In case anyone else is wondering why the effects of being on the HN front page look small at first glance, notice the logarithmic scale being used for the y-axis.
At first I thought the increase in traffic, while noticeable, didn't look particularly impressive on those graphs, but then I noticed that those diurnal traffic patterns looked a bit strange, which is when I noticed the log scale!
The visualisation on that site is good, but it's sadly plauged with data errors. The UK data doesn't seem to correspond to any other source I can find. I think it might be delayed by 24 hours, but even that doesn't seem quite right...
I love the data visualizations but I am always surprised to see so many different ones given how little use-cases they serve. They can broadly let people know where the power is coming for and help policy makers to a certain degree. They are just naturally interesting for a little bit while you explore but then drop off. It's almost like its most useful for exploratory data analysis and not a ton else
I'm curious if other people have interesting use cases here and how accurate is the data? Is this all people putting different layers on top of one source of truth for data - or patching together various sources?
I'm not sure whether this MP was in the pocket of gas, coal or nuclear interests or whatever but he successfully rounded up residents to NIMBY what would have been the biggest wind farm to date even though it would have barely have been visible.
> Electricity prices would still be through the roof. The prices are all set on the international markets.
Only to the extent that electricity can be imported and exported via international connectors, which are of course limited in their capacity.
Prices are not set internationally, but domestically. Energy is not a tangible, stored commodity like coal which is internationally priced.
If what you said was true then America's electricity would be priced the same as Europe's, whereas it is way cheaper.
Therefore building out additional electricity production in the UK could well lower prices, depending on matching of demand and supply, agreed prices in contracts, length of contracts, etc, and of course whether additional connectors are deployed.
There's actually a similar but much more widespread talking point about gas, claiming the price of that is set on the international market and therefore the UK producing more gas locally would not help reduce prices. That should come with the exact same caveats (only to the extent that it can be imported and exported, American prices are much cheaper for Europe's because of this, and that's likely a big reason why electricity prices are much lower there) but the mainstream media unfortunately ignores them.
There is also a caveat that any cost savings from locality may be wiped out by higher costs in other areas. It may well be cheaper to invest in the US or Middle East and import as LPG. Transport costs are only one factor. And it is not like domestic supply would have no transport costs either. Running pipelines through rural England to fracking sites is not exactly cheap.
Scotland has one of the biggest gas fields in Europe, why should it rely on ugly and unreliable Wind turbines? Esp Global Warming probably makes Scotland's climate more comfortable, and its proximity to Greenland means sea levels might even fall.
No, it’s not false, that article takes a deliberately obtuse definition and uses it to debunk something which wasn’t claimed.
Clearly due to the nature of grids and shared generation nobody can guarantee that all electrons used came from wind power (nor does anyone care!?!) but Scotland is an exporter of energy and at times its entire needs could be met from its renewable generation.
Not sure which part of Scotland producing lots of renewable energy you find difficult to cope with, but renewable production is here to stay, cheaper than other sources and a growing part of the mix.
Our economies are linked, so even from a selfish perspective, the effects of global warming will felt even in places where the weather doesn't directly cause problems. If the effects of climate change get bad, we are likely to see widespread war.
About end of the Stone Age ~15,000BC you could still walk from UK to Europe - there is I believe evidence of civilisation and villages down there still.
> I assumed solar would be the thing that takes over
Solar in the UK is highly seasonal. A ~4kW installation that generated 500kWh in June might only produce 50kWh in December [1] - whereas a ~4kW install in Spain might generate 700kWh in June and 200kWh in December [2]
So if you want power output in December, Solar in the UK isn't the best choice :)
In UK wind is actually broadcasted to take over. After the new line connecting with Norway (for hydro storage) the majority of investments are going into wind.
On Nuclear, I think right now there is 1 big nuclear plan offline for maintenance so there might be some of that too.
In the Mediterranean area, while there is more prevalence of solar, it's not a clear winner either. For instance in Italy there is quite an aggressive law on usage of agricultural space for big solar farms.
Solar will win in the decentralized, domestic space, an area that I'm highly interested in.
At scale, Wind seems to offer a better ROI, especially on country on the coast line (or other favourable morphological characteristic)
I'm heavily looking to switch to work on the space (from more traditional consumer products), but it's a more full stack space: software is written as a byproduct of the hardware. unfortunately I haven't found any Electrical engineering interesting in doing something in the space. Shameless plug if there is someone out there interested.
The Tories said no to onshore wind, now solar is getting really cheap they are banning the building of solar on most farms (by reclassifying low quality land as higher quality land that must be used for food).
At the same time they are thinking about allowing wind on land again (probably because it will no longer be the cheaper option).
Given their links to fossil fuel interests it comes across as delaying tactics.
It's obvious why the Tories are thinking about allowing onshore wind again: a huge chunk of the mainstream media, including the BBC, have been pushing the idea that it's the superior option which the Tories are just ignoring because they're conspiring with fossil fuel companies to screw us. At this point it's probably not politically viable not to allow it even though it makes little sense. The BBC's been doing things like describing them as the "cheap, reliable" option every time they talk about the Torie sblocking onshore wind and omitting the fact that they're basically worse on both counts than the offshore wind the UK is building these days, repeating any claims the leader of the opposition makes on the topic verbatim and unchallenged, and even outright describing one of its big fundamental disadvantages as nonsense.
I read/heard somewhere that if the Republic of Ireland built all of their potential offshore wind-farms, it could power the country and generate a surplus for export. Obviously need to solve the storage issue or rely on interconnects for when the wind isn't blowing/blows too hard.
The east coast around Dublin (fortuitously, as the major population center) has good banks in relatively shallow waters ~10-20km offshore (Oriel, Kish, Bray, Codling, Arklow banks). There are only 7 offshore turbines in operation today (Arklow, 2003 25MW, planned expansion deferred), but hundreds more planned within the next 5 years. Less wind than the west or north coasts, which is seemingly less amenable, but there is at least one bank planned for Galway.
https://gis.seai.ie/wind/
there is a twitter account @UK_WindEnergy[1] that posts the percentage of total power on the UK National Grid that is being generated by wind about once an hour, and then once a day a daily wind % totals. it doesn't happen very often, but i have seen upwards of 60%! very heartening.
I'm not sure the anticorrleation has ever been proved. While it seems logical, the cloudy / stormy weather that sometime we experience in UK is too harsh for wind farms
Named storms often generate records for wind power generation. Even if a few turbines in the middle of the storm have to turn off, the rest of the country still gets lots more wind.
If you look at graphs of the wind and solar production in winter vs summer, the correlation is obvious. On a day-to-day basis, much less so, but on average low wind does tend to come along with higher sun.
Isn't it the sun's energy that ultimately creates the wind - through differential heating?
So whether it's anti-correlated might a local feature depending on the local factors driving the weather?
Perhaps stronger correlation would be that air movement ( wind ) is the thing that drives the weather changing. ie no wind, means slow change ( though the opposite isn't necessarily true - if you are in the centre of a cyclic weather system which isn't moving you could have wind and not much change ).
The UK is too northerly and has too little spare land for solar to dominate (it will of course still play a large role). Wind is where it’s at. The UK has a vast and windy offshore domain.
Agreed. But note that a lot of the local solar capacity doesn't actually show up on the grid production numbers.
ie if you have a solar panel on your roof and mostly use it to reduce the power you take from the grid, all you will see in the national numbers is lower demand, not increased production.
Loads of on-shore wind is likewise not metered. If you own a hill top farm, especially if you have industrial electricity loads (e.g. milking cows, lighting barns full of hens) it makes loads of sense to buy a modest turbine and install it on a suitable rise, it won't pay for itself over night but it's very competitive with other farm investments and not correlated. If electricity prices go up the turbine is better value, regardless of whether people are paying higher farm gate prices or your yields increased.
I think the estimate is that maybe as much as 5GW of UK wind nameplate capacity is unmetered, so it's a minority of wind power, but it's a big minority.
No, I'm not sure it's accurate because it's guessed by looking at suppressed demand.
There's no central register of unmetered power generation, the assumption used is that if on a windy day mysteriously we're buying 25GW from the grid across the country, while on a similar but calm day it was 30GW that suggests 5GW of electricity is not being purchased when it's windy, implying 5GW of unmetered electricity supply from wind.
And there are presumably other embedded systems making up some of that 5GW estimate. Farms just seem obvious because 1) I've seen farms with wind turbines 2) They're industrial scale electricity users, often occupying terrain very suitable for a wind turbine
Don't most domestic panels actually feed into the grid (so presumably would show up on the stats as solar generation)? Unless you've got a battery system at home.
Domestic panels are what we call embedded generation - they are connected to the distribution networks, not the main transmission network. The System Operator (NGESO) doesn’t have real-time insight into the distribution networks themselves - they are just visible as a net demand on the system. Embedded generation serves to reduce this demand by feeding power locally to the distribution network.
We can forecast the embedded generation in real-time, but it’s only post event once the meter data has been accounted for that we know what actually happened.
Export tariffs are so low (around 4p per kWh) compared with import tariffs (more like 35p per kWh last time I looked) that if you got solar panels recently, after the feed in tariff was stopped, then getting a battery too made sense. I imagine most new installations include batteries. We only really export in the summer or if we are away - we use virtually all the electricity we generate most of the year.
Depends on how it is setup and it varies in different areas, almost all are grid connected but many only "suck the excess power needed" from the grid when the panels can't produce enough, and only some of those "feed back" power when they produce too much.
They do - but as the rate you are paid for electricity is now a fraction of the price you are charged, most people without a battery try and align their energy use with production.
( The suns out! Put on the washing machine/dish washer etc ).
Sure - don't know what proportion of solar panel installations that is though - it was an early adopter incentive.
Bottom line - not all the local solar production is measured at the grid level - much of it results in demand reduction which can't be directly attributed.
I think this will only increase - either due to local batteries, or more electricity driven heating systems ( heat pumps for example ).
And this isn't just homes - if you have a farm and have a big water reservoir which you fill by pumping water - and you had some solar panels - you'd just run the pumps when it was sunny - there is no particular need to run them at particular times ( same if you had a wind driven pump ).
I find https://gridwatch.co.uk/ a bit more readable. At the bottom of the page you can click on each energy source to see those metrics for that source only (worth doing to understand the volatility of wind in particular if you haven't seen those charts already)
The data shows pretty clearly that combined-cycle gas turbines are still THE type of power stations that are used to balance the supply and demand, but solar is already helping a lot during the day.
French data shows gas power stations produce up to 9GW (~13%), and without solar they would be used to produce 12.5GW (~19%).
An enormously expansive area nearly 3 times the area, mostly full of cheap land a full 20 degrees of latitude further south isn't very surprising to have more solar and the continental-ocean boundary generates powerful midday wind, exactly when you want it.
For all the coal rolling, capital knows when there's a good deal going.
Offshore wind in the UK currently uses the "Contracts for Difference" payment mechanism. Operators bid to build turbines, and the best value operators get assigned areas of the sea. Then, they receive a fixed price from consumers for any electricity they generate (effectively, but there's market mechanisms in there that complicate the accounting).
Initially, this was much more expensive than fossil electricity, but the price of turbines has dropped and the price of fossil electricity has grown, so now existing wind turbines are lowering the price consumers pay for electricity.
New wind farms have achieved CfD rates of less than £0.04 per kWh, which is not a subsidy for the wind farm operators, but rather a subsidy for electricity consumers as this electricity is far cheaper than market rates.
I've always wondered under the mechanism who has benefited from higher energy prices in the UK? With consumers currently paying high prices, who's getting the difference between the CfD price and the market price for energy generated by wind. Is it the government do you know?
Wind farm operators sell their power onto the market (they can sell however they like, but the reference price is calculated according to the day-ahead spot price).
Any imbalance between the agreed price and the reference price is sent to the LCCC (Low Carbon Contracts Company, part of the government).
The LCCC then re-charges any CfD payments or surplus funds to the electricity suppliers. This should eventually work its way into an increase or reduction in household energy bills. So the end consumer should get the difference between the wholesale and CfD price, in theory. This is also taken into account when the OFGEM price cap is calculated.
To answer your question about who benefits from high electricity prices - mostly fossil fuel producers, but also fossil power stations, legacy renewable generators with direct subsidies rather than CfDs, and electricity market traders exploiting the volatility.
I think that also clarifies something I'd found confusing: that the spot price is currently effectively determined by the price of gas, and yet the UK consumer is benefitting from the presence of wind generation (which generates much cheaper power than gas)
If I've understood your post correctly, this is because the electricity companies don't directly pass the spot price onto consumers. Instead when the price to consumers is calculated, the part attributable to wind is taken account of at the lower price.
So effectively the marginal price to consumers is actually affected by the average cost of generation (which is turn, from an economic point of view is arguably undesirable, because it means consumers don't have sharp enough incentives to save electricity at the margin)
Yes, that's right. The spot price is determined by the marginal source of electricity. That's normally gas, but is sometimes coal, imports, or pumped hydro storage. The consumer actually benefits twice - once when the wind is sold into the market, which necessarily lowers the spot price for _all_ electricity (more wind supply is the same as reducing total demand, which will reduce the market price). Then, the difference between the spot price and the CfD price is refunded, but this time only on the electricity actually generated by wind.
In general, electricity suppliers don't literally pass the spot price on to consumers. It used to be that a supplier could price electricity however they liked, including passing the spot price on. However, for the past few years, suppliers are required to buy futures, and price their supplied electricity on that basis, because of the domestic price cap. If they didn't they would run the risk of going bankrupt like Bulb. Futures bring stability, and in an efficient market with perfect information buying futures would be the same as buying spot. But the market is not efficient and with perfect information, so that assumption doesn't apply. Notwithstanding that, you were correct, the part of electricity generation attributable to wind should be taken account of at the lower price.
For most consumers, their marginal cost of electricity is identical to their average cost (ignoring the standing charge) as they are on a fixed rate tariff. It would undoubtedly be more efficient to charge consumers the actual marginal cost at the time of consumption, and then refund the CfD payments in a monthly payment later, but that's not how it's done sadly.
They produce hydrogen from sea water? I had assumed fresh water sources, but I suppose salt water on an absolute scale is not that more loaded with particulates than anything else.
Yep efficiency isn't great - but as I said, better then the efficiency of throwing excess away ( zero ).
There is also value in the ability to store the energy - not as efficient as something like using water to store potential energy ( ~75% ), but there is value there.
I'm not somebody who thinks it will be hydrogen everywhere - frankly electricity is easier to distribute and we already have a good infrastructure - but that's not to say it doesn't have a role.
Wind turbines are capital intensive and the entire cost is upfront. Once the turbine is built it makes sense to sell it at whatever the current market rate is. That could be really low or really high. The main purpose of government support is to give some certainty about being able to pay off the debt. But that support has become less neccesary as costs go down and wholesale prices go up. Arguably the main benefit of setting prices upfront in the long term is avoiding price spikes and encouraging cost reduction. But there are also risks in terms of the cost of servicing debt as interest rates rise.
It is now, while natural gas prices are high and the technology is mature. It did require a subsidy to get off the ground. Of course, you have to decide whether the consumption of a globally finite resource of "safe temperature" counts as a subsidy or not.
It's very cost effective. A wind generated MWh costs about £25 while a nuclear MWh is more in the region of £120.
If you use wind to generate electricity and use that to synthesize natural gas which you store and use to generate electricity the whole thing costs about £80-90.
On Friday, December 9th at ~4:00pm GMT (Greenwich mean time):
Nuclear: 5.25 GW
Wind: 3.84 GW
Combined Cycle Gas Turbines: 23.31 GW
Solar (Estimated): 0.35GW
Installed Wind Capacity (onshore + offshore): 25 GW [0]
Installed Solar Capacity: 13.4 GW [1]
Total installed Wind/Solar: 38.4 GW. Total produced: 4.11 GW
Wind is currently producing 15% of its installed capacity. Solar is producing 2.6% of its installed capacity. Combined, the renewables are at almost 11% of their installed capacity. Gas turbines are making up the difference.
Lots of you are cheerleaders for "renewables". They seem like a transitional technology to me. If hydrocarbons are ever going to be retired from use, nuclear sure does seem like the only option.
It seems to me like humanity's only hope is a breakthrough in our understanding of the laws of nature.
