And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/undergrounding/
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
I've mostly voted Green all my life but for the last 5 or so years I remain satisfied at their losses, as they're somehow unable to understand why people are moving away.
(My comment's a little bitter, but I do hope they figure this one out.)
Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
A lot of thermostats support it
The problem here is
1) the excess power is not near the demand
2) the cost of electricity near the excess power is no lower than where there's no excess
3) nimbys prevent the extra interconnects being built which equalise power availability and power demand
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
Correct?
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).
Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation
Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.
Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.
Best of luck =3
Generally, bio-fuels proved more practical using fermented alcohols or fat transesterification into B100. A genetic engineering solution for salt-water tolerant fuel crops or microbes is highly probable.
If I recall correctly, methanol powered vehicles would get significantly lower mileage per tank of fuel, and tended to damage petrol engines. =3
The solutions are:
1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.
2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
Ring-fence constraint payments and convert them into a build mandate: every £1 spent curtailing in a zone next year becomes £1 of capex allocated to relieving that exact bottleneck (HVDC, transformers, phase shifters).
Pair it with a fast-track permit for projects that follow existing transport corridors and bury through parks/towns only when the cost of delay exceeds the cost premium.
Sweeten the deal locally: automatic bill credits or rooftop/heat-pump grants for residents along the route.
If we’re going to socialise the waste, we should socialise the upgrade-and make the "do nothing" option politically expensive.
This week the northern-ish parts of europe are hitting one of the highest price point for electricity in recent time, with prices going for around $0.5 per kw/h. Calm weather in combination with low production from solar is creating a shortage in production, at the same time as the weather is getting colder.
There is a lot of money on the table to get energy produced at the right time and right place. Having energy produced at the wrong time and in the wrong place is not worth anything.
Stops the power being wasted ( though obviously hydrogen generation is less efficient than direct use ), and also creates a stored form of the energy for less windy days.
BTW also not suggest a hydrogen everywhere energy economy - use it centrally to augment/replace gas powered backup.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
Which claims curtailment is about 10%
That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business. If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".
Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
What's the possible demand drop, 20%? More?
It can't take many days like this to offset a GWh of grid level storage, able to complete absorb environmental gluts like this.
https://www.coireglas.com/project
The key challenges are deploying large-scale energy storage, and transmission of stored energy to areas of demand.
Yeah, I like pumped hydro and even with its lower efficiency, it's cost effective... but I live in the Fens and I'm looking at solutions that work everywhere. Local storage is going to be more important once a significant portion of the country has an EV and heat pump.
Short-term profits and for-profit policy lobbying are utterly incompatible with building intelligent, robust, future-proof infrastructure.
Even food distribution?
Food is a bad counter example here, as retailers are not prevented from adjusting their prices the further away you choose to live off major population hubs. OTOH electricity in many cases costs the same in the entire country (incl. UK.) This means that energy consumers are not incentivized by these expenses to consider the real costs of the grid. They will rather build a new factory/etc close to London where they might expect to have access to better workforce pool instead of in Scotland right next to the overproducing turbines.
NIMBYism against new grid infrastructure would also largely disappear overnight if the market actually made economic incentives (in a form of reduced electricity prices/fees) for people to accept infrastructure bringing that electricity to them. The way things stand today – when electricity costs the same to everybody in the country – of course you wouldn't want any works in your vicinity.
It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)
Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
> Wind power is so cheap
Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)
France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
Or alternatively merit order data https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.
Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.
Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7
New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.
Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming
> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies
If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.
Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.
You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
