And this is another reasons prices per kWh are what they are

Mstty

https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/05/31/uk-power-dumping-raises-concerns-over-energy-management/

Source above

National Grid ESO has reportedly paid up to £550/MWh to dump excess power into neighbouring countries

“Yesterday (Monday 29th May), National Grid ESO spent £9.4 million on balancing the system by trading and using the balancing mechanism.”

CSI_Yorkshire

That doesn't look like an exceptionally high price to me.  System buy/sell price is often near £200-£300/MWh so a spike up to the £500 range shouldn't be odd.

The most interesting part of the article though: “They couldn’t turn off power stations because they needed them on to provide inertia to the system so this left the interconnectors as their only option."  That's only going to get more common in the short term.

Mstty

CSI_Yorkshire said:

That doesn't look like an exceptionally high price to me.  System buy/sell price is often near £200-£300/MWh so a spike up to the £500 range shouldn't be odd.

The most interesting part of the article though: “They couldn’t turn off power stations because they needed them on to provide inertia to the system so this left the interconnectors as their only option."  That's only going to get more common in the short term.

They could have told the consumers with reporting smart meters reporting every 30 mins and run an all you can eat buffet to burn the excess.

I would have done a load of washing, tumble dry, used some electric heaters as it wasn't the warmest of days yesterday. Cooked a roast and put the dishwasher on early to name a few

Swipe

Yep, I could have pulled an all nighter and had a field day

Spoonie_Turtle

Would be interesting to see the Agile prices for those periods.

mmmmikey

Spoonie_Turtle said:

Would be interesting to see the Agile prices for those periods.

I paid an average of 13.09p/kWh - a bit cheaper than other recent days but not massively so. Still reeling from the shock of yesterday's bill - it was cloudy here and it was up fourfold on the previous week's average. Still, at 10.1p not too bad I suppose.....

Mstty

Swipe said:

Yep, I could have pulled an all nighter and had a field day

I forgot to add, legionella burn, charge the power station up.....would have been like energy shift events lol

Scot_39

The UK waists £100s million on unused capacity every year.

Take just one example - we are regularly paying renewables not to generate in the far North - where there is not enough demand - we also pay gas stations to spin up and generate those GWh of energy.

Which is I guess in part why we are building new HVDC links in Scotland - including 2 to England (this time on East Coast - to supplement the link to N Wales from West Coast)

See this Sky article re NG £2.5bn estimate in coming years for "constraint costs"

https://news.sky.com/story/britons-paying-hundreds-of-millions-to-turn-off-wind-turbines-as-network-cant-handle-the-power-they-make-on-the-windiest-days-12822156

And god knows what the new licensing is going to allow for when the wind capacity expands exponentially as planned in coming years.

And then their's the real cost of renewables - that when they don't generate - we need almost full UK demand available from the conventional generation capacity , fossil fuels - gas, wood, coal and even diesel farms still exist I believe - and nuclear.

So paying for the same demand twice.

And the only way around that problem - is to build 100s if not 1000s GWh of expensive storage.

And of course the headline renewable auction CfD prices - that the greenwashing media boast about dropping to around a 1/3 cf 2015 -  don't include grid costs, that storage or the cost of maintaining the standby capacity.

The only thing that is likely to be true - is that we the consumer - will as usual - pay heavily.

QrizB

This is just how the energy market works.

If you can think of a system that works out cheaper on average, please let Ofgem and NG ESO know.

Scot_39

The problem is the policy isn't being driven by wholesale let alone consumer pricing - it's been driven by the environment.

And that is not the same thing.

I don't know the answers - but do wonder if  nuclear  not a better direct 1 for 1 solution to replace gas generation - than piling on more and more unreliable (unpredictable) renewables.

QrizB

Scot_39 said:

The problem is the policy isn't being driven by wholesale let alone consumer pricing - it's been driven by the environment.

Nevertheless, even with the balancing costs electricity from renewables is cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels and that is cheaper than electricity from nuclear.

The latest round of CFD auctions contracted for offshore wind power at something like 4p/kWh, vs. about 10p/kWh from Hinkley Point C.