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Err, no, bugger off

The UK’s leading offshore wind developer is in talks with Net Zero Secretary Claire Coutinho about the fate of its flagship project off the coast of Norfolk, after spiralling costs cast doubt over its viability.

Ørsted, the Danish renewable energy giant, is understood to be in talks with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, led by Ms Coutinho, about securing more generous subsidy arrangements for its Hornsea 3 wind farm project.

It would see 231 turbines installed off the coasts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire, generating power for 3m homes.

Subsidies for Hornsea 3 were agreed with the Government last year through contracts for difference (CfDs), with operators guaranteed a minimum price per megawatt hour (MWh) known as the strike price. Ørsted was promised £37.35.

If it’s more expensive then we don’t want it.

And this really is the correct answer too. Sure, saving the planet and all that. But only at a price. If the price is higher than that they goodbye planet.

No, really….

21 thoughts on “Err, no, bugger off”

  1. It’s just plain annoying that we get told it’s cheaper, yet it requires a subsidy to make it profitable, lots of investment is needed in the grid to make it usable and we still need to pay for 100% backup gas generation to be maintained and ready to go for the weeks when the wind doesn’t blow.
    I do wonder how much our bills would be cheaper if we had zero wind and solar power.

  2. Sneezer – No idea, but people shouldn’t have to accommodate other people’s fetishes in general.

    We want normality.

  3. Do the women require lower tables or something?

    Blokes are generally taller, which I suppose could be an advantage when reaching over the table.

  4. More wind power >> lower fossil fuel consumption >> price of fossil fuel declines >> consumption of fossil fuel rises, elsewhere.

  5. The power and speed of the break is critical in pool.

    Dudes, including the ones who claim they aren’t, are bigger and stronger and therefore have an inherent advantage, as is the case in pretty much any sport you care to mention.

  6. jgh
    November 15, 2023 at 1:44 pm
    £37.35 per megawatthour, eg? So that’s 3.75p per kilowatthour. So why is it 31p per kWhr on my bill?

    Because that is what they are being paid per kWh, not what it costs per kWh to supply.

    The difference between the 31p and 3.75p is intermittency cost which is paid by the consumer.

    Every MWh of wind needs a MWh of fossil fuel back-up because its output is not sustainable (Ha!), gets interrupted for periods, nor is it despatchable and its grid input cannot be planned. It cannot provide frequency stability.

    Therefore the consumer is paying for the MWh from wind plus that MWh from gas. (Nuke doesn’t do back-up), even though gas might not actually supply all that MWh, or any of it you still have to pay for its operational costs – including the gas it is always burning – and provide sufficient revenue to return a profit. So in effect for every MWh you buy from wind you have to buy a shadow MWh from gas. It is why the price of electricity is determined by the price of gas produced electricity.

    Imagine having a BEV – a fire engine or emergency ambulance which must reach its destination without delay. Range uncertainty, availability of charging points that are operational and not in use means you are followed by an ICE fire engine or ambulance as back-up.

    The fleet of BEV fire engines/ambulances must have a parallel fleet of ICE vehicles, which operate behind the BEV or sometimes instead of if their batteries are being charged.

    So you are paying the capital costs of two fleets of fire engines/ambulances plus operational costs of both.

    That is the genius of the transition from fossil fuels to ‘renewables’ – you need to keep the fossil fuels, and the more ‘renewables’ you add, the more fossil fuels you need to match their output.

  7. There are some sports or activities where it may not be an obvious reason for it but it’s massively dominated by one sex, pool happens to be one of them, maybe something to do with spacial awareness as well as the break advantage but very few women can compete at top level with male players

  8. photobucket

    If it’s more expensive then we don’t want it….

    …but we’ll be forced to buy it anyway

    @Sneezer

    Blokes are better at anything that involves accuracy and motion. Comes from tens of thousands of years being hunters and avoiding or throwing things

    Darts, table tennis, motor-sports are other examples

  9. “Therefore the consumer is paying for the MWh from wind plus that MWh from gas. (Nuke doesn’t do back-up), even though gas might not actually supply all that MWh, or any of it you still have to pay for its operational costs – including the gas it is always burning – and provide sufficient revenue to return a profit. So in effect for every MWh you buy from wind you have to buy a shadow MWh from gas. It is why the price of electricity is determined by the price of gas produced electricity.”

    That doesn’t explain the difference between 3.75p/KWh and 31p/KWh. Presumably the gas turbine that backs up the wind farm doesn’t cost much (if any) more per KWh than the wind farm does so even if we say the gas turbine has to run 24/7 in the background as well and double the 3.75 to 7.5p/KWh, that still leaves 23.5p/KWh unaccounted for. Whose pocket is that going into?

  10. There’s still the actual cost of delivery infrastructure and maintenance to cover.
    They’re always having to fix parts of the grid, dig up the roads and replace components or upgrade so we can all charge up our milk floats that we don’t want. That needs an army of people to do things.
    Then the distribution company has to make a profit.
    Then the distribution company has to pay tax on profits. Sorry, we the consumer has to pay the tax on profits of the distribution company.
    And then there’s the green levies on our electricity to fund all the green, polar bear saving stuff we don’t want like wind power.
    And then there’s tax on it all as well.

  11. @John B
    You are certainly right that adding renewable is one driver of balancing costs. Although funnily enough the biggest problem is when the wind blows too much and the Grid has to make payments for refusing power. However as this report shows https://1drv.ms/b/s!AkH38tr8tPdPmsVVphgMqEJaEN3ZnA

    The cost is overwhelming driven by the cost of gas to power the peaker plants not the capital cost of the plants themselves. Wind and solar are both cheaper than gas at the moment so have a downward effect on consumer prices.

    In the long term competition in the supply of balancing load from new technologies will reduce the cost of load balancing.

  12. Serious question (in the context that I’ve always regarded the wind thing as nothing more than a scam/grift):

    Can one (efficiently) run synthetic fuel power plants instead of gas. Ie, resolving the problem of storage/need for gas or coal back up? Hence, double (or triple) up on what’s needed in wind (yes, yes, I know, but stick with me). Then use the regular excess to create synthetic fuel which feeds the power plants for when it’s not blowing. Excess from that powers (adjusted) ICE cars (as already mooted on here), etc.

    “Obviously” nuclear is better, but just playing devil’s advocate, if that mark-up above is not faked/misunderstood?

  13. Technologically? Sure. We know how to do electrolysis – electricity to split water into H2 and O. We know how to reform H2 up to petrol, derve, fuel oil etc – though for power stations we’d probably only go to CH4 (natural gas or methane). We could probably get more efficient at those, but not much more.

    Economically? Well, hmm. I think that for some uses – note that’s *I* think – that this is already economic for jet fuel. Cheaper than trying to have hydrogen planes, or blimps or whatever. For some form of battery (ie, calling a battery any form of stored power) then I also think it’s already economic. As the basis of the whole system? Not sure. Maybe if we use fuel cells not turbines as power stations, maybe…..

  14. Tim,

    Thanks. I wasn’t thinking batteries. More just storage of fuel like we already do now with gas and oil. Unless charging batteries is somehow cheaper but which doesn’t seen right – intuitively off the top of my head, just the sheer magnitude of it?

    But yes – so economics is the issue, not science. In which case, some will no doubt make the case for flooding our shallower coastal waters with the damn things (above and beyond that is)…

  15. “Then the distribution company has to make a profit.”

    Why?

    No one seems to care if farmers make a profit or not. Why should the electric distributors be guaranteed one?

  16. @John B
    “Therefore the consumer is paying for the MWh from wind plus that MWh from gas. (Nuke doesn’t do back-up), even though gas might not actually supply all that MWh, or any of it you still have to pay for its operational costs – including the gas it is always burning – and provide sufficient revenue to return a profit. So in effect for every MWh you buy from wind you have to buy a shadow MWh from gas. It is why the price of electricity is determined by the price of gas produced electricity.”

    This is mixing up MWh and MW. You need to have the generating capacity of gas for when the wind isn’t blowing. But that’s MW not MWh. You don’t actually burn a MWh of gas for every MWh of wind energy produced. As @JB says,

    The cost is overwhelming driven by the cost of gas to power the peaker plants not the capital cost of the plants themselves.

    In other words, The back-up capacity is the relatively cheap bit, so having gas on stand-by works pretty well. Provided the gas plants aren’t burning through molecules at full pelt, they’re not running up a huge bill. Up to a point, adding wind/solar to the system makes life cheaper for the consumer because its marginal costs are low and the annual consumption of gas burned to produce electricity has gone down. And coal, the most inefficient bit, is almost out of the system entirely.

    The problem isn’t that we’d be better off if we tore the renewals out and went fossil fuel only. We wouldn’t be. Having a mix of sources makes sense for economic reasons, never mind the geopolitics. The bit where it gets hare-brained is people wanting to take the fossil fuels out entirely before we’ve got economically viable solutions to load balancing and storage.

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