Part ownership of a Ripple Wind Turbine, fancy it?

[Moxi]

Just been looking at the half hour prices on agile and the pricing is much more expensive than usual in the early hours and current period so I wonder if theres something bigger going on thats got KH wrapped up amongst it ?

Edit: (Got agile and tracker mixed up sorry - I meant tracker - nope it is agile, why do they use the two terms for the one tariff ?)

Time will tell and the coms will tell us next month what was up

shame though as its a blowing a hoolie again down here, 25mph gusting to 40mph so I was thinking similar up the coast a ways.

Moxi

[Joeboy]

Just been looking at the half hour prices on agile and the pricing is much more expensive than usual in the early hours and current period so I wonder if theres something bigger going on thats got KH wrapped up amongst it ?

Edit: (Got agile and tracker mixed up sorry - I meant tracker - nope it is agile, why do they use the two terms for the one tariff ?)

Time will tell and the coms will tell us next month what was up

shame though as its a blowing a hoolie again down here, 25mph gusting to 40mph so I was thinking similar up the coast a ways.

Moxi

Looks like 19mph at KH the noo. Just one of those things. Nature showing us our true size in the scheme!

I can say with certainty that they have improved their communication since GF first started up. It's still subpar in general but Simon.is actually communicating pertinent details in a timely fashion.

[djh]

Edit: (Got agile and tracker mixed up sorry - I meant tracker - nope it is agile, why do they use the two terms for the one tariff ?)

They aren't the same are they? Agile prices vary every half-hour. Tracker changes once a day.

[Moxi]

Edit: (Got agile and tracker mixed up sorry - I meant tracker - nope it is agile, why do they use the two terms for the one tariff ?)

They aren't the same are they? Agile prices vary every half-hour. Tracker changes once a day.

djh,

I had to go to a third party site to get my head straight and yes you are correct and so was I before i changed my mind and then changed it again, its definitely agile which is the polar opposite to my mental state today

[Joeboy]

KH is back up!
It's not right though as it is 21mph at site. Maybe just started and needs to rotate nacelle and ramp up?

[nowty]

KH blade angle was showing 50 degrees so they were feathered out of the wind so they are either on slow start up or they are doing more checks.

But the blade angle is now reducing , 37 degrees now and KH is slowly ramping, currently generating around 1.7MW up from 1MW about 10 mins ago.

Most other wind farms in the area are generating nicely.

[AE-NMidlands]

KH is back up!
It's not right though as it is 21mph at site. Maybe just started and needs to rotate nacelle and ramp up?

Mine now says whole site is delivering 1700kW... good to hear!
(Snap Nowty!)

[nowty]

Latest from Ripple is,

"Kirk Hill is back online, but currently curtailed for grid purposes."

[Joeboy]

Nice to see GF & KH cranking hard this morning.

KH 67% CF at 22mph
GF 83% CF at 17mph

Edit
KH 65% CF at 20mph
GF@ 85.2% CF at 23mph. at 11am


I guess there's still a blade control problem on turbine 1 at KH?

Still can't get my head around 70,000 panels at DW. I'd kind of forgotten the reality of the project.

[nowty]

Big info on the Ripple Community about the KH outage, but I think its equally about managing expectations going forward.

Kirk Hill outage

15/08/2024
As you may know if you have been following our updates on community, we have been made aware of an outage at Kirk Hill. We’re still awaiting some details from the SP Energy Networks (SPEN) Control Room. This is not a major issue, but as this is the first time since the site was energised, some members have wanted more detail. Here’s what we know so far.

The headline is that what caused the outages was operation of an automated Load Management System (LMS) operated by SPEN. In short, this disconnected the wind farm to protect local grid infrastructure from becoming overloaded during a period of high winds and low summer demand, possibly combined with a fault on the local network. Whilst frustrating for us and for Kirk Hill members, this isn't a major issue and isn't unforeseen. If you'd like more technical details, read on!

Covering off a few things that this wasn't: • It wasn't a comms issue - apologies for any confusion around this, when we saw no data we assumed it was due to comm’s rather than no power on the main 33kV connection.
• The outage was not directly caused by lightning. There was a big electrical storm passing through the area on Monday morning, and this meant the service team couldn't access the site. At this stage, SPEN have not confirmed whether all of their network was 'intact' or if certain lines were offline for maintenance or due to faults (which could include lightning). • The outage was not due to an instruction from National Grid under the Balancing Mechanism. More about this below. • Nothing belonging to the wind farm broke, either as a cause or effect.

The Balancing Mechanism is used at a UK level by National Grid to balance national supply and demand. Under the terms of our connection contract, due to the scale of the wind farm, we will eventually have to start participating in the Balancing Mechanism. This means we will submit prices at which we're willing to be constrained off when National Grid requires this, usually during times of high wind output and low demand. We won't always be instructed to go off during these periods. When we are, the wind farm will receive a payment which will go towards the operating costs pot (Ripple doesn’t get the payment), ensuring there is still a benefit for all the Kirk Hill members. When instructed, the turbines will be remotely set to turn down or turn off; this will be done via our Asset Manager, RES, through their control centre.

There can be other more local bottlenecks though, and these are not 'static' - they change due to temperature of cables and transformers, and as power demand changes. It is very, very uncommon to have a completely 'firm' grid connection (which the generator can have unobstructed access to, even during planned maintenance of a circuit or when there is a fault). Doing so would essentially require a parallel grid connection and additional capacity on the network, which would be unused for the vast majority of the time. This would be a waste of resources and prohibitively expensive. To avoid this, grid operators have a variety of tools to allow timely and cost-effective connections for generators.

One of these is a Load Management System (LMS). Kirk Hill is subject to an LMS. During normal conditions, there is no restriction on our output and our connection can take our full 18.8MW of power. Some of this power is then distributed to the local 33kV network, and surplus is exported up through the transformers at Maybole and onto the 132kV transmission network. In some conditions (typically in summer, when local demand is lower; during summer storms; and often if one of the transmission circuits and/or transformers is offline for maintenance or with a fault), the remaining transformer and/or transmission circuit could start to approach its maximum capacity. When this happens the LMS sends escalating signals to the wind farm to reduce power, or go off completely, and the Ripple dashboard will reflect that reduced power output. This is what happened in the early hours of both Monday and Tuesday mornings. Although clearly not ideal for the site to be operating at reduced output, all the systems were working as anticipated.

Most of this was happening automatically, and it was all being monitored by 24/7 control rooms operated by RES, Enercon and SPEN. They did a great job of coordinating and cooperating to ensure the impacts could be minimised. For instance, after the site came back online on Tuesday SPEN confirmed that we could operate at 6MW until the issues had cleared; RES and Enercon worked together to implement this temporary restriction remotely, leading to more stable running of the system and likely a higher yield for the wind farm than would otherwise have happened. This restriction has now been lifted.

Curtailment due to LMS signals is not compensated, and so we won't receive any payment for this from SPEN (the alternative would be to pay millions to have a ‘firm’ connection). Whilst not ideal, this had been accounted for in the projections for the wind farm, so this is not unforeseen.

A more sophisticated control system may be put in place by SPEN in future that constantly calculates how much headroom is available on the system and sends signals to the wind farm to operate using that headroom. But this is a number of years off yet.

A few members have suggested that the dashboard should show the status of the site (whether it is operating, under maintenance, curtailed, disconnected, etc); we are always keen for constructive and polite feedback but without getting into lots of technical detail, we are limited by the number and type of signals that we get from the SCADA, and this is further complicated by the fact different projects have different SCADA systems. We are investigating what could be added to the dashboard but our priority is ensuring the site itself is running efficiently to maximise your savings.

We hope this explanation is useful; if we get any additional details from SPEN to explain the context or root cause, we'll try to pass them on - but it’s not guaranteed they will be able to provide this. We know some of you were concerned at the outage and would have liked more details earlier - unfortunately this isn't always possible, we are reliant on 3rd parties for information in some instances. Please bear in mind as well that Ripple doesn't have a 24-hour presence ourselves, so we can't always communicate what a problem is out of hours - that wouldn't be cost effective. However, Enercon, RES and SPEN do all have 24-hour control centres and please be assured that they were all aware of the issues as they arose and worked hard over the past few days to ensure output could be maximised.

Next week the site will be at 'single circuit risk' due to a planned transmission outage at Maybole. This means one of the transmission circuits and transformers at Maybole will be out of action. If windy, we would anticipate some further LMS curtailment and/or outages.

We have provided you with this update to reassure members about what's happened in this instance. Hopefully members have found this useful. We appreciate that it's the first such outage and therefore wanted to provide you with something a bit more comprehensive. During its lifetime, there will be times where the wind farm or a turbine will go offline for any number for reasons. This is entirely normal and has been factored in when calculating your estimated savings when you bought your shares. Rest assured we have systems and external teams monitoring the wind farm 24/7 so when we spot an issue you need to be aware of, we will let you know via the news feed on your dashboard. Most minor issues however will not affect your generation significantly and therefore will not require a lengthy update in the future.