The Seagreen wind farm off Scotland’s east coast is squandering vast amounts of its power because there is not enough grid capacity to transport it to areas of the country where it is needed most.
This inability to handle surplus electricity led to 77pc of Seagreen’s total output going to waste last year, new accounts show, from a total of 114 turbines.
This is likely to have sparked hundreds of millions of pounds in so-called constraint payments for the wind farm, which is run by Scottish energy giant SSE and France’s TotalEnergies.
These payments are made under a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.
So cheap, renewables, so cheap, eh?
Saying, well, just upgrade the grid doesn’t solve this problem either. Because that’s an extra cost, meaning that renewables are not so cheap, right?
Forgive me for repeating myself, but the only high calibre engineer I’ve ever known who decided to devote his career to “green” energy started by dismissing wind energy because it is too dilute in time (it’s intermittent) and space (you need a hell of a lot of windmills sited where it suits the wind rather than the customer).
Nowt’s changed since the seventies except that stupider, more ignorant, more venal, more reckless people now run the show. String ’em up but be sure to use organic hemp.
Anyone who’s ever played Sim City quickly figured out “Wind” is not the way to go if you want your city to run…
If wind is an efficient, reliable provider of power, why did we switch from wind powered ships to steam powered ships, and from wind powered water pumps to drain the Fens and the Netherlands to steam, then electric power?
If burning coal to make steam is an efficient, reliable provider of power, why did we switch from steam trains to electric and diesel trains?
You realise that there’s almost no similarity between the turbines used in coal (and gas) power stations and the reciprocating mechanism of a steam locomotive? And where do you think the power for electric locos comes from?
I think we also find that power stations burn coal more cleanly and efficiently that steam locomotives, for reasons of scale, and because they don’t have to move about whilst doing it.
We still power those electric trains with coal tho . . .
Just as China’s EVs are also powered by coal.
The problem with steam locos is not the coal, it’s the water. The old A4 Pacifics could carry enough coal to get from London to Edinburgh, but not so the water to make steam. There was a mechanism to scoop up water from troughs between the tracks on the long straights in Lincolnshire & Yorkshire.
I once went on an excursion pulled by Tornado from Paddington to Worcester, and that needed three fill-ups from tankers by the side of the track!
Water troughs were a well-developed technology and occurred at frequent intervals. The first ones out of Euston were at Bushey.
When I hear this I always have a fantasy of going back a thousand years and imagining an ancient market where merchants gather to sell their wares. A gold carriage drawn by six white stallions arrives in the square and a bloke gets out clad in magnificent robes and his servants set out a table. He sits in a fine gold chair behind the table on which lie large sacks. A small merchant,curious as to the man’s obvious wealth, asks in deferential tones “What do you have to sell?” “Nothing at all” comes the reply. “How are you so wealthy?” “The King orders that you fill these sacks with gold and givem to me” “Why???” “To save the world!”
Then I get bored imagining all the blood and gore. But it IS a happy ending…
Yup, any grid modifications for the benefit of wind power are inherently expensive because those improvements only deliver when the wind delivers, ie 25% of the time.
Upgrading the HT grid to move wind generated power around is a waste of everything, unless the low voltage grid is upgraded to distribute the electricity once it gets to “where it’s needed” for all the car battery chargers, heat pumps and other electrical appliances replacing gas appliances.
There is only silence with respect to the low voltage network.
No matter what the cost, if it saves the planet it is worth it………………….
So let’s build more of them.
Sorry, I mean let’s borrow to pay overseas multinationals eye-watering sums to build them followed by even more eye-wateringly insane price guarantees for future governments and generations to suck up.
Business as usual then.
Ah, haven’t you heard? Multi-national conglomerates buying up everything in the UK and owning our strategic industries is a great thing. I know this because everyone on here tells me so, and gets very cross when I suggest it might not be such a good idea……..
It’s telling that they just let this energy go to waste. If they weren’t being given endless free money by the government they’d have to find a use for it. Well, of course, they wouldn’t exist in the first place but you know what I mean.
This is probably a stupid question but could at least some of that surplus electricity be used to directly power the mother of all crypto-mining operations?
Yes, it could. Provided you can shrink the crypto-mining operations into items small enough to share space at the tops of a lot of poles sticking out of the North Sea.
Don’t need the tops for that… You have the entire shaft to work with…. They’re mostly hollow, y’know….
Now… to get enough un-nerfed GPU’s at *any* price to make it in any way commercially viable… Quite another matter…
Why bother if you get paid whatever happens to the electricity?
Get paid more?
But I suspect that between intermittent electricity supply and GPU replacement costs the math ends up not working out.
Mining also requires lots of cooling, and wind farms tend not to have lots of suitable water available to dump the heat into. They could use salt water, but the infrastructure for that is also expensive. And I suspect getting subsidies to pay for that would be more difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick
Could be me, but having a large mast sticking up in the air doesn’t give enough room to mount a couple of heat exchangers?
Note that the mining rig runs when there *is* wind, but no “demand” from the grid…..
Any Bureaucrat who signed off on ‘a government scheme to encourage renewables, aimed at guaranteeing cash for green power even if it cannot be used.’ should find themselves in the Tower.
Even if he/she did so under direct orders from Ed Mililiband?
We cannot say that civil servants should obey ministers and that they should be punished for their actions hen obeying ministers
Pendant warning:
Why is ‘most’ dangling out there?
Candidly, some of the Airstrip One production units squander electricity in an irresponsible fashion. You know the sort. Some of them own as many as four pairs of shoes.
If the wind is free, how can they be squandering or wasting power? Since wind turbines only collect energy and convert it into electricity, if they don’t collect it, its power is still there just transferred to any matter it meets.
But the bonus energy could be used for ai data centres or crypto mining in Scotland.
Clever business people could see this as a great opportunity to utilise cheap energy for AI, Data centres, and cryptocurrency mining.
Scotland could benefit enormously with hi tech business.
Intermittent energy is not very helpful for data centres (whether powering AI or not), I guess that’s why all the clever business people are looking into nuclear or gas turbines for their DCs instead…
Which is why Bill Gates has suddenly become a climate change denier (sort of). He thinks now that although climate change is a real problem, it’s no longer an “emergency” which indicates to me that Billy Boy is looking at gas turbines to power data centres to try and catch up with everyone else…
Problem is, those business people are clever enough to see that this is a non-starter, and won’t touch it with a bargepole. The only clever bit is in tapping the subsidies which they get no matter what. They don’t give a flying fuck about “green” energy.
If you are so clever . . .
Yeah, just think of all that money those rapacious capitalists are leaving on the table. Why don’t you and your lefty mates combine your pensions and show them how it’s done?
AI and data centres need reliable energy. Wind power (especially the excess over TX capacity) is pretty-much the opposite.
Tell you what – if it’s such a great idea, just borrow a couple of hundred mil, and build server farms to utilize excess wind-powered generation. We’ll all watch you get rich!
I cannot borrow millions of pounds. I am an ordinary person. Good grief.
I doubt you even manage ordinary, Barry.
Has it not occurred to you that if it could be used for that, it would be already? And if it’s not, there may be a reason? Such as a lack of those fiddly copper wires it has to go down? Or that it might destabilise the grid and do an Iberian Peninsula on us?
My god, learn to think first before ejaculating over this page.
You are not an expert on this issue. I have studied this.
No, you haven’t. I work in the industry, and no one who has actually worked on this stuff would come up with such wonderfully inane comments.
Except that it can’t Barry. Scottish government won’t allow the data centers.
Oh, and crypto isn’t money. You can’t buy anything with it.
Isn’t there actually a limit to how much Bitcoin can be mined?
But if there isn’t a limit: We know what an increase in supply does to prices, don’t we? We are supposed to be fans of economics here. So what would virtually unlimited “free” electricity devoted to crypto-mining do to the price of crypto?
There’s a limit. That was the point of its design.
Paraphrasing: ‘Electricity thrown away because grid could not cope’ sounds like a deflection for ‘Wind blowing hard at 3 a.m. when electricity unwanted’. Just a thought.
Actually quite common, one of the major drawbacks with intermittent energy is the unpredictability. First you need high capacity links to the site and such sites are often, though not always, remote, and you need a way to either store excess generation OR to rapidly substitute the supply should it drop. A country with plenty of Hydro is ideally suited to Wind Power supplementation because Hydro can respond rapidly enough (and has typically enough inertia to assist grid stability) and to some extent water not used to generate can be stored for future use. The drawback though is that wind does nothing for base load capacity in such a scenario but *may* extend the ability of the Hydro to generate at full capacity. Typically some wind power plus a lot of Hydro is actually a good mix as long as one has enough base load capacity without the Wind.
Without Hydro, it can be difficult to balance Wind power without significant inefficiencies. If one uses thermal generation standard Coal/Gas generation cannot react unless already in the right state (running on standby) and that is inefficient to say the least. Combined cycle can respond but not always as the Gas Turbine part generates quite rapidly, but the thermal portion has to ramp up, again unless in a semi-active state.
Geothermal can typically react fast but not a lot of places have much of that available. So for much of Europe at least Wind is not a very desirable supplement below a lowish level, though it can be done at significant cost and inefficiently. But shouldn’t Scotland have significant Hydro generation, hilly enough (if not very high) and plenty of rainfall, I haven’t looked but doesn’t Scotland actually have a good Hydro base ?
Hmm, doesn’t sound like Scotland’s rich.
Going to make it up on the volume – always works, amiright?