still_learning

I have read it Bob, and it tells us that @KathrynPorter26 is correct. It says... "Unfortunately, balancing costs are increasing and are predicted to go up from around £2bn a year now to as much as £8bn by 2030. That’s because over 60% of these costs are what we call ‘thermal constraints’. These typically come about when we need to take action to manage high amounts of wind generation in the north because it's unable to reach demand in the south. Put plainly, the cables don’t exist yet. To prevent the existing cables from overheating and catching fire due to excessive current flowing through them, NESO acts to turn down wind output to avoid a power outage.". It's an admission that wind energy creates the grid instability, and that the grid was never designed to cope with diffuse intermittent sources of energy, which requires us to spend billions on additional transmission lines and mitigation infrastructure. The more wind turbines we add, the greater the instability and the more we have to spend on short term grid balancing. The costs of mitigating wind generation, and wind subsidies, dwarf what it would cost to build dispatchable energy generation where energy is actually used.

Grid balancing used to be relatively trivial. The function of the national grid was to maintain a certain frequency, with generally predictable fluctuations - which were managed with the use of spinning reserve, which was integral to large coal power stations. Diffuse intermittent generation (wind) made a manageable feature of the grid an unmanageable crisis, especially after demolishing spinning reserve capacity. The more intermittent generation we add, the more acute the problem becomes, because the fluctuations are much larger. There is no cost effective way to make wind viable. Batteries are expensive, and were only ever intended as short term grid balancing tools. They simply cannot offset the wild fluctuations created by wind, nor can the span the gaps created by weeks of low wind. As such, renewables have made us more reliant on gas and more susceptible to price spikes. Wind advocates argue that it's a grid capacity issue, which is partly true, but is ultimately misdirection. Accepting this argument means having to invest tens of billions in otherwise unnecessary transmission lines and related infrastructure, which adds to the capital costs of wind (which doesn't appear on the wind energy balance sheet) on top of exorbitant subsidies and market rigging. The renewable energy lobbby has always depended on the technical illiteracy and gullibility of journalists, politicians and activists, but those of us who took the time to understand the system were predicting this crisis as far back as 2007. Nothing I'm seeing unfolding in recent years is remotely surprising to me. Most of this was explained to me by an SSE energy trader when I worked there. They knew it was a problem, but it wasn't their problem. They were subsidised to build windmills and taxed to shut down their power stations, so as a business, that's exactly what they did. Now it's our problem and we're paying through the nose to keep the lights on.