UK Wind Record

[Ken]

I wonder why Octopus Agile did not reflect the overnight negative prices. Are they abandoning Agile and using cheap stuff to pay for Octopus Go overnight.

[Oliver90owner]

I would be addressing that question to the supplier, if you want the truth.

[Stinsy]

Maybe Octopus are seeing the huge losses they’ve been making over the last few months and are trying to make more margin. The problem with the secret nature of the pricing algorithm is that it gives them the opportunity to change it…

[Joeboy]

The No1 concern of the Nat Grid is reliabity of supply and i am sure they have a scenario for every occurence remembering its the sudden and unexplained failure that can literally cause a black out. To this end they will ensure that there is enough "spinning reserve" inerant in generators spinning and thus haveing stored energy. This energy is not available to any degree in wind and sun and so a certain amount of gas and sometimes coal have to be kept on the supply sometimes subsidised. The NT has recently fitted some synchronous generators which do not produce leccy but just store energy and this will relieve some of the spinning reserve. It is also thought that batts may be able to do this function as well but not yet proved.

This stored energy allows milliseconds for other actions to take place and pevent the frquency dropping out of range and tripping automatic trips and ultimately local blackouts.

A lot of this is going on in Australia where they dictate a min amount of dispatchable power (coal and gas) on the grid and curtail significant amounts of RE

No where near as simple as people first think

Nice one Ken, I like the idea of synchronous generators. I suppose we will be needing a lot more storage as we go forward. I really liked the hot rock storage solution as shown on here a month or so ago. Low cost , low tech. Seems too crazy to be going to all the trouble of WT'ing the land and sea then curtail them. Deep, inexpensive storage needed.

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-tra ... -1-1061093

[Tinbum]

The NT has recently fitted some synchronous generators which do not produce leccy but just store energy and this will relieve some of the spinning reserve.

I remember a friend of mine telling me many years ago about a similar thing for the backup of a police station or its communication system. It was a massive flywheel that spun all the time and then used that momentum to keep everything going during a power cut.

[Stinsy]

The NT has recently fitted some synchronous generators which do not produce leccy but just store energy and this will relieve some of the spinning reserve.

I remember a friend of mine telling me many years ago about a similar thing for the backup of a police station or its communication system. It was a massive flywheel that spun all the time and then used that momentum to keep everything going during a power cut.

The flywheel would probably have been to keep the supply smooth for the computers while power was switched to/from generator/grid...

[nowty]

Highest I saw yesterday was about 15.6GW on https://energynumbers.info/gbgrid (includes an estimate unmetered wind)

So about 2.5GW less than record, so as I expected wind was almost certainly curtailed.

We need a cold weekday with the wind peaking at around 6pm to break the record, OR find a way to use up the surplus power to stop wind being curtailed OR find a way to replicate a LOT of spinning reserve with batteries to drop the gas generation to near zero.

NOTE - The chart below does not include estimate of unmetered wind so only needs to hit about 14.3GW for it to be a record so the wind resource was probably there but not the demand.

[nowty]

I think a potential wind record tomorrow (Fri 26th Nov),



Its getting colder, its a weekday and the peak is coinciding with max demand at 6pm. Only caveat is that Friday may not be the best weekday for max demand, but I reckon its going to be close.

The scores on the doors to look for are around 14.2 GW on gridwatch and 18 GW on energy numbers.

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk (does not include unmetered wind)

https://energynumbers.info/gbgrid (includes an estimate unmetered wind)

[nowty]

Latest wind forecast, out-turn still increasing but still lagging the forecast and we are still 2 or 3 GW away from the record.

[AE-NMidlands]

There's a howling gale here at the moment, but energynumbers only shows wind at 9.8 GW, less than gas. Are our generators shut down for safety, or are they being "curtailed?"