Bishop Hill Windfarms paid to switch off
From the Sunday Times (not online; via commenters)
Wind farm operators in Scotland were paid nearly £900,000 to keep their turbines idle for a night because the National Grid did not need the power.
The payments, up to 20 times the value of the power the wind farms would have produced, were offered by the National Grid because it urgently needed to reduce electricity entering the system.
It was oversupplied with power on a wet and blustery night last month when demand for electricity was low.The National Grid confirmed it had made the payments. “On the night of April 5 and 6, the demand for power was low but the nuclear generation plants in Scotland were running as expected. There was also heavy rainfall, which meant hydro power plants were operating well, too,” a spokesman said.
Reader Comments (70)
The story is up at the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13253876
My wife and I each still have a few shares in the National Grid from that big state promotion in the 90's.
To whom it may concern- 'We are not amused'.
And the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/8486449/Wind-farms-paid-900000-to-switch-off-for-one-night.html
Read it this morning. Inauspicious start to the day.
Comedy gold. Sadly we foot the bill.
So - this is fantastic news. You grumpy types on here keep trying to pretend that wind power doesn't work, yet here's evidence that it's so successful, that they had to be turned off, as they were generating too much power for the grid to cope with.
I'm glad we finally put that one to rest. Turbines clearly do work.
No one to my knowledge has ever said that wind turbines cannot produce electricity, merely that there actual output is only a fraction of there installed capacity and that the out put is unreliable and often out of sync with demand.
Wind power is clearly a pretty useless form of power generation if it produces power when it can't be used (as in the current example) or doesn't produce power when its needed (as was the case earlier in the year). As some people have noticed there is at present no sensible mechanism to store power.
If we relied on wind power, hospital operations would need to be scheduled when the wind was blowing
O/T though related...
Independent: Green schemes are 'wide open to major corruption'
No sh*t Batman...
ZDB. Read the third paragraph , slowly. The problem with wind generation is it tends to generate when the demand is low and not when the demand is high ( ie. the middle of winter). Unless you can use it like they do in parts of Europe to replenishe hydro lakes in times of low demand , to store at least some of the energy then you will always have these stupid payment situations.
I think wind generation has its place in some local areas but if subsidies are required to justify their existence then its a waste of tax payers money.
Zed
You do not understand how the grid has to be balanced exactly to meet demand. The report shows two things:
- Wind is extremely difficult to integrate with the grid
- Wind is extremely expensive
It does not demonstrate, in the sense you intend, that 'turbines clearly do work'.
The province of Ontario in Canada has a FIT for renewable energy supplies. For windmills this is around 60 cents/kwh. By comparison nuclear in Ontario is 5 cents/kwh. Ontario has a surplus of electricity and oftentimes has more energy than it can deal with. it then is compelled to sell this energy to neighboring jurisdisctions.
The tricky part of this is that the price of surplus Ontario power often goes negative. So the rate payers in Ontario are paying these renewable suppliers and inflated FIT and then must pay again to get somebody to take this unwanted energy.
More to the point, the neighboring province of Quebec has a large surplus of green hydroelectric energy and the capacity to being large quantities more on stream. They offer this power to Ontario but are consistently refused. Ontario's plan is to subsidize green energy so that a renewable industry will grow up. So far, despite billions and billions in subsidies, no such industry is apparent.
Only in Canada
"If we relied on wind power, hospital operations would need to be scheduled when the wind was blowing
May 1, 2011 at 10:28 PM | Arthur Dent
And can you please point me to these plans that we should rely exclusively on windpower? Oh look, there aren't any.
Your comment is simply ridiculous.
Zed
The case for renewables as a means of displacing significant amounts of coal from the energy mix is ridiculous.
"You do not understand how the grid has to be balanced exactly to meet demand."
May 1, 2011 at 10:31 PM | BBD
You know what they say about assumptions...
It's actually something I have a fairly good handle on. It's too late and I'm running out of time to break it down now, but wind has the potential to be a big player in lowering our CO2 output, necessitating reduced consumption, grid update and better excess generation storage.
You're trying to have an actual sensible discussion on the subject, but bear in mind that this place is a dumping ground for endless half-wits droning on about turbines only operating at x% of capacity/always being still/requiring endless maintenance etc. For those guys (and it's always men), this is a good proof that wind is quite capable of producing so much power that the grid can't handle it.
Good night.
Zed
I look forward to our next discussion.
Good night to you.
Can someone tell me why they could not have turned down the hydro generation?
Presumably these payments arise from a take or pay contract arrangement with generators. Perfectly standard in almost any vertically disintegrated industry because it shares risk. I could be wrong but other generation types will also receive those payments from time to time. I don't think this is an interesting point.
Curses. I was hoping to set up as a wind non-farmer. Just being paid whenever I threatened to produce. Now its been rumbled I suppose that gap in the market will be closed.
ZDB -- Why bother coming onto this site if " but bear in mind that this place is a dumping ground for endless half-wits droning on about turbines ". ?? This is the problem with the AGW crowd --you all have to degenerate the debate down to mindless name calling when things don't go your way.
Using your argument that this situation illustrates why wind power can work so well, then the situation in the middle of winter when the Scottish wind power system generated virtually zero power when the demand was high shows why it doesn't work. Both arguments are stupid in my view.
The real stupidity to how alternative energy policies with subsidies and FIT systems are wrong is very well illustrated by Tom Gray with the Canadian situation.
ben
You perhaps miss the 'interesting point'. Which is the amount of money actually paid.
The grotesque inflation arises from currently excessive subsidy to the renewables sector.
BBD: oh I see. Yes that is ridiculous, and I take back my comment. If the operator is going to dump power, he should be dumping what's cheap. Take or pay contracts always have the pay amount less than the value of the good not taken. Not 20 times more.
Published Date: 23 October 2010
A YouGov opinion poll commissioned by Scottish Renewables found 78 per cent of those surveyed agreed wind farms were necessary.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/opinion/Letter-Turbine-truth.6595241.jp
The Scots are tickled pink with their wind power. When the layoffs and closures come, I wonder if they will still be smiling?
Climate change law to rip £8bn hole in budgets - Scotsman.com News
SPENDING on schools, hospitals and other key services is set to be hit by the estimated £8 billion cost of Scotland's world-leading climate change laws, the government have admitted.
http://news.scotsman.com/news/Climate-change-law-to-rip.6526829.jp
We need more examples of renewable energy in practice.
Do they get paid even more to run them as fans?
"On the evening of the 5th into the 6th of April, the wind in Scotland was high, it was raining heavily...
I wonder why the authorities seem to have been unprepared for high winds and heavy rains - they were almost the norm during the years I lived in the Highlands. Next they'll be caught off guard by all the midges being chopped by whirling blades...
If only our Lords and Masters were so easily silenced.
ZBD it's only a guess on my part but I'd bet my pension you're not an engineer!
According to the news, wind turbines are doing better than Osama.
They paid up to 20 times the cost of the power that they DIDN'T take from the windmills? WTF?
Guys, there's a killing to be made here... set up a business with a million of those old 100 Watt incandescent bulbs. Then, when there's too much power, offer to flick on all your light bulbs for, hmm... let's say 15 times the cost of the power. It's gotta be cheaper to WASTE that wind-power than pay a motza to not receive it.
Mind-boggling stooopidity...
Can someone tell me why they could not have turned down the hydro generation?
Hydro is predicable and good for base load so you keep it running, Wind is unpredicable and variable so you turn it off first. Timescales are 24 hrs, so the rainfall had already fallen and the water was only going one way, the wind could turn off at any time.
To be of benefit to the grid, any generator connected to it must:
1 do baseload
2 or be despatchable and do load-follow
3 or be despatchable and do peak load.
Which of these functions does wind power do? For zebedee's benefit (I'm sure geronimo's guess is correct) the answer is none.
And as anyone who has analysed wind performance knows, wind power does not reduce CO2 emissions because of the huge amount of concrete and other materials use to manufacture the things; because of the huge amount of energy neede to transport and construct the things; because of the CO2 emitted by despatchable generators continuously and inefficiently running in back-up mode; because of the energy consumed by the things when the wind doesn't blow; because of CO2 emitted from peat removed to build the things on Welsh and Scottish mountains; because of the energy expended in maintaining and frequently replacing parts; because of the energy expended in decommissioning the things; etc etc.
Wind turbines are a scam to take money from electricity consumers (particularly for those in fuel poverty) to give to unscrupulous developers and politicians' rrelatives. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial of reality.
Full details are provide by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) at http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/231-high-rewards-for-wind-farms-discarding-electricity-5th-6th-april-2011.
It makes fascinating reading. Just wait till all those proposed, planned and in-construction wind farms in Scotland are operational; and watch the payments for not-generating. Send the bill to zebedee - she approves of all this.
Are there any circumstances at all where the commerical risk on possessing a wind farm is taken by the owner, not the poor benighted consumer who has no say in the matter?
It seems like a heads I win. tails you lose deal for the proprietors.
These used to be called protection rackets. Either pay me money not to come and steal your goods, or I will steal them anyway. In this case, you either pay me money to make the windmill go round,,,or pay me even more to stop it.
Scandalous and corrupt behaviour. Has any tenacious journalist done a really good dig into the investmenst of our lords and masters (including the fuckwit 'civil servants') who designed this system? I know about the BBC pension fund, but I wonder how many mandarins are bigtime 'green investors'?
@phillip bratby
Your link to Renewable Energy Foundation doesn't work :-(
PBs link works without the last dot ;)
http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/231-high-rewards-for-wind-farms-discarding-electricity-5th-6th-april-2011
I read somewhere the problem was that they couldn't feed the power down the grid to England because of a switch failure.
@zeedeebee
'It's actually something I have a fairly good handle on. It's too late and I'm running out of time to break it down now'
This sounds suspiciously like the sentiments famously expressed in Winnie the Pooh
'Rabbit, I suppose you don't know, What does the North Pole look like?"
"Well," said Rabbit, stroking his whiskers. "Now you're asking me."
"I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten," said Christopher Robin carelessly.
"It's a funny thing," said Rabbit, "but I've sort of forgotten too, although I did know once." '
BoFA - yes, that is what I have been thinking too. They won't been able to switch off the new run-of-the-river schemes (which are all less than 2MW and like wind heavily subsidised by ROCs, but don't add up to much anyway) but if Scottish Power/SSE were running some of the much bigger post-war storage schemes e.g. Sloy (130MW), or some of the bigger schemes in Perthshire (total c. 250MW) and they still had capacity for storage in the head lochs, then they have been effectively operating a scam - using water to generate which could/should have been stored, while fleecing the National Grid/consumers for the un-used wind output. At the very least this demonstrates how the rush for renewables, the ROCs, and their implications for grid management have not been thought out systematically, or at all. The only certainty is that the consumer is having to pay way over the odds for this mess.
This all sounds like a bit of dubious financial engineering, and shades of Enron's management of California power.
The BBC says a transmission fault meant power could not be despatched from Scotland to England. The Scottish grid is owned by Scottish Power and Scottish & Southern Energy. Because of that failure, wind farms owned by Scottish Power and SSE were paid 20x the market rate for surplus energy. Why did they pay themselves so much over the odds for power? Seems like it could have been an easy way to make those wind 'investments' appear more profitable than they actually are.
@May 2, 2011 at 8:53 AM | Latimer Alder
Nice one!
If ZedDeadBeat has what she considers to be "a fairly good handle" on BigWind, then my mind is absolutely boggled by the thoughts of her possible comments on topics about which she has no clue.
"And can you please point me to these plans that we should rely exclusively on windpower? Oh look, there aren't any."
Now that's what I call a strawman with bells on.
Can ZedDeadBeat point us to a comment suggesting that anyone thinks there are such plans?
Oh look, only in ZedDeadBeat's strangely afflicted imagination.
But you could look at (a) the LibDim's election manifesto pledge on energy, (b) the ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 Report or, indeed the present Government's Energy "Policy" to get a feel for just how high the loony hyperthermalists intend to crank up this particular scam.
May 2, 2011 at 6:14 AM | Crowbar of Oz:
"Guys, there's a killing to be made here... set up a business with a million of those old 100 Watt incandescent bulbs. Then, when there's too much power, offer to flick on all your light bulbs for, hmm... let's say 15 times the cost of the power. It's gotta be cheaper to WASTE that wind-power than pay a motza to not receive it."
I think you're on to something here - a great scam like this could undercut WTGs and who knows, we might even be able to do something useful with the energy!
Incidentally, is zeberdee serious or is he/she being ironic?
It would be a fair deal to pay them the same amount they would have got if the turbines were running, plus a fee for doing the work of switching them off. But up to 20 times? Why?
@alexej
'It would be a fair deal to pay them the same amount they would have got if the turbines were running, plus a fee for doing the work of switching them off''
Why? Wind is an unreliable power source. The generators don't pay us for not having electricity available when we would like to buy it. Why should we pay them for having it available when we don't need it.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
==> Tough shit. They should take the risk, not us.
As usual, one sniff of the chance that you might be losing the argument and you're off like a rat up a drainpipe.
Alexej - one of the wind farms was paid £800 per MWh. That's 80 pence per KWh. Consumers in the UK pay on average about 12 pence per unit. The industry used to be run by engineers, for the benefit of industry and consumers. The rot started with privatisation, which brought in supermarket managers and lawyers who could maybe get their heads around distribution, but were incapable of understanding the technicalities of generation, grid balancing and transmission. It now seems they don't know basic economics either.
Wait till they start to build the insanely expensive off-shore wind and tidal schemes e.g. the Tiree Array - the HVDC interconnectors alone for the 1.8GW scheme will cost billions. I give the first 10MW off-shore wind turbine less than 12 months operation before the Atlantic has the last laugh. A total waste of money (if they can raise it that is - highly questionable thankfully). When will these numpties learn that wind energy is only practical if its total output is only a maximum of 5-10% of the grid demand, such that grid balancing is not such a significant issue?
Another gem from ZedDeadBeat's last posting before going Up the wooden hill to Blanket Fair:-
"For those guys (and it's always men), this is a good proof that wind is quite capable of producing so much power that the grid can't handle it."
So is a thermonuclear explosion.
So do we perhaps leave it to the gals to wire up an old Russian H-Bomb to the grid?
"Pass the insulated pliers and the electricians' tape Doris!"
Zed is just a wind-up merchant!
(sorry, I couldn't resist a good pun)
I would like to point out with Zed however that he/she has certainly become a little less strident with respect to his/her inner certainty...
Only a conciliatory approach will reap any benefit with the population of 'zeds' out there as one is much more likely to surrender a former position if one doesn't feel one will be mercilessly attacked for the former illusioned position.
Zed will be feeling very unsertain indeed about the whole issue.(of AGW/CAGW/CAGG VC and Bar).
I speak as a former committed 'warmist'...
Just trying to be mediative.
Zed,
I'm more than happy to have a perfectly reasonable dialogue if you would like. No point scoring.
At those prices it would pay to fit electric motors to the things to 'assist' even when the wind is not blowing?
Watch out to see if my letter to The Sunday Times in response to this lunacy gets published...
My last one did - albeit in the Business Section...
Correct me if I'm wrong - but I can't think of a worse example of scamming the consumer 'whatever happens' in recent history...
It can't go on - SURELY....!