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)
BBD
Yes, you are right -- the Watermelons such as ZDB have no idea how the power grid works. You just touched on the more obvious points.
The problem is that wind mills produce power when the wind blows, which is often at night, when there is very low demand. The reason this is a problem is that the generation on the grid MUST match the demand. The reason is generator over and under speed.
The generation on the grid is carefully controlled for the very good reason that the hertz rating of the grid must be very carefully controlled. Too much power, the generators have a lower load and so speedup. That is the hertz goes up. Too little power, the opposite happens. Do to their cost, the main generators are designed to run in a very narrow hertz rating. Get too high or too low, dynamic imbalances will cause them to burst. This happened years ago in NYC with "Big Alice", a massive steam powered generator that snapped a drive shaft about a meter in diameter. The entire generator had to be replace at the cost of many millions of dollars.
So while the wind mills actually produce DC which is converted to AC and are thus immune to over speeding, the steam and diesel powered generators on the grid are not. Some night, there will be an unexpected wind storm and a sudden gust of wind will cause generator overspeed with the resulting failure of some very expensive equipment
Electric power grid design is best left to the professionals and not starry-eyed know-it-alls.
I fear that we will all learn about that some windy night.
jones
Been trying that for a while (see also Discussion thread). Not much luck so far. I wish Zed would stop pretending that she knew anything about energy technology, grid balancing etc. The gap between pretended and actual knowledge is embarrassingly evident.
See also Don Pablo and others, above.
@ Latimer Alder
I do not like windturbines either (those farms in Gran Canaria eg look horrible), but assuming that you make/let somebody build one by promising to buy his electricity, and then not keeping that promise, I believe it would be fair etc etc
I did a breakdown of the costing for the lady from ZDB "lady" from Truro and then saw that someone on WUWT that had done a better job than me!
I still want to know if they had included the costings for the inverters or the battery bank in the minuscule installation. That adds huge costings plus more maintenance!
Re Alexej
Suppose I start making widgets. If I overproduce, should I expect to be paid 20x the normal market price for my excess widgets? The windmills were generating power when there was no demand. Why should they be so overcompensated and not just paid the normal market rate for electricity they ended up wasting? If the windmills threatened grid stability, why not just disconnect them to protect the grid?
Or, the next billion pound boondoggle-
"A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), described the incident as "unusual" and said more electrical storage was needed."
Great. Let's throw more money at trying to solve windmill's 1,000 year old problem of intermittency. Also notice Ron Oxburgh's Falck got paid out, and no doubt he'll be lobbying for more money to get thrown at his renewables interests.
@alexej
'I do not like windturbines either (those farms in Gran Canaria eg look horrible), but assuming that you make/let somebody build one by promising to buy his electricity, and then not keeping that promise, I believe it would be fair etc etc'
Sure ..if you write dumb contracts you should stick by them, no matter how dumb they are. Or buy yourself out.
But the true moral of the story is that you shouldn't agree to such stupid Ts&Cs in the first place.
The government has a responsibility to the welfare of its citizens that it seems to have completely ignored in its misguided sacrifices of our money and best interests to its irrational and boneheaded belief in Mother Gaia. And in its naive and credulous dealings with the spivs and speculators of the 'wind power revolution'.
Atomic
Also, one has to watch the accounting when it comes to energy storage. There's a vast deal of nonsense talked about everything from underground tank-to-tank pumped hydro to using the national (electric) vehicle fleet as storage/backup for smoothing wind intermittency/variability.
Flywheels and compressed air get touted periodically too.
With the possible exception of car batteries, these backup/storage technologies impose a conversion loss in the order of 30%.
Given the rather poor yield from all renewables, this additional loss is a serious problem to the viability of these approaches. It always reminds me of those dotty schematics for perpetual motion machines.
Look closely, add up the losses, and there's never enough energy to make them work.
Quite how all this squares with an ever-rising demand for electricity (remember that national fleet of electric cars) is not clear.
On a bad day, I tend to lose patience and dismiss the witterings of the pro-renewables brigade as b*ll*cks. Which it obviously is.
Hence the UK governments recent (very quiet) reduction of its crazy offshore wind capacity target from 33GW by 2020 to 12GW. Snap! 66% gone, just like that.
There is indeed a wind blowing somewhere, and it's cold.
The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change likes wind turbines cos they're pretty. That's how policy is decided these days.
The only feasible large energy storage media are called fossil fuels or fissile material.
One option when overproduction occurs,is to pump water [fresh or salt] into an elevated reservoir,lake etc. with a damwall and turbines and store as potential energy. This could then be used to generate electricity when peaks occur.This converts low cost energy into a higher value product.This concept is being used at Niagara.
Investment in windfarms by private company's or individuals is just that! An investment! If the national grid has no requirement for the surplus electricity generated by private wind farms then why should the national grid pay for a comodity it is not using. That is just typical of modernBritish thinking. Just one other reason why we are so deeply in the S**T !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BBD
Ta.
Aye, she strikes as one who has a 'belief' but little else allied to a degree of insightlessness that renders one incapable of seeing their own position of ignorance (no Zed, that wasn't a term of abuse in your case, I meant the true definition).
I have zero knowledge of power generation or any allied technology ( I'm a doctor by trade) but I know that I do not know and this is sufficient for me to be able to listen to those who do and try to derive a view.
Zed is not in this head-space and it is sad so I find the caring part of my makeup making itself felt. Pathological caring I suppose but somebody has to be.!
It's a tragic thing to behold and to be fair anyone of us who has a belief challenged feels very uncomfortable indeed and few can comfortably make a paradigm shift without some pain.
I speak as a former ardent 'warmist' by the way.
I monitor this blog daily and will observe from a distance the travails of the Zeds et-al and will continue to advocate for them in a purely concilatory way.
I'm sure I can 'save' at least one somewhere........
Trust me.
@bbd
'Hence the UK governments recent (very quiet) reduction of its crazy offshore wind capacity target from 33GW by 2020 to 12GW. Snap! 66% gone, just like that'
Presumably to compensate for the reduction in the offshore target, the government are planning a vast increase in moonshine production and a compulsory national campaign of wishful thinking every second Thursday forenoon. Many fairies, elves and sprites will be signed up to assist in this endeavour.
Mr Huhne will also be announcing an enhanced tax credit scheme for families who help the government to achieve their ambitious target of becoming the world leaders in sacrificing nubile virgins to the Mother Gaia.
'Our portfolio of measures sets an example to the rest of the World in energy policy. We expect hordes of visiting delegations to learn how we do it and to take home valuable lessons. Our last guests were clearly so impressed that they couldn't stop laughing with amazement after I explained it all to them. Thye had tears in their eyes. It must have been joy that we had shown them The One True Way.' he is expected to say.
Ref an earlier comment above I used the word 'unsertain'.
I hardly need say this was a typo surely?
Meant 'unshoor' of course...........
@tom eyre
Check out Dinorwig (opened 1984)
http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm
and then ponder why it is still the biggest such installation in Europe. And note that its capacity is less than 2GW.
Great idea for very special circumstances. But few buy a Lamborghini just to do the school run and the weekly shop in Tesco. We need a zillion Mondeos not a few Ferraris. Sadly, they don't exist.
Er.... can someone tell me (DeadZedBed must know, I'm sure) - is Drax paid twenty times the going rate for electricity if it is not required..? Or Sizewell..? Or multiple gas-fired stations..?
If not - WHY NOT..??
Latimer Alder - yeah, I spotted that 'dramatic' reduction in proposed offshore wind capacity in The Sunday Times this week - but - and this is where your elves, fairies and nubile virgins come in - there is, apparently, still a HUGE chunk of 'renewables' on the pie chart for 2020...
And another thing - why is the government keeping quiet about this proposed reduction..? Surely an announcement to the effect that: 'We have realised that such a proportion of offshore wind capacity is irrelevant to the main object, generating electricity 24/7/52, so we are pursuing more reliable means of achieving this aim'.
Hmm... Yes - a bit far-fetched, I admit....
Why wouldn't the National Grid just offer the surplus electricity to industry at a discounted rate? Presumably they could even hold auctions on these sorts of occasions.
It would earn the National Grid money, rather than making them pay out.
And it'd stop the flow of free money to the already-heavily-subsidised wind farm operators.
Exactly illustrates the point I've been trying to make for months. The stats for windpower (+/- 20-25% of nameplate) are just plain wrong. Because there is no control over when the wind blows, a lot of the time (50% is as good as any other number) the windmills are generating power when its not needed, so the real output is nearer to 10% of nameplate. What a nonsense and, of course, we are now told that we're even paying for the waste.
Re BBD
One is currently doing some creative accounting and a spot of marketing wrt energy storage. Well, not storage per se, because given the costs/losses involved that's pretty pointless. More like using any surplus energy to do some useful work and produce useful product. As for electric vehicles becoming some kind of grid battery, somehow I can't see consumers being happy setting off for work and finding their vehicles haven't charged, or the charge has been clawed back. Then again, if we got paid the same very generous rates as Falck & Co, electric cars might just pay for themselves. So we'd have to strip mine for lithium, that's a small price to pay to save the environment, right?
Its been pretty breezy in this neck of the woods recently - but I see that wind's contribution to (relatively low) electricity demand is back down to 0.8% (or under 10% of capacity)...