Curtailment costs to rise to £500m a year

[AE-NMidlands]

'Staggering' wind farm switch-offs cost energy customers nearly £1bn (https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/hom ... n/?ref=nuo, behind a paywall unfortunately.

PAYMENTS to energy firms to switch off mainly Scottish wind farm turbines because they produce too much power have cost bill-payers approaching £1bn in just over five years and are expected to soar to £500m a year.

It has emerged that households who are seeing a doubling of energy bills since last winter are set to face further pain by the "absurd" constraint payments system which is predicted to dole out record amounts in the next four years.

but I think we knew this.
It's wrong to say the compensation system is absurd when they should really be complaining that the grid is not fit for purpose and nothing has been done about storage.

[Oldgreybeard]

I wonder how much curtailment is just down to the lack of a big enough interconnect between the north and the south? I wouldn't mind betting that a fair bit of it is. I knew someone that lived on Orkney and I remember him telling me that their problem was that the cables connecting them to the mainland couldn't handle all the power from their wind farms, and they often had to curtail some for that reason.

Has to be a very strong argument for improving the grid infrastructure to get power where it's most needed, if we are curtailing RE just from not having enough distribution capacity.

[Mart]

Perfect timing thread, as I'm still pondering the distributed home batts idea that OGB mentioned. A thought I'd had, that would fit with this issue, is that deployment should start in areas where RE generation exceeds (on a growing basis) the ability to move it to other parts. Off the top of my head that would mainly be Scotland at the moment.

So a policy that helps all parties down to DNO and household levels, would also in its early stages, help to reduce curtailment, and increase RE consumption.

Obviously I appreciate these are not simple issues, but every bit helps, especially if early measures aren't a compromise, but actually work well in the future mix too.

Looking at the bigger issue, I assume this is also why Scotland is building (amongst others) those two huge batteries - 400MW each, total 1,600MWh. I'm sure many, many more will follow.