costs) go down, since most of the externality costs of FF's and the current grid arrangement are not necessarily included in the unit price we pay.

Big issue, probably no absolute answer. But I don't think a blind defence of the current centralised model would stand up to much inspection.

Edit - apologies Z, I should have read on first.

PS - Istar, judging by the thanks you and Michaels got, I suspect my view/opinion has merit.

Martyn1981

lstar337 wrote: »

The example michaels gave above specifically mentioned a company installing their own turbines and using the power.

If they can install a turbine and be self sufficient, why would they need the grid?

I think that was the main point.

Even people here (at this early-ish stage of renewables) talk about going 'off grid'. When the economics permit, why wouldn't everybody? Granted, we are talking some time into the future.

Actually he said they would use less power from the grid, possibly just 20%. So they would not leave the grid.

[I'm still not convinced that an aluminium smelter is a good example, since they need vast amounts of energy and tend to be subsidised or in some way linked to large scale generation, such as geothermal in Iceland, or located close to nuclear plants.]

However, for every customer real or theoretical that leaves the grid to become dependent on renewables, then that's a good thing for UK CO2 targets, the meeting of which involves costs and expenditure.

Martyn1981

lstar337 wrote: »

It will be interesting to see if/how renewables disrupt the grid in the future. At what point is the grid no longer viable?

As renewables/energy consumption reduction/storage improve, will domestic properties even need or want to be grid connected? I don't see why they would.

I'm responding to this separately as it's a very interesting subject.

I doubt that we would see a significant shift in the UK as PV is too variable across seasons, with a 4:1 ratio for May or June v's December (30d pitch south facing, or 3:1 for 50d pitch).

And whilst we have an awful lot of wind, micro-scale wind is just not good enough nor economical, you really need to get to mid scale for it to be viable (back to factories etc).

However, for countries like Australia who have abundant and reliable PV generation with about a 2:1 (or less) seasonality, combined with very high delivery charges, then things change completely.

Tony Seba has pointed to 'God parity' a pun on grid parity and the God particle, as a theoretical source of free generation. He goes on to point out that PV and storage in Australia is close to the cost of leccy distribution, so even if generating costs were zero, the grid might still be more expensive. In that situation ..... things can start to happen.

There have been two studies in Aus (have a play on Google) that found that 1/3 of domestic properties might abandon the grid over the next few decades. One study suggested it I think 5(ish) years ago, and another checked then confirmed the figure, perhaps 3 years ago.

But ...... perhaps EV's will change this too by pushing up leccy demand. Though then we face the discussions on whether we should feel sorry for the oil producers, oil shippers, refinery workers, transport drivers, petrol station staff etc etc ...... since disruption always brings ...... well ..... disruption.