Wind being curtailed tonight

mmmmikey

GreatApe wrote: »

Why should the British citizen pay big corporations to build wind farms that will sit idle more the time?

1. To reduce CO2 emissions in an attempt to mitigate the climate emergency (you may have heard about this in the news)
2. To save money on their electricity bills

JKenH

1961Nick wrote: »

11pm through to 6.00am is the time we'll all be charging our EVs. It'd make sense to be planning lots of new windmills now to cope with the extra demand.

And when the wind isn’t blowing?

I am not against offshore wind but the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the more wind we have in the system the more back up we need when it doesn’t blow. Until we can store the energy generated someone has to pay for that back up to stand idle

As an example on 27 August wind power only produced 1.57 of the 31.3 GW demand whereas at 11.30 pm yesterday wind was producing 10.58 GW against demand of 22.7 GW.

ed110220

The tabloid press, Torygraph and rightist blogosohere have been fuming about wind curtailment for as long as I can remember, since the days that it formed just a tiny percentage of electricity generated. Cameron's swivel eyed loons have been getting very swivelly about it for a long time, yet wind generation has kept on.increasing while they and their influence dwindle.

1961Nick

JKenH wrote: »

And when the wind isn’t blowing?

I am not against offshore wind but the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the more wind we have in the system the more back up we need when it doesn’t blow. Until we can store the energy generated someone has to pay for that back up to stand idle

We can't need more backup if we add more wind? The same as we have now is surely the worst case scenario?

Does our wind power ever become totally becalmed or is there always some generation?

mmmmikey

JKenH wrote: »

Until we can store the energy generated someone has to pay for that back up to stand idle

Cars stand idle overnight when they're not being used - someone has to pay for that, does that mean cars are a waste of money? Gas fired power stations stand idle overnight when demand falls and they're not as economic and/or clean as other power generation sources - someone has to pay for that, does this mean they're a waste of money? And so on.....


My point is that you have to take a broader view of this. You could of course argue that if I only used my car once a year then it would be an expensive luxury and a waste of money, so there is a point at which the economics become questionable. But you can't in my view sensibly argue that just because something isn't 100% utilised all the time it is a waste of money.


It seems to me that there's a level at which curtailment is perfecty acceptable and sensible and a level at which we max out and the economics are blown, but to suggest that the minute you see any curtailment wind farms no longer make sense is, in my view, bonkers.

JKenH

1961Nick wrote: »

We can't need more backup if we add more wind? The same as we have now is surely the worst case scenario?

Does our wind power ever become totally becalmed or is there always some generation?

Hi Nick, I had added some stats for the last week as an example of wind variabilityto my earlier post.

Let’s assume for sake of argument that we have 20% wind now and 20% nuclear and 40% gas with the rest made up by imports, hydro, solar etc. If the wind dropped to 5% we would have to make up 15% from elsewhere- say 5% import, 2% hydro and 8% gas. That is the back up I am referring to.

If however we had 50% wind, 20% nuclear and 10% gas and the wind dropped to say 10% then we would need to make up 40%. If we had the same 5% import and 2% hydro available then we would need 33% of the back up to come from gas. That would mean gas generation would have to increase from 10% to 43% (a 330% increase). That would mean gas plants standing idle much of the time and there is a cost there.

I hope that helps explain what I was trying to say.

JKenH

mmmmikey wrote: »

It seems to me that there's a level at which curtailment is perfecty acceptable and sensible and a level at which we max out and the economics are blown, but to suggest that the minute you see any curtailment wind farms no longer make sense is, in my view, bonkers.

Yes, it is finding that level. This article suggests a figure of 34% for wind. I am not suggesting that figure as being exactly right but it may be difficult to have a 100% VRE grid in practice.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8837293/economic-limitations-wind-solar.

Quote from the article below.

Wind and solar power are booming, rapidly becoming serious players in electricity markets around the world. The question now is not whether variable renewable energy (VRE) is viable, but how far it can go. Just how much of a grid's electricity can come from wind and solar?

In a previous post, I described the challenges that face traditional grids as they attempt to integrate more VRE, along with the emerging solutions to those challenges. At this point, the obstacles are fairly well understood. As the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) says, there is no technical barrier to a grid running on 100 percent wind and solar.

Rather, what limits exist are economic. At a certain point, in a given grid system, the cost of integrating more VRE exceeds the benefits. NREL refers to this point as a grid's "economic carrying capacity" for wind and solar.

Obviously, economic carrying capacity varies from grid to grid. And it's a moving target — it can be expanded, as we'll see in subsequent posts. This post will simply serve as an introduction to the economic limitations facing VRE on current grids, operated by current rules and markets.

The rule of thumb: As they grow, wind and solar hit economic headwinds
Jesse Jenkins and Alex Trembath recently published an interesting set of posts that address these questions. The first is about the enormous progress VRE has made to date. The second is about how far VRE can go before economic carrying capacity is reached.

Jenkins and Trembath propose a "rule of thumb": "It is increasingly difficult for the market share of variable renewable energy sources at the system-wide level to exceed the capacity factor of the energy source."

Let's unpack that a little.

"Capacity factor" refers to how often a power plant runs and thus how much power it produces relative to its total potential (capacity). Nuclear power plants in the US run around 90 percent of the time, so they have a 90 percent capacity factor. On average, the capacity factor of solar ranges anywhere from 10 to just over 30 percent. For wind, it ranges from 20 to just over 50 percent, averaging around 34 percent in the US.

The rule of thumb doesn't say that driving wind power beyond 34 percent of grid electricity is impossible, only that it becomes "increasingly difficult," i.e., increasingly expensive. A similar story holds for solar.

This is true, the rule says, at the whole-system level. A grid that is connected to other grids, like Denmark's is connected to Norway's, is not a whole system, it's a subsystem. It has a place to export or import energy, to balance out its own fluctuations. The rule of thumb kicks in when there's no longer any place to export to or import from.

So that's the rule of thumb. Obviously it leaves lots of wiggle room. Capacity factors vary from grid to grid; so do available grid flexibility measures; so do public and political willingness to subsidize renewables.

And keep in mind that if wind topped out at around 35 percent and solar topped out at, oh, 25 percent, together they would cover 60 percent of total electricity demand. That would be an absolutely remarkable feat. In truth, say Jenkins and Trembath, there's reason to think the rule of thumb is too generous and VRE will top out at maybe 50 percent of global electricity. Even if they're right, though, that would represent an energy revolution, not some grim disappointment.

Still, it would leave 50 percent of electricity demand to be covered by some combination of other low-carbon sources: hydro, nuclear, biomass, geothermal, and coal or gas with carbon sequestration.

So are Jenkins and Trembath right? The phenomena they discuss are certainly real. The open question is whether and to what extent we can engineer around them. It's complicated.





PS. Just in case anyone suggests I am pushing FF generation, I am not. This article suggests the balance of the grid is from carbon neutral sources.

GreatApe

1961Nick wrote: »

11pm through to 6.00am is the time we'll all be charging our EVs. It'd make sense to be planning lots of new windmills now to cope with the extra demand.

EV deployment isn't going to be that rapid
How many more EVs do you think will be on UK roads come 2024? Perhaps 500,000 ?
These 500,000 EVs might be able to absorb 0.5GW if all charges during the 9 or so low hours (of course some will be charged outside of those hours just because)

To put that into perspective even if those 500,000 additional EVs were existing today we would still have curtailed marginal green last night. And of course the next 5 years is going to see a huge amount of marginal green added to the grid

The only real rapid solution is to build additional interconntors especially to Norway and if possible to Canada/USA and also potentially regulate all boilers to be smart duel fuel boilers starting ASAP. These is Something like 2 million boilers replaced per year so this would be a rapid way to install dual fuel boilers that can use electricity during times of excess marignal green power

The boiler idea can absorb ~10GW of marginal green
Additional Links to USA/Canada/Norway perhaps 5GW again
And yes maybe 500,000 EVs could absorb 0.5 GW too

GreatApe

JKenH wrote: »

And when the wind isn’t blowing?

I am not against offshore wind but the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the more wind we have in the system the more back up we need when it doesn’t blow. Until we can store the energy generated someone has to pay for that back up to stand idle

As an example on 27 August wind power only produced 1.57 of the 31.3 GW demand whereas at 11.30 pm yesterday wind was producing 10.58 GW against demand of 22.7 GW.

Backup isn't a huge problem because CCGTs and OCGTs are fairly affordable but yes they do have to be paid for. Of course the fanatics will try to force these CCGTs to use syn fuels at 5-10x the cost of natural gas but we can ignore them and keep using NG out the ground at 1p a unit

Really what is needed is a cheap way to absorb excess generation and this can be done by hybrid boilers and mass interconntors. Regulate boilers to be dual fuel. Both gas an electric. When the boiler is about to fire up it asks the grid should I use gas or electric. During marginal green times the grid says use electricity and when there is no excess wind the grid says use gas.

If this was done, at virtually no cost the nation would be able to install more and more wind and there would be no curtailment. The more wind you install the more often these boilers run with electricity and the less often they run with gas

GreatApe

1961Nick wrote: »

We can't need more backup if we add more wind? The same as we have now is surely the worst case scenario?

Does our wind power ever become totally becalmed or is there always some generation?

Yes we don't need more backup today because the CCGTs exist but your going to have to pay for them to be economic so they stay open we already do this via capacity payments that is to say we have to pay the CCGTs even if they just sit there idle

The UK needs at least 55GW of thermal capacity
This is down from about 65GW thanks to LEDs and more efficient appliances and the loss of some heavy industry

With the closure of the remaining coal plants and potential the closing many of the remaining nukes in the UK are are indeed going to need a few new CCGTs and OCGTs both of which are being built.

The real problem with wind is that it has high correlation to itself and you can't control it
As such even now in 2019 we have too much sometimes and curtailing an expensive power source isn't the best use of it. Which is why we need more interconntors and also a day to dump a lot of power cheaply into either transport or heating.