Wind curtailment Monitor

[dan_b]

Found this this morning - a website claiming to be a live "Wind curtailment monitor" which also claims to track the cost of said curtailment

https://wind-curtailment-app-ahq7fucdyq-lz.a.run.app/

Any thoughts as to its methodology or if the costs are genuine?

[Stinsy]

I’m wary of drawing too much negative attention to curtailment. Sure it is frustrating when gas power plants are churning out CO2 in the South East while Scottish wind turbines are being curtailed. However as we build more wind generation capacity there will naturally be more curtailment but this isn’t a bad thing. We need a system whereby: if the Scottish fleet is becalmed the Dogger Bank, or Cornish fleet can pick up the slack. However this will naturally result in curtailment when it is windy everywhere, which is a feature not a bug.

[Mart]

I've never understood why the Daily Mail crowd are so obsessed with curtailment of wind. I don't recall it ever making the news when payments were going to gas and coal to keep their boilers hot in case of demand increases.

Wind is ideal for curtailment as it can do so, so quickly by altering blade angles, and rotating nacelles out of the wind. So they 'do it', because they can in many cases, as requested. Plus they can ramp back up quick.

I may have this wrong, as I heard it said about the National Grid, not by them, but apparently in the UK they build out the infrastructure after the RE capacity is well under construction. This may sound weird, but it's to avoid building (spending money) on schemes that don't get fully approved or commissioned.

And Stinsy is dead right. All scenarios for 100% RE or high RE with some nuclear (like the UK), all suggest that overcapacity is the cheapest option. There's no point building out the infrastructure and storage to cope with peak generation, if it's cheaper to accept some spill/waste/curtailment.

Storage will always be behind generation and curtailment. No point building storage till there's enough excess (volume and regularity) to make it economically viable. We've seen that working really well in the UK and elsewhere, as we move from small-medium storage offering FFR, into larger scale storage for peaker services, and then for economical excess storage.

The wind and solar industries have always said that on-site storage can be added to RE farms easily at a later date, as and when viable. No problems, and no extra cost in doing it later.

I suspect the curtailment carp, is just a desperate way to knock RE, now that the argumnets that the grid can't cope with more than 30%, sorry I mean 40%, make that 50%, oops 60%RE ...... etc have failed, and NG have said we will be ready for 100% low carbon (~85% RE(?)) by 2025.

[dan_b]

I agree completely - it will be used as a stick to beat up renewables by the right wing media fossil fuel shills for sure. But thought it useful to share so that we are fore-armed and fore-warned! Be useful to have similar figures for the grid balancing costs of other types of generation - the gas and coal plants that are paid to be hot but not actually generating...

[Moxi]

What that site needs is a historical curtailment cost for a nuclear, gas and coal fired power station for comparison - not sure how readily available those figures would be ?

Also for my understanding could someone explain why the WT's are curtailed rather than passing the energy to the interconnectors or is it simply that they are curtailed because theres no demand within transmission distance of any possible demand ?

Moxi

[nowty]

What that site needs is a historical curtailment cost for a nuclear, gas and coal fired power station for comparison - not sure how readily available those figures would be ?

Also for my understanding could someone explain why the WT's are curtailed rather than passing the energy to the interconnectors or is it simply that they are curtailed because theres no demand within transmission distance of any possible demand ?

Moxi

I did read yesterday that some of the power is ONLY curtailed to the grid but the power is in fact going into batteries for later release. The operators get double bubble, paid for the constraint and then paid again for release to the grid from storage. I doubt however that you could stick it through the interconnectors without first going into the grid.

[Swwils]

Looks accurate to me, possibly a little low.

Curtailment is a huge issue, almost a market bug and generators get a free ride by ignoring transmission costs in their unit value.

Interconnects are extremely expensive, the newest one we got is Western HVDC, cost £1.2 billion.



The primary barrier is B6 boundary, in windy conditions you end up with around 60TWh of net flow from North to south. Even though the 2 planed new HVDC connects would solve 90% of 2022 curtailment conditions that hasn't anticipated new wind projects - the sticky issue is that you can build new generation far quicker than interconnects capacity.

On Christmas day curtailment was £9 million on 75GWh of energy.

Some now have a quad-whammy consumer pockets loophole:

Pay for original generation, pay to curtail, pay for gas generation locally and then pay to release the original energy from storage later. Paying for storage later is not part of the design and will hopefully be closed soon, the rest are market leftovers that are quite detrimental to consumer prices compounded by low wind weeks that can spike prices. You can also end up with strange frindge scenarios like when Germany paid Denmark to stop its wind turbines.

Its quite an interesting argument as people claim nuclear generation is inflexible when balancing the grid when a lot of the issue comes from location of RE and the detachment of generators from local demands; this has resulted in the quite heavy handed stick that windfarms will never be paid the premium strike price when wholesale is negative.

[Mart]

I agree completely - it will be used as a stick to beat up renewables by the right wing media fossil fuel shills for sure. But thought it useful to share so that we are fore-armed and fore-warned! Be useful to have similar figures for the grid balancing costs of other types of generation - the gas and coal plants that are paid to be hot but not actually generating...

Yep, brilliant thread Dan.

I think most of the curtailment now goes 'through' wind, as it's so simple. Of course that makes wind look artificially bad.

People will get bored of it eventually. Just like all the negativity about onshore wind a decade ago, which has reduced significantly (~50% from around 12% to 6%) in the quarterly public attitudes surveys, whilst support has risen from high 60's to mid 70's as a %age.

[Mr Gus]

Archy de... is easily contactable via his twitter page, look at the history & see if its been discussed / put forward, ..certainly would give far more context rather than decrying wind on its own without highlighting others in the supply systems inherent flaws, & costs side by side.

[Mr Gus]

Looks accurate to me, possibly a little low.

Wonder how much of a new cable job the duff ppe, buy, store, destroy, pick over saga would have paid for !? ..because its original sum was 122 million, plus othe storage, transport, burn, investigation aftermath total rising until govt give up, so what would 200 million do to lighten this load & contribute towards less curtail!ment costs from ppe fraud.

Either way a good chunk of cash toward a stream lining solution unless mone & co have a fleet of subpar cable extruder manufacturing "contacts" too.
(if we take the highlighted site at face value)