Wind curtailment Monitor

[Swwils]

It's more of keeping up with the rapid pace of wind deployment. Turbines go up easier than cables go in

Would be great if the market supported more local onshore wind but this generally has got snarled up.

[dan_b]

It's also a quick and easy thing to do to curtail a few turbines in response to changing demand/ grid constraint compared to spinning up or down an entire thermal plant, let alone a nuke?! So in some ways, turbines should be praised for the flexibility.

[Mr Gus]

+1 from me dan

[Swwils]

It's also a quick and easy thing to do to curtail a few turbines in response to changing demand/ grid constraint compared to spinning up or down an entire thermal plant, let alone a nuke?! So in some ways, turbines should be praised for the flexibility.

But the turbines aren't located where the demand is.

[dan_b]

But also to some extent, nor are the gas plants or the nuclear power stations.

[Swwils]

They are mandated to have acceptable transmission links as part of the projects; for example the Hinkley connector. Also in general they are better dispersed for various reasons.

Ideally generation would mirror the population and industry density map, but it doesn't. That's hard to change in the UK even if we had many onshore turbines.

Essentially the ramping of nuclear would cause additional carbon as gas picks up the slack. But they do often reduce output to balance - its important to make a distinction between ancillary services to support grid frequency and proper load-following.

Traditionally mixing nuclear, wind and solar is extremely expensive compared to open-cycle gas ramps, which is why a lot of people despite not liking small module reactors are behind NuScales 6 x 50MW PWR idea.

And people wonder why they said that the capacity market was a bad idea in the first place!

[Mr Gus]

Can you offer some conext rather than nitpicking with one technology please Swwils.

IE, as pointed out, neither are nuclear, coal, gas turbines located in big ciries (though they chuck naff housing anwhere nowadays) I'd be very happy for nuclear to sit amongst london central. & the major seats of population, IF they want nuclear power that badly & waste storage too! ..very expensive, ..how does that cost eat into curtailment payments!? (really) because there's moaning & there's scrutinising & working out best practise / project investment, of which battery storage should play a part.

What info do you have to put forward, going forward?

Cheers.

[Swwils]

Well that's the kicker; it's a complex bag. Several farms in the south never got past planning due to local resistance when they should have been fast tracked.

Curtailed wind alters the capacity factor of the farm and makes the capacity factor unrepresentative of the windfarms performance, which is fundamentally unfair.

When you have unreliable supply, coal and gas are relatively much more attractive, which is unavoidable.

Texas is a great example, with it's mature fleet the turbines tend to not be near populations even when incentives tried to place them there.

Basically curtailment isn't a sound strategy moving forward and we need to fix it, maybe the generators should be responsible for delivery too (which would harm the economics of UK wind and solar) or one of the many other ideas suggested.

[Mr Gus]

So better cable "management" investment for starters, . .well that sounds like an even better reason for batteries in homes & beyond.

Savings on building a better cable network, as per your use of the curtailment site diagram, could save us how much in curtailment payments annually? "typically" ..care to speculate?
Ditto battery storage, how long to balance out costs versus big storage at windfarms or spread as part of a get batteries in say sports centres, (cheap rae pool heating etc) scheme & for govt buildings, schools etc to draw upon storage to use later as part of the bigger time switching power usage

..or even contemplate modeling one cost aainst the other to significantly eat away at money going somewhere for nothing compared to production & power set aside?

Essentially octopus scheme brought into action by planning a more productive means of using surplus from the outset & redirecting curtailment payments & helping knock out the slow ramping coal / diesel on standby , & eating into coal power stations, naturally.

[Swwils]

The diagram is from ngeso:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/researc ... boundaries

The two planned new HVDC once finished in 2030 should have capacity for all 70TWh (about 90%) of 2022's curtailment. But they won't have the capacity for 2030's planned new generation, where the aim is to keep it below 15TWh curtailed on the 30GW extra going in. But this assumes some very generous storage amounts of beyond 30GW behind deployed in that timeframe.