Too Much Of A Good Thing: Scotland Gags On Wind Power
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DPC Market Street from Montgomery Street, San Francisco, after the earthquake 1906 Filed under Be Careful What You Wish For, once again here’s our fri
[See the full post at: Too Much Of A Good Thing: Scotland Gags On Wind Power]Hi Euan
Isn’t this a case for time priced electricity and strong demand management for the consumer? I think if I was a business or a householder, I could be persuaded to avoid peak usage times or at least reduce usage if the price were comparatively very high. This might be an actual practical use for a mobile app, you could use them to switch your appliances on or off based on current price.
I think 24 hour constant priced electricity is a historical luxury we have got used to. A maket for local distributed storage could be created as well if price differences were there.
I am not really a market solutions person, but why make the energy providers to all the hard work of supply management?
Given the excess generating capacity that wind will provide, couldn’t most or all of the existing hydro schemes be re-purposed as pumped storage? They won’t be needed for generation purposes.
@carbon waste life form – I’d be a major supporter of variable power prices with a display on the wall telling me what the current price was. But for some reason in the UK they are not able to role out something like this that seems so simple.
@ Mark Janes – its not so simple. You need a bottom reservoir to pump water out of. Some of our hydro schemes do empty into large lochs but when you pump you lower the water level and reduce river flow and vice versa – when you produce the rivers flood. This happens at the moment so its all a matter of scale and what the river systems can handle. One existing hydro scheme on Loch Lomond (Sloy) is being converted to pump and this will double its capacity.
From a disgruntled reader:
Could I ask you to please help me with unsubscribing me from this newsletter?
I have been enjoying Raul’s and other’s posts for quite a while, but this nonsens you are now regularly publishing for your “friend” Euan Mearns just doesn’t make any sense. No way will I see one more ridiculous fossil fuel promoting posts of his in my mailbox.
Thanks Euan
I also think that instantaneous pricing would not be difficult to implement and would be amenable to a gradual roll-out. Customers would probably need a networked meter which could have privacy issues, in theory.
Variable pricing might reduce or negate the need for feed in tariffs, and would at least allow renewables to be selected on an equal footing. FIT tariffs have always looked to be a fudge to me, I’d rather see the externalities of FFs, nuclear or hydro factored in instead as appropriate.
I reckon the reason that variable pricing is not introduced is political. We feel entitled to cheap energy on tap at our convenience.
@Ilargi’s disgruntled reader
I must admit that I am a wind energy supporter in principle and wish that Euan were wrong about the problems with dispatchability and pricing in Scotland at the 2020 mix level. I feel that he is right though, which is why I support demand side management.I find it hard to see how producing more energy can be a problem. In a way, yes, it’s expensive. But that’s measured as if it’s conventional. You could think of it as producing its base power as expensive, but producing the extra gale-force power as a freebate. Looked at this way, what you need are systems that absorb and/or utilize massive amounts of intermittent power. This is hardly unusual. The old windmill era, c.1600-1800 in non-stable wind areas (ie, England, not Netherlands) would yes, sit around and not do any work until there was wind. Then you’d hustle to grind your wheat, saw your boards, pound your rags all at once in long shifts as weather permitted. Then go idle again. That’s life in the green, ecological, earth-centered world. Welcome to party. But that’s a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Unless you really WANT to continue burning the last remaining coal reserves and risking nuclear emissions just for your technological convenience.
I don’t think we want that, so changing our habits, the very way we think about and do work is one of those compromises. Used to be all the logs we cut and waited for the rivers to thaw. All the wheat was stored and waiting for the mills half the season, in transport, for canals to thaw and fill, or water to flow after summer dry or winter freeze. This ain’t unusual, folks. It just costs some money. In extra storage, elevators, that in fact create resilience, not the 3-day supply chain everyone frets about.
So yes, it’ll take time, and it’ll take money, and more even will take change. You could make power dead-free in wind areas during surplus hours. That should cause the localities to take advantage of the power, for instance adding electric baseboard heat, or intermittent industrial work, compressed-air storage, aluminium smelters, I don’t know. …But they would. This is best idea, as one of the obstacles wind power is that basically the local people have to look at and deal with them, but get screwed concerning power. So if they have all the trouble, but no price-benefit, why WOULDN’T they oppose projects? Whereas with power, they could become a renaissance craftsman area.
You could of course go centralized, big-scale too and pump water, melt salt, or split water, but those are large, expensive, centralized projects ripe for more boondoggles. Still, once you’ve paid, you’d be a fool not to, especially as the alternative is to melt down the UK grid with oversupply. Pumping lochs is only one option, and it may be a bad one. Free power could mean freezing ice, heating water, lifting train cars up a slope, filling a tidal estuary, or who knows?
In essence, Scotland bought a lot of future electricity up-front, with an open contract concerning supply. Since you already bought the oversupply, the only rational thing to do is figure out how to capitalize on it.
Free power is a benefit, never a liability. Not everything that happens is a problem. Even on doomer sites.
Yup, if you want more of anything, just subsidize it.
Leviathan certainly knows better how to spend precious capital than all the world’s participants in all the world’s markets. Next up, free refrigerators for Eskimo’s.
Has anyone asked about tapping the trillions of tons of mass moved each day on the planet by the predictable and consistent tides? Twice a day at different times along the length of coasts?
And try handing it over to the private sector. If it’s profitable, someone will build it, provided they aren’t strangled by regulations.
Oh, I forgot,,,a camel is a horse designed by a central planning committee. Guess the answer is to pump water into the deserts so we may grow more corn to make ethanol, then burn it, using the power generated to pump more water,,,,,,,reversing the function of the windmills to use them as fans to keep the desert cool?
WTF, absurdity is in, after all. Why not turbo charge it?
What I don’t appreciate from this writer is that green energy is solely looked at by its economic cost, yet fossil fuels are viewed solely from its overt costs, not all of the externalized costs to society. Does the deaths from emphysema, mercury-laced water, radiation poisoning, exploding coal sludge ponds have a cost? Or do we just assume that’s another can to be kicked down the road until our species breathes its last.
I’m all for understanding the true costs of green power, both its carbon footprint as well as its expense to society. But Euan would prefer to ignore the true cost of fossil fuels to our world. When do we get Stoneleigh back? We need Nicole’s greater holistic perspective on energy and economics that this one-sided analysis doesn’t employ. Can someone please pick her up from new Zealand?
Thanks Euan for a fascinating article. However I must agree with some other respondents that the analysis appears to be coloured by a grumpy tone.
The problem you outline is to be expected in a system driven by renewables. In our remote photovoltaic household electricity system in the SE Queensland mountains, we go from feast to famine according to the weather. Currently in the summer wet season, our supply is marginal, we scrimp on electricity, charge our ebike batteries at mains-supplied neighbours’ and occasionally have to use a petrol motor to charge the batteries. However during the dry spring, we have a surplus of electricity. To use as much as we can, we cut firewood with the electric chainsaw, cook with electricity (instead of using charcoal or gas), etc.. But every sunny day the regulator still switches off the panels once the batteries are full. We have the choice to wring our hands worrying that the capital invested in the panels is wasted, or being grateful for the adequacy we have and thinking of additional ways to embody the surplus power.
Similarly, in the Scottish situation you outline, at the worst, wind turbines may need to be feathered in times of surplus and their potential output wasted. This will be at an economic cost to someone, but (as has been proposed above already) it also offers the opportunity of low-cost energy, which time of use pricing may be able to facilitate.
This is just how it is with renewable energy. If you want a high proportion of your supply to be renewable most of the time, you will probably have times when you can’t use it all.
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