The Alternative Green Energy Thread

JKenH

JKenH said:

£2750 per MWH!

It got worse - £4000\MWh!

Average wholesale price for the day £304/MWh

JKenH

U.K. Power Grid Creaks at Risk of Blackouts The U.K. power market is showing signs of strain. For the fourth time this winter National Grid Plc warned that the buffer needed to ensure security of supply and keep the lights on was too small.

While the U.K. has made swift progress on switching from fossil fuels to renewables, this is the downside to cleaning up its energy system. And, like Wednesday, when the wind doesn’t blow, cold weather boosts demand and several nuclear plants are offline the grid operator is left scrambling to avoid blackouts.

The risk of blackouts this winter is higher than the grid operator has made public, according to trading house Hartree Solutions. National Grid’s scenarios, which show the tightest margins since 2016, assume imports of electricity from the continent. One of the nation’s major interconnectors with the Netherlands is down for maintenance until Feb. 1.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/u-k-electricity-grid-creaks-under-repeated-winter-pressure

EVandPV

JKenH said:

U.K. Power Grid Creaks at Risk of Blackouts The U.K. power market is showing signs of strain. For the fourth time this winter National Grid Plc warned that the buffer needed to ensure security of supply and keep the lights on was too small.

While the U.K. has made swift progress on switching from fossil fuels to renewables, this is the downside to cleaning up its energy system. And, like Wednesday, when the wind doesn’t blow, cold weather boosts demand and several nuclear plants are offline the grid operator is left scrambling to avoid blackouts.

The risk of blackouts this winter is higher than the grid operator has made public, according to trading house Hartree Solutions. National Grid’s scenarios, which show the tightest margins since 2016, assume imports of electricity from the continent. One of the nation’s major interconnectors with the Netherlands is down for maintenance until Feb. 1.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/u-k-electricity-grid-creaks-under-repeated-winter-pressure

That explains the high Agile prices lately !

JKenH

EVandPV said:

JKenH said:

U.K. Power Grid Creaks at Risk of Blackouts The U.K. power market is showing signs of strain. For the fourth time this winter National Grid Plc warned that the buffer needed to ensure security of supply and keep the lights on was too small.

While the U.K. has made swift progress on switching from fossil fuels to renewables, this is the downside to cleaning up its energy system. And, like Wednesday, when the wind doesn’t blow, cold weather boosts demand and several nuclear plants are offline the grid operator is left scrambling to avoid blackouts.

The risk of blackouts this winter is higher than the grid operator has made public, according to trading house Hartree Solutions. National Grid’s scenarios, which show the tightest margins since 2016, assume imports of electricity from the continent. One of the nation’s major interconnectors with the Netherlands is down for maintenance until Feb. 1.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/u-k-electricity-grid-creaks-under-repeated-winter-pressure

That explains the high Agile prices lately !

You might like these articles about how these spike prices are calculated and why we have the capacity notices and shortly after see them cancelled.

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/electricity-system-price-rockets-to-2-242-mwh-as-questions-raised-over-calculation-methods

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/balancing-mechanism-hits-3000-mwh-as-margins-remain-tight-through-cold-snap

JKenH

Has Brexit created higher electricity prices? A look at the impact of decoupling from EUphemia

The tight margins led to dramatic peaks in intraday trading and Balancing Mechanism (BM) prices. Power prices in the N2EX auction hit £1,000.04/MWh for the period 17:00 to 18:00 on Wednesday 6 January, the highest hourly price seen on the auction. During the same period EDF’s CCGT plant West Burton B was called on at £3,000/MWh in the Balancing Mechanism.

Following on from the EMN issued for Friday, West Burton B2 and B3 had offers accepted at £4,000/MWh in the BM, while Uniper’s Connahs Quay 3 CCGT plant was accepted at £2,750/MWh.

“The high prices encourage people to enter the market, so they're not necessarily a bad thing,” argued Hewitt. “A power station that’s marginal is going to make reasonable money in periods of high prices, which might mean it will decide to stick around for another year or maybe somebody who’s developing battery projects or developing gas peakers or maybe even CCGTs is going to look at these high prices and say, ‘well, there we go, I can make money in this market'. So they're going to be more encouraged to build."

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6071905/the-alternative-green-energy-thread/p41

JKenH

Dynamic Containment and the growth of batteries

With the evolution of the grid, we are moving away from big, slow fossil fuel generators - gas, coal, oil - and we’re moving towards more distributed renewable energy, so the characteristics of the system are changing. Therefore, the requirements to maintain 50Hz change because low carbon technologies have less weight, less inertia.

So National Grid is moving as quickly as they can to design new services to maintain the power on the grid in the face of these changes. There's three of them, Dynamic Containment, the post fault service, Dynamic Moderation for adjusting for large but gradual changes in frequency and then there's Dynamic Regulation for minor adjustments around 50Hz .

https://www.current-news.co.uk/blogs/current-chats-arenkos-roger-hollies-on-dynamic-containment-and-the-growth-of-batteries

JKenH

Why Asian LNG Prices Are Going Through The Roof

China currently is facing a cold spell not seen since 1966. Utilities in Japan and South Korea face similar issues as inventories are drained at record speeds and demand is skyrocketing. 

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Asian-LNG-Prices-Are-Going-Through-The-Roof.html

JKenH

China eyes bolstering control of rare earths as national strategy

This could slow down the green revolution down a bit, affecting not only EVs but other green technology such as wind turbines.

The draft bill, released to the public on Friday, said the Chinese government will manage the process from mining to exports of rare earths as a national strategy, as tensions with the United States have been escalating over state-of-the-art technologies.

The United States and other major economies, including European countries and Japan, depend on rare earth imports from China, the world’s dominant supplier of the materials.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/01/17/business/china-rare-earths/

Edit: rare earths are not actually all that rare, just messy to extract, and China has a lot of them. 

JKenH

The logic behind Bosch's plans for hydrogen fuel cell trucks

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology-news/under-skin-logic-behind-boschs-plans-hydrogen-fuel-cell-trucks

shinytop

Interesting.  Why not BEV trucks though - are they too expensive, heavy, short range?