Regional pricing

Regional pricing “could” mean that the transmission losses and grid infrastructure costs are borne by the people consuming electricity rather than spreading those costs across everyone.

This is just another example of dirigiste statist socialists wearing a “market” figleaf when it suits them. The point of moving stuff around on a grid is to provide Pigouvian subsidy from those who have economy of scale to those who don’t, because those with scale – the cities – want the stuff from those who don’t – the countryside. They won’t get it if they make the countryside unviable. Hence road, leccy and gas networks, and the cost of posting a letter anywhere in the UK mainland being the same.

In this instance not only can the Picts not use all of their immensely variable wind leccy successfully, for them to use it at all requires the provision of baseload and grid inertia. And where does that come from?

It’s another reason why we need a water grid. “But it’s our water!” shout the Picts, drowning in stuff they can’t use. It clearly doesn’t occur to them that by providing it on a grid to the productive South, they can get the products of that productive South more cheaply…

Sigh. Pylons are cheaper then burying. If they weren’t, they won’t be there in the first place.

Somebody needs to apply Chesterton’s two-by-four to that idiot.

Hmmm… how does regional pricing work when regions are linked together to provide power more efficiently…?

Lincolnshire wants to erect 87 miles of pylon transmission lines at a cost of £1 billion. Given the typical spacing of 5 pylons per mile, that yields a cost of roughly £2 million a pylon, which does seem rather steep. In primitive South Africa where we wear grass skirts and live in mud huts, the cost would be about £15 thousand a pylon. Something is not kosher.

I gather that the DC current from Norway and France needs conversion to AC. How mad would it be to do it not with an inverter but by running the DC through a motor to spin an AC generator? More costly in capital – no doubt, but how much? Less energy- efficient but by how much? 10% maybe?

It would be one way of getting more rotational inertia into the grid. I suppose a third contender would be to use AC current underseas instead of DC? Could that be nearly economic for a short undersea stretch i.e. to and from France? Or, since the Narrow Seas and the Channel are shallow, how about just using pylons to carry AC current over the water rather than burying cables in the sea bed? Or, or, or: how much use could be made of the Chunnel? I mean, the rise of the EV car will eventually render the Chunnel unsafe for carrying vehicles anyway.

@ Southerner

The extra ~ £2M per pylon is the regulation cost of 10+ years of consultation, planning committees and appeals.

Dearime – typically gas line compression is gas-powered; you’ve got all that lovely gas flowing through the line – why not use a little bit of it to do something useful? In effect, it acts like transmission losses on an electrical line – put in 1,000 GJs at one end, get 980 GJs out the other. We have had some recent interest in electrifying compression on new-build, as everyone want to save Gaia. One of the problems is the infrastructure cost to deliver electrical energy to the compressor – pipelines are often in the middle of nowhere.

Southerner – £2M / pylon doesn’t sound off by much to me. We are currently planning a long high voltage AC line, and it’s coming in at about $3M / tower (CAD) – although we are going through some very challenging terrain. About 20% of that is for station equipment for switching stations along the way. Your figure of £15K seems very light to me, but what do I know?

“Fridges are about 300-800w”

Dunno what make of fridge you have, but I’m bloody glad I don’t own one! My fridge draws about 80 watts during normal running…

DC vs. AC
There are two reasons for using HVDC for interlinks.
One is the losses – DC losses are lower over very long distances (they use some in the USA) than AC, and are lower in a high-capacitance situation (such as underwater). There is a conversion loss from AC to DC and back again, which is why they are not used for short links – the conversion losses would outweigh savings by running DC instead of AC.
But for links between the UK and elsewhere, DC provides isolation from grid frequency. So the UK runs it’s own frequency and that’s independent of what mainland Europe or Scandinavia does. Had we had AC link, and thus been tied to the European grid for frequency, there’s a risk that the disturbances that took Spain (and bits of Portugal and France) offline recently could have caused some of our own generation to trip – potentially causing us to have similar widescale blackouts.

But back to the article. Regional pricing would make s.f.a. difference to the need for grid capacity. The grid is needed to carry lecky from where it’s generated to where it’s being used. Interesting fact, if your supplier sells you “green” lecky, they are greenwashing you – the lecky they sell you is exactly the same mix as sold by everyone else. For a given combination of supply and demand, the only difference it makes if “supplier X buys all it’s lecky from renewables” instead fo buying from a mix is purely an accounting one. It makes no difference whatsoever to the mix of lecky that gets delivered to you.
What may make a difference if the pricing changes are so significant that they significantly alter consumer habits. But I doubt anyone would get away with that because such a change would mean some people (I suspect in the south east) being noticeably worse off and there being something of an outrage.

Copper pays in at lower voltages where the runs are shorter. They are temperature-limited too – they need to be derated in summer.

There was a case here in Norfolk where a line was getting overloaded in summer for that reason. It would cost lots to upgrade but because it was part of a network with alternative feeds they put in a phase-changer to force the power flows to rebalance over the other feeds, keeping the load on the line in question within limits.

As for motor-generator sets, that works in specialised situations (e.g. 110v 60Hz in the UK) but these days with GaN and SiC high voltage rating semiconductors it’s much easier/cheaper to build an inverter/rectifier set. No natural inertia of course but there are techniques to do it in software. The penalty is that under normal conditions it is very underutilised to leave headroom for when the demand suddenly increases.

Bogan – we have electrified some compression – but typically in relatively built-up areas where it can see a redundant feeder. I agree – you don’t want to set yourself up for single-point failures (qv Texas winter problems two years back…).