UK Wind Constraint Payments Could Hit £12 Billion A Year
We currently moan about having to pay a couple of hundred millions or so to persuade wind farms to switch off, but that will soon be the tip of the iceberg
The Telegraph reports:
If Ed Miliband can deliver his net zero vision, a windy day should be a good day for Britain.
Under the Energy Secretary’s clean power plans, it should mean lots of turbines – mostly in Scotland – spinning furiously and generating plentiful green power for the electricity grid, in theory.
But in reality, this is not what always happens.
Instead, Britain has an unexpected problem: there are too many wind farms for the grid to handle, with the country’s north-to-south power lines lacking the capacity to carry away all the electricity created.
It means that every week, grid operators are instead having to throw a huge amount of power away – all while paying wind farm owners millions of pounds for what is effectively “phantom” generation.
Matt Oliver, the Industry Editor, goes on to warn that the bill could reach £8 billion a year by 2030, according to NESO.
Sadly, as is often the case with the Telegraph and Net Zero, Oliver proceeds to get the story wrong by claiming this will all be because of lack of grid capacity.
The National Grid is already planning to spend tens of billions on upgrading the network, which will largely deal with the problem of getting power from wind farms to customer. And most of the extra renewable coming forward will be from the North Sea, not Scotland.
The real problem come 2030 won’t be the grid, it will be the oversupply of intermittent wind and solar power at times, for which there will not be enough demand to absorb.
Take yesterday as an example, quite a typical day weather wise.
Wind and solar power supplied just over half our electricity, 15 GW. Under mad Miliband’s plans to triple wind and solar, we would be generating 45 GW, plus another four GW of nuclear from Hinkley and Sizewell B, which cannot easily be switched off.
Source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
We would therefore have 20 GW too much, even supposing you could store enough electricity to balance out supply during the day. That adds up to 480 GWh a day, or 175 TWh a year, if it happened every day.
There will of course be many days when there is not enough power to go round, but it gives an indication of the huge amounts of electricity we will have to throw away. To have enough renewable capacity to meet demand on low wind days, you have to build so much that you will inevitably have far too much at other times.
NESO did the sums in their Clean Power 2030 Report last November, which I covered here. Their modelling showed just how volatile generation will be. Virtually all the time, there will be either too much or too little power on the system:
Source: https://www.neso.energy/document/346781/download
They reckon that 22 TWh will need to be curtailed, with another 41 TWh of surplus power exported – a total of 63 TWh, which is a third of the projected offshore wind output.
In all, NESO estimate the cost of curtailment, losses on exports and storage of excess power at £25/MWh, which works out at £8.9 billion a year. This is on top of the existing cost.
However, NESO’s figures already look too low. Their expectation that we can export two thirds of our surplus appears to be ridiculously optimistic, given that the rest of NW Europe will also have too much wind power at the time that we do.
If we can find somebody to buy, we will be extremely lucky to get the projected £40/MWh for it. At worst, assuming we can export none of it, the cost of curtailment will increase by £1.6 billion.
NESO have also underestimated the average strike price of wind and solar, which will determine the cost of curtailment – CfD generators won’t settle for less, and most of those with ROC subsidies will demand even more.
Given the vastly increased strike prices on offer in AR7, introduced after NESO’s report was published, the weighted average will probably be over £100/MWh. That would add another £1.3 billion to the bill.
Add that lot up, and we are looking at close to £12 billion a year, over £400 per household.
NESO have not even bothered to include the cost of grid expansion in their Clean Power 2030 Report. OFGEM have estimated it will cost £80 billion by 2030 to upgrade the grid to cope with increased demand and connect Scotland and the North Sea to consumers in England.
Somebody will have to pay that back.
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