UK Wind Record

[Mart]

Energy numbers is showing 19.5GW for wind. Wowza.

Edit - And -2.9GW to France.

[Oliver90owner]

Mart,

Is there new interconnector(s) to France?
Gridwatch is only showing about nett 1 GW export, at about 1545h. Gas, down at only about 20%, is good!

[dan_b]

ElecLink has now officially finished testing/commissioning and is in full commercial service, rather than load testing.
IFA2 went live in 2021, and of course there's the original IFA1 - a potential 4.4GW of connections to France.

[hoggy]

Sure I saw 19.77GW wind at some point but didn't get chance to screenshot it.
We still have the obscure Belgium > UK > France power loop going on again which I find amusing.

[ecogeorge]

Was just gonna post wind @ 18.9Gw wow .. but you've beat me too it...

George

[dan_b]

France is struggling with capacity with so many nukes off line at the moment, there's an interconnector dance going on in the SW too - Portugal is exporting on its HVDC into Spain, who are then exporting on their HVDCs into France.

Sure I saw 19.77GW wind at some point but didn't get chance to screenshot it.
We still have the obscure Belgium > UK > France power loop going on again which I find amusing.

[AE-NMidlands]

Sure I saw 19.77GW wind at some point but didn't get chance to screenshot it.
We still have the obscure Belgium > UK > France power loop going on again which I find amusing.

and we are importing from Orkney too...
which led me to this, a very nice story:
https://news.sky.com/story/the-tiny-isl ... d-12459111 (the-tiny-islands-of-orkney-lead-the-way-on-renewable-energy-and-generate-130%-of-what-they-need)

Orkney has embraced renewable energy like no other corner of the UK. The tiny islands have more than 650 wind turbines dotted across the rugged landscape.
Add almost 400 solar installations and a handful of experimental devices for generating power from waves and tides, and the Orcadians are more than self-sufficient for electricity.
Together they generate 130% of what the population needs, despite the growing number of plug-in cars on the islands.
Some of that has to do with nature's gift - a wind that whips across islands year-round, long daylight hours in summer and seas that are never still.
But homeowners and communities have also seized on financial incentives to operate their own mini power stations.
On Shapinsay, a dot on the map just six miles by four, the community of a little over 300 people has a wind turbine that towers over grazing cattle.

It's their new cash cow - bringing in up to £5,000 a day from the electricity they sell to energy companies. Some of it pays off the loan from the bank. The rest is invested in the community: a bus service, an out-of-hours ferry link to the main island, and some affordable housing.

Adrian Bird manages the turbine for the Shapinsay Development Trust.
"This is our turbine," he told me, as we watched the blades spin. "We're doing something positive for the community, but we're also taking advantage of clean renewable electricity to do that."
But with so much clean electricity generated across Orkney, the power cable back to the mainland gets overloaded. Energy companies cap how much can be generated - and throttle back the turbines. The industry calls it curtailed wind. Adrian calls it wasted energy.

It happened as we talked - the blades slowed, even though the wind hadn't dropped.
"They've switched us off," he said. "It's frustrating because it's a loss of money, and this can happen 100 times a day." It's also a missed opportunity for reducing the overall carbon footprint of the electricity grid - gas is the standby.

But just as Orkney has shown the way to an economy powered by renewable energy, now the islanders are going further.

They're investing in electrolysers that use the excess power from the turbines to make hydrogen from water. The gas, in effect, stores the energy. In Kirkwall harbour, it's turned back into electricity to provide auxiliary power to ships in dock. And on Shapinsay the hydrogen is used to heat the school.

Adele Lidderdale, the climate change officer for Orkney Council, says the rest of the UK has much to learn from the islands as the government strives to reach 100% renewable energy by 2035. "We've demonstrated that," she said next to her hydrogen-powered van. "We've got hundreds of households with wind turbines and got hundreds of households now using electric vehicles. "There hasn't been a lifestyle change for us and I think it's just managing that transition well, to find good ways to store that energy and deliver it to the end consumer."

The European Marine Energy Centre on Orkney is also a test-bed for experimental devices that attempt to harness energy from the tide One of the companies currently plugged in at one of the berths is Orbital. It's generating enough electricity for 2,000 homes from the O2, the world's most powerful tidal turbine. Two rotors spin in the water that rushes between the Atlantic and North Sea several times a day, at speeds of up to 10mph.

Research suggests tidal power could provide more than 10% of the UK's electricity with the same guaranteed output as gas or coal. "That's what's really important," said Daniel Wise, the company's operations manager. "The tides are very, very predictable. We can look into the future and tell you anytime what the tides are going to be doing. "So we're able to know how much power and when it will be coming into the UK grid."

The technology is still in its infancy and the marine energy industry wants the government to support its development by guaranteeing a price for the electricity it generates - just as it did in the early days of wind power.
Daniel said: "We think we're ready to make more - and if we make more, we can make them cheaper."

[dan_b]

Are there many heat pump installations on Orkney?

[spread-tee]

Well whaddya know, some joined up thinking on Orkney, if only that were contagious..........

desp

[hoggy]

Yes we do quite regularly import from Orkney. They have a fairly slick Network Management system which keeps shuffling generation & loads around different zones to make the most of the connections they have.
You can watch it live here: SSE Live Data Orkney which is basically where I get the info from and then layer it ontop of the map.
The Isle of Wight does similar although I think my code has gone wonky on that one so I need to check what wrong with it.