Brickbat: Off the Grid

In 2025, the United Kingdom paid a record cost of nearly £1.5 billion ($2 billion) to keep wind farms from producing more energy than the nation's outdated power grid can handle. When high winds cause turbines to produce more energy than power lines can safely carry, the government must pay wind farms to shut down turbines in remote areas to prevent an overload; it must then pay other sources, such as gas plants, to turn on in order to meet demand. Last year, the government spent £380 million paying wind farms to shut off, and it paid power plants £1.08 billion ($1.46 billion) to make up the difference. Without urgent infrastructure upgrades, experts warn these "constraint payments" will continue to rise, adding to customers' electric bills.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

It might be good for Britain to go back to a time before electricity. They had an empire then.

[Vernon Depner]

They'll be lucky if that's as far back as they go. They've imported lots of people who would like to go back to the 13th century.

[rbike]

Is this bad?

I don't seem to know anymore.

[mad.casual]

The telling certainly makes it sound like a call for more green infrastructure spending.

Without urgent infrastructure upgrades, experts warn these "constraint payments" will continue to rise, adding to customers' electric bills.

To be clear and actually "both sides" the issue; the powerlines to support the wind turbine's maximum output aren't there for lack of capital. The powerlines aren't there for lack of need. Updating *and maintaining* the grid, especially just to accommodate the peak wind times when you can already, per the article, flip on gas power and meet demand with existing infrastructure, is throwing good money after bad trying to optimize efficiency for a product no one is demanding. The gas powerplant, you always know which lines need upgraded where; wind, you never know which lines will be operating at peak efficiency when, and which you upgraded needlessly.

They're just piling on the cost to update the grid to more fully support wind on top of the price of gas because EVs are just. really. popular.

[TJJ2000]

But, but, but ... The weather changes!
That's why [WE] Sun-God worshipers get to Gov-'Gun' down those 'icky' peoples $.
...for our sacred-swirly-star displays of purity!
/s

[Neutral not Neutered]

Not actually presenting the complete story? Not sure why important points were left out? So disingenuous.

When the wind blows too fast the windmills must shut down or they blow up. This is called furloughing and happens with all windmills. There is a large cost to this.

Wind and solar generation require fast acting, millisecond reactions typically accomplished by Natural Gas power plants, hydropower generation or expensive and wasteful controlling of the base load to clean the intermittent and ever changing generation signals to avoid the grids/transformers etc from blowing up. There is a large cost to this.

If honesty was included, reporting the actual usable amount of electricity from wind and solar delivered and not the total amounts of generation the system might generate, which are the numbers they use to market with and tout for political points and virtue signaling, would be diminished by a minimum of 20%.

One other drain on wind power is when the wind is not blowing. Early version would sit not moving and required more energy to break interia and get them going. This also caused maintenance issues and reduced longevity. Look at the San Joaquin Valley mess! To counter this the windmill blades are kept moving. This requires electricity to accomplish which is a large cost. Newer windmills have solar panels on the tops and batteries to try and provide the power needed to keep the windmill spinning but typically the electricity is fed from the grid for this.

Can't blame Europe though. They were on board to have LNG and NG delivered and plants built/reworked from coal, to generate electricity from NG.

Putin shut that down when he stepped on Assad's head ending the LNG pipelines through Syria from Qatar and Egypt and tried to force Russian LNG as the only source in the EU. They even tried to rework the deal so the pipelines would carry Iranian and Iraq's LNG instead. Then the war in Syria broke out.

Oddly the lies that the climate change agenda was removing all use of fossil fuels for electricity generation continued to increase even though the plan was always to include LNG generation.

Then the push to virtue signal accomplishments began and the coal power plants were not refitted for LNG but instead were refitted from coal to Bio-Mass.

Bio-mass was falsely touted as renewable and sustainable and clean by a small group and even though was proven to not be, they pushed it through in much of the EU and the UK.

Not putting any forethought into burning wood chips and garbage and the amount of supply required within a couple of years the supply waned and could not sustain the amount of plants trying to burn Bio Mass.

The plants were reverted back to coal...

[GroundTruth]

Note that it was not that customer demand had been satisfied using nothing but renewables, but that the grid itself couldn't take the throughput.

Sounds like bad planning and engineering; perhaps there were political decisions involved?

[Neutral not Neutered]

The country will never be able to function with only renewable energy production. Not possible.

And the article is disingenuous only faulting the grid infrastructure upgrades when there are other costs for wind never talked about by those who promote wind as I noted in an earlier post.

[Lester75]

So, tear down the windmills and build coal plants? That would be dumb and a waste of sunk resources. Instead plan better for your new energy sources, no matter what they are. On-shore wind is pretty cheap and more robust power infrastructure is a good investment no matter what the energy sources.

[TJJ2000]

Since FDR and the "New Deal" of Security for Socialism.

Coming soon to the USA ... "The Healthcare Crisis"
Coming soon to the USA ... "The Mortgage Crisis"
Coming soon to the USA ... "The Education Crisis"
Coming soon to the USA ... "The Energy Crisis"

Or just summarize the whole thing ... "The Socialist Crisis"

[John F. Carr]

Reminds me of Major Major's father in Catch 22 getting paid for not growing alfalfa.