On 11th May an article appeared on the BBC website with the heading “Renewable energy projects worth billions stuck on hold”). It bemoaned the fact that [b]illions of pounds’ worth of green energy projects are on hold because they cannot plug into the UK’s electricity system” and stated that “[s]ome new solar and wind sites are waiting up to 10 to 15 years to be connected because of a lack of capacity in the system…”.

This evening, BBC Radio 4’s PM programme followed up with an interview between Evan Davis and Ben Wilson, Chief Strategy Officer for the National Grid, which contained more than a few interesting snippets.

ED: Now, if you build a new wind or solar farm, helping to de-carbonise the electricity grid in Great Britain, be aware you might have to wait fifteen years for National Grid to connect your facility to the Grid. In fact, there are real worries that it is the Grid which is the constraint on building up renewable energy. Ofgem wants things to change, it says the current National Grid regime is not fit for purpose, some of the delays are unacceptable. National Grid wants thinks to change, but why is there such a problem? Earlier I spoke to Ben Wilson, Chief Strategy Officer for National Grid, and I asked him if I wanted to build a wind farm, what would the process of connecting it to the Grid be?

BW: You have to come to us with an application, and so you have to indicate the size of the project, where the project will be located. We then work out where on the existing network that will need to connect in to, and then that in turn would determine what new infrastructure is required. And then we’ll work out whether any reinforcement of the network deeper into the network is required. Large-scale connections will then have an impact on power flows on the Grid as a whole. If we can connect you without doing that additional reinforcement initially, we will do that, and then we will make a connection offer to you which will have a date in it and will detail those works. If that’s acceptable you then accept that, and then you are in the connection queue, you’re in the connection pipeline for your connection.

ED: How long will I have to wait to get connected to the Grid?

BW: We’ve got about 170 Gw of connections in the pipeline, and more than half of that is within a…is being offered a connection day within twelve months of what has been requested by the customer, so essentially is on time. And that ranges between sort of now through to about ten years from now depending on the scale of the project.

ED: So hang on, there are people waiting ten years to connect their projects. Obviously, they probably won’t build the project if they’re not going to be able to connect it for ten years, but, but, but well theoretically if I order now I might be told “Yes we’ll fit you in in 2033”.

BW: If you want to connect a very large, many hundreds of megawatts or even a gigawatt scale, offshore wind farm, and if you’re coming new in a place which requires new transmission infrastructure to be built to connect that, then it can take that long, absolutely, to offer you the capacity. And that’s a function of what’s already in the connections system ahead of you and it’s also a function of how long it takes to build a new transmission line.

ED: Everybody – the regulator, the investors in renewables and National Grid – everybody agrees we’ve got to speed this up if we’re going to meet any kind of 2035 target for de-carbonising the electricity system. I understand it takes a long time to get planning to build transmission cables and all of that, I understand that. Why there is a queue; why – it sounds like the old GPO, you know, when you ordered a telephone and there would be a big wait for two months while they would deign to install it for you. Why do you not just have the resources, once you’ve got the permission, to get on with the work?

BW: So, it’s, again, we’ve got to come back to the scale point to start with. So peak demand on the system is about 50 Gw today, and I just mentioned that at National Grid alone we have 170 Gw in the queue, and I think for the system as a whole it’s more like 280 Gw. So we are dealing with a transition here where we have multiples of the entire system in the queue ahead of us, so this is a, you know, an absolute step-change and inflection point, so that scale point can’t be made strongly enough. We do need to make changes: so we have a strict first come first served system at the moment under UK regulation where if you come and make a connections application you go back to the back of the queue even though not all the projects in front of you are actually ready to connect at the date they’ve been offered or in fact may ever connect. So we’re advocating for what we call “connect or move”, which means if you’re not ready at the date that you’ve been offered, then you have to get out of the way. So we don’t want people sitting in the queue blocking people behind them who have got ready to go…

ED: Projects which are ready…

BW: Yeah, exactly.

ED: How much difference are all the measures you’re proposing and Ofgem are proposing – the change in the queue – how much difference is this going to make? Or do you see this as just carry all the way through to 2035?

BW: I see the collective changes that we have been proposing, that Ofgem has been proposing today, I see those making a significant difference. So we could see years come off certain applications. So we will start to see that coming through. It is important to note, though, the targets for 2030 and for 2035, they are ambitious targets, there is risk attached to them, and we do collectively all need to do things differently if we’re going to hit those targets.

ED: Just a final one. Shouldn’t you have seen this coming, that we needed to adapt the Grid to the 2035 carbon tar…the target for de-carbonising electricity? And it’s been obvious for quite a while that we’re not…that the Grid is slowing the whole process down?

BW: You know, I’d point to the progress that has already been made. You know, the UK is one of the most de-carbonised advanced economies, I think our national emissions, the last time they were this low was in the 1890s, so I think we have seen this coming and a lot of progress has already been made. But the scale of transition ahead of us – these are, you know, once in several generations worth of changes, the scale of this means that everybody’s got to come together and push through these changes if it’s going to happen. It’s not for one company or for one party alone to deliver.

ED: Ben Wilson there, the Chief Strategy Officer at National Grid.

40 Comments

  2. “So hang on, there are people waiting ten years to connect their projects.”

    To be fair, it’ll probably take Nat Grid only a year or two to carry out the physical infrastructure installations, but maybe 8 to overcome the inevitable objections and lawfare of Greens & enviros regarding a proposed route.

    https://midsuffolk.greenparty.org.uk/2022/04/28/greens-call-for-undersea-electricity-grid/

    “As concern and opposition grow to National Grid proposals for huge new electricity pylons and cables from Norwich to Tilbury, the Green Party has proposed a radically different approach for getting power from wind turbines to the main areas of consumer demand. Some opponents to more and bigger pylons stretching across East Anglia have already pointed to the possibility of undersea cables to carry power further afield, notably towards London and its surrounding suburbs.”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-64913250

    “Opponents of a 112-mile (180km) line of pylons have welcomed an electricity transmission review of East Anglia.
    National Grid’s proposed network of pylons, from Norwich to Tilbury in Essex, would carry electricity generated by offshore wind farms.”

    https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/document/146091/download

    “In summary, the capital costs of the options considered are as follows:
    • AC onshore option (Norwich/Bramford/Tilbury) at 6.9GW £793.50m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Tilbury) at 4GW £2,028.20m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Tilbury) at 6GW £3,104.90m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Bramford/Tilbury) at 6GW £4,168.40m
    With lifetime costs as follows:
    • AC onshore option (Norwich/Bramford/Tilbury) at 6.9GW £1,136.00m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Tilbury) at 4GW £3,769.00m £2,475.00m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Tilbury) at 6GW £5,654.00m £3,713.00m
    • HVDC offshore (Norwich/Bramford/Tilbury) at 6GW £7,332.10m £5,099.83m

    NB – “This letter was updated and republished in January 2023 with updated lifetime cost figures”

    Liked by 2 people

  3. They’ve got applications whose total capacity is THREE TIMES the peak demand. It’s a feeding frenzy. Renewables companies are frantically trying to cash on on a highly lucrative profit-making business funded by the tax payer and bill payers. They are NEVER going to connect the majority of those applications, even if they can re-engineer the national grid to accommodate 100% penetration of renewables.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Jaime,

    For me, that was one of the key matters revealed by the interview. This was another:

    …You have to come to us with an application, and so you have to indicate the size of the project, where the project will be located. We then work out where on the existing network that will need to connect in to, and then that in turn would determine what new infrastructure is required. And then we’ll work out whether any reinforcement of the network deeper into the network is required….

    And this was another:

    …It is important to note, though, the targets for 2030 and for 2035, they are ambitious targets, there is risk attached to them…

    …But the scale of transition ahead of us – these are, you know, once in several generations worth of changes, the scale of this means that everybody’s got to come together and push through these changes if it’s going to happen….

    The scale of the transition is massive. It’s expensive, it’s disruptive, it’s very difficult. So why are we doing it? Needless to say Mr Davis didn’t pick up on any of the real issues revealed by his interviewee. He didn’t ask about the cost, he didn’t ask about the risk, he didn’t really ask anything about the difficulties involved. Still, an alert listener will have picked up that all of these issues exist.

    Of course, when we are continuously told (wrongly) that renewable energy is cheaper than gas, none of these costs or difficulties are factored in to that sum.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. “Damned By Their Silence: What Happened to the Grid Engineers Who Fought For Reliable Power?”

    https://stopthesethings.com/2023/05/18/damned-by-their-silence-what-happened-to-the-grid-engineers-who-fought-for-reliable-power/

    Engineers built reliable and affordable power supplies; ideologues obsessed with intermittent wind and solar are rapidly dismantling them. Why engineers allowed that to happen is something of a mystery.

    Sure, renewable energy rent-seekers have exploited opportunities created around ‘saving the planet’ by purportedly ridding it of man-made carbon dioxide gas by using wind turbines and solar panels (which do neither).

    And, yes, a naïve and gullible political class – backed by an equally naïve and gullible press – have provided the basis for the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.

    But to explain how disciplined professionals, who actually know what they are talking about, to allow it to happen, is something else.

    Bureaucracies are naturally bloated and filled with dimwits and yes-men. Regulators are usually in on the scam (whatever it might be) – with those employed always eager to join those that they’re meant to be regulating and benefit from a substantial uplift in their pay scale.

    In this essay, Russell Schussler attempts to explain how and why the experts who built our reliable and affordable power supplies have run silent and allowed the world to fall for the fantasy of an all wind and sun powered future.

    Worth a read, IMO.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Perhaps the moral code of grid engineers should be ‘first do no harm’ and they should stick to that, rather than abandon it under pressure from their ideologically driven and financially persuaded managers and employers. Rather like doctors and nurses abandoned this fundamental pledge during the Covid crisis and remained largely silent in order to keep their jobs.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. At this moment in time the Grid is running at 79% generation and 21% imported . The wind on most of the country is a bit variable but mostly moderate 13mph it can only produce13% wind, solar 17%. Do we have Gridlock in the North Sea or is the sun shining to much ? 13mph seems to be a decent speed for the high efficiency blades or is it a bit fluffy today ?

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Jaime
    Being presumptuous and speaking on behalf of other power station/ grid engineers, we have very little if any influence on the decisions made about developments and operations. Go through directors & senior management of the companies and see how many are first, heavy electrical engineers, and then how many have had a proper career in the coal face of the industry. There are more people on boards because of diversity box ticking than those actually know and understand the industry. Often the CEOs don’t.
    Then there is all the political and activist shareholder influence on board decisions. Are Blackrock or the like there? Institutional investors are often the worst – the demented reef fish.
    Planning Engineer at Climate Etc has written a number of articles on the issue of warnings and potential industry problems, one of which Mark linked to. No doubt many engineers have written reports warning of the dangers, which may come out if a collapse happened. Until that blackout happens, no-one will do anything. Then in the witch hunt afterwards, the guilty decisionmakers will weasel out.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. Chris,

    There were a few things which stood out to me from Russell Schussler’s essay at Climate Etc. The first is the siloing of experts into highly specific fields and the creation of a silo mentality among workers, such that very few had sufficient breadth of knowledge and general expertise to enable a focus on the bigger picture of grid reliability. The second is the apparent prevalent culture of belief among grid engineers and other utilities personnel in the moral propriety of ‘going Green’ – even to the point that they would stack the deck in favour of Green hopium, a kind of altruistic wishful thinking enabled by the aforementioned silo effect. The author says:

    “Despite what you may have heard, most engineers want to be environmentally responsible. Instead of being opposed to new technology, most of us have sought to support potential “green” applications that had at least small hopes of promise. I was never aware of anyone stacking the deck against “green” options, but the reverse frequently occurred.”

    This prevalent culture operated to disincentivize any dissent among the ranks:

    “/ There were few to no near-term incentives for individual utility experts or for utilities corporately to speak up as regard planned threats to reliability
    / There were significant near-term disincentives for speaking up.”

    I can imagine one of those disincentives was the threat of being fired.

    But the most shocking of all is the transition of the corporate responsibility of utilities from ensuring grid reliability to ensuring compliance with reliability standards set by a higher authority:

    “Perhaps the greatest impact came in the shift of responsibilities. Utilities used to have responsibility for ensuring reliability. They had skin in the game. They had a number of tools including generation and transmission options to better ensure reliability. But regulation by FERC through NERC, took the reliability function away from utilities. Utilities are no longer responsible for ensuring reliability. They are responsible for compliance with reliability standards. That was a profound and consequential change. Utilities are no longer developing reliability experts; they are developing experts in standards compliance. When outages occur, it’s hard to figure out where blame lies now. Will there ever again be grid experts who have skin in the game again?”

    So, utilities are no longer responsible for the safety and functionality of the grid; they just have to ensure they comply with overarching regulations. This is eerily similar to the sea-change which has occurred at the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, admitted to by the head herself, June Raine, who says that the principal role of the MHRA is not to aggressively regulate the safety of drugs but to ‘facilitate the speedy authorisation of safe drugs to market’, an ‘enabler’ rather than a watchdog.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Jaime
    Every country has its own grid management and electricity system. That means what may be happening in one place is not replicated in others. The US is not the same as Australia or NZ. It doesn’t appear to be the same as UK. What the US has as the utility in say Georgia is a lot more encompassing than say National Grid in UK or AEMO in Australia. This is why one has to be wary of extrapolations.
    If you go back to PE’s passage you quoted “But regulation by FERC through NERC, took the reliability function away from utilities. Utilities are no longer responsible for ensuring reliability. They are responsible for compliance with reliability standards.” The political bureaucracy changed the rules without regard to the views of the grid engineers. Invariably the lawyers and economists have more say in them than engineers do. Have a read of those rules and see if you can understand them, let alone run something to meet then. Compliance is often ensured by eyewatering fines on companies. And companies take it out on their staff. In those situations, what does one do? Meet the rules, no matter how stupid they are, and cover your arse.
    If you work among power station people, you would quickly recognise why siloing occurs. To understand parts of a system in an engineering context, you need a very deep knowledge within a very narrow field. It is very hard to communicate the issues to someone with even a basic understanding. There are many concepts hard for people to understand, even for those working in other parts of the same workplace. The interactions between turbines, generators, transmission components, and protection systems especially under fault conditions, cross many boundaries both physical and specialisation. I haven’t met anyone who understands the lot at anything more that a superficial engineer’s level though they can know their part very thoroughly. The grid rules take very few of these issues into account.
    I can understand why Ben Wison was expressing reticence. The politicians have a plan not based on engineering reality. They believe legislation will get compliance from the laws of physics. He is expressing the company line, not his own opinion. He can’t say things will turn to custard or will even that it will cost megabucks, though he might well know that. Politicians and bureaucrats are really vindictive when cornered.
    To increase capacity of a grid, you just can’t make the lines bigger. You have to do a huge amount of protection work going through all the scenarios of generating under different condition or what happens in faults. Then you need to plan how you will meet those challenges. That is long before the first sod is turned. But the bureaucratic morons can’t understand this.
    It is only when things go wrong that focus occurs. Then the rules do catchup. Go back to AEMO South Australia blackout in 2016 or Odessa Texas trip in 2021 & 2022 to see the problems discovered by compliance with the rules.

    Liked by 4 people

  14. Jaime
    I have to declare a vested interest. I co-authored a number of articles on the Australian grid with PE. I know it is very hard to write about analysis of technical issues at a level lay people can understand.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Chris,

    Your efforts to communicate the problems of adapting grid infrastructure to renewables to the wider public are effective and necessary.
    I do appreciate that aspects of grid function are extremely complex and almost impossible to understand by non specialists, even trained engineers, let alone the general public. What I would say though is that, up until the point when ‘renewables’ started to seriously perturb the operational effectiveness of the grid, national grids worked reliably and predictably and minor perturbations due to extreme weather, lightning strikes etc., were dealt with efficiently and effectively. There must have been experts with overall wide knowledge of the system to oversee the putting together of the components of the system in such a way that it functioned reliably, interconnected, as a whole. Those experts seem to be absent with regard to designing/updating ‘sustainable’ and ‘smart’ grids. It seems to be a case of ‘bolt on the extras and hope for the best’.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Jaime
    What makes you think politicians would seek, let alone listen to the advice of people who know what they are talking about? We are seen as stick in the muds or dinosaurs. Those bright young thinks with PPEs or the shiny suits are masters of the universe. Dissent is not tolerated.
    Look at how the CEO of Pacific Hydro was dumped because he told the Minister Snowy 2 pumped storage was a dog and they were wasting your time trying to build a CCGT to run on hydrogen when the fuel didn’t exist. The whole industry worldwide noted this and buried their heads back in their shells. The only ones saying things are the retired and semi-retired as we don’t have to worry about careers.

    Liked by 2 people

  17. Chris,

    “What makes you think politicians would seek, let alone listen to the advice of people who know what they are talking about?”

    I don’t think that. Never have. They are arrogant, unthinking, uncaring fools. But the public; they might listen to that advice, offered to politicians, especially when they are left in the dark on cold winter nights or forced to have their electricity rationed, and they might say ‘why the bloody hell didn’t you listen to expert advice?’

    Liked by 1 person

  19. The public doesn’t listen to the advice because it is not put to them. The elites receiving it ignore as it doesn’t fit the narrative. The Covid machinations showed that contrary views are not allowed. And look how power prices rises are explained – unreliable thermal generation is the current excuse isn’t it. Where are the Yellow Jackets?
    If one reads the AEMO technical reports, the warnings are there for Australian politicians. I am certain similar documents are there for other grids. However, the grid works on multiple factors of contingency cover that there needs to be a number of serious events occur concurrently for a major event to happen. That is why they aren’t appearing – just two or three of the four layers are used. When they do, it will be one-offs with bandaid patches until they can no longer deny them. That is when the no-one told us excuses come out. But until the lights no longer go on, everyone up top believes all is well and no issues.

    Like

  20. I could post this on so many threads, but it seems topical to put it here for now:

    “Wind farm curtailment costs see Scottish renewable power ‘wasted'”

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/23532508.wind-farm-curtailment-costs-see-scottish-renewable-power-wasted/

    The National, being IMO the SNP’s version of Pravda, pushes the idea that Scotland is suffering because of UK government folly, but in the process unwittingly demonstrates that the real folly was devastating Scotland’s wild places and wildlife by going on a windfarm-building frenzy when the infrastructure to cope with it wasn’t in place:

    FIVE-HUNDRED and seven million pounds. That’s how much was added onto British energy bills in 2021 alone because of fees the National Grid has to pay wind farms to shut down.

    That money – an increase on the £299m which was spent in 2020 for the same reason – was “utterly wasted”, SNP MP Philippa Whitford told the Sunday National, because there is not the capacity to send the renewable power generated in Scotland to where it is needed.

    The £806m in “curtailment costs” – 82% of which was paid to wind farms north of the Border – arose because the National Grid has not been upgraded sufficiently to handle the renewable power that Scotland can generate….

    Liked by 1 person

  21. That’s a very enlightening read Mark. It emphasises the fact that National grid have not built the interconnectors to transport this electricity to where it is needed, or could be used, in the islands and in England. Yet we’re busy building the Viking Link in Lincolnshire to transport renewable electricity from Norway!
    Besides that, the huge potential for pumped hydro storage and hydrogen storage is not being exploited in Scotland. Instead, our government is obsessed with huge batteries, which are resource intensive, extremely expensive, and hopelessly ineffective.
    It’s all about money. Short term massive profits for crony Green capitalists. National Grid knows that it cannot possibly incorporate these huge pulses of renewable electricity into the grid during times of high winds in Scotland – the infrastructure just isn’t there. So instead of investing in proven energy storage (pumped hydro has been around since the 60s), which would reduce bills for consumers, instead they just turn off the turbines and the renewables companies and investors profit handsomely for doing NOTHING.
    It’s happening in Germany:
    “Together, these suggest that limiting emissions is at best a secondary goal. There is of course the puzzling mania to phase out nuclear power, but there are many other things too. This Twitter thread, for example, draws attention to the general hostility of Agora Energiewende to energy storage, which is crucial for any grid that is to be powered by intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Agora has churned out statement after statement declaring that “the energy transition need not wait for power storage facilities,” until the grid runs on 60% or more renewable power. The little-noticed effect of this neglect, is to make the market for reserve power much more lucrative. The more intermittent energy sources there are in the grid, the more participants in this limited market can earn, either by taking payments to reduce energy consumption, or by supplying expensive short-term reserve power to counteract intermittent production. Investments in storage technology would destroy the possibility of profiting from intermittency, and it’s very likely for this reason that nobody is interested.”
    https://www.eugyppius.com/p/energy-transitioner-in-chief-patrick

    Liked by 1 person

  22. Mark
    Curtailment (and the costs associated with it) are going to happen more and more often. Rather than rewrite what is covered elsewhere, and trying to avoid link kiting, we cover it in the articles on Australian grid in Climate etc. South Australia has to do it near daily and keep the GTs on.
    Even if the lines had of been built, there can be major problems in transporting the unreliable generation long distances. As the output swings, the VARs change even more and the voltages become hard to control. Lightly loaded lines can be a nightmare. Can be cured but needs a lot more infrastructure than just transmission lines. When one looks at the construction cost numbers, the curtailment may be a cheaper option than overbuilding to carry everything south.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. @All – Seems the “your fault National Grid/Central Gov” finger pointing has finally started re the “renewable power wasted” reality that is finally hitting home (in some countries).

    as Chris says above – “That is when the no-one told us excuses come out. But until the lights no longer go on, everyone up top believes all is well and no issues.”

    I would only add, for the UK, it beggar’s belief that so many “renewable power” projects were given the go ahead without the National Grid saying something like “not so fast, we don’t have the infrastructure to cope with this many”

    Like

  24. ps – just read comment last line from Chris above –
    “Can be cured but needs a lot more infrastructure than just transmission lines. When one looks at the construction cost numbers, the curtailment may be a cheaper option than overbuilding to carry everything south.”

    not sure if you are talking about UK, but as Jaime pointed out above –

    “It emphasises the fact that National grid have not built the interconnectors to transport this electricity to where it is needed, or could be used, in the islands and in England. Yet we’re busy building the Viking Link in Lincolnshire to transport renewable electricity from Norway!”

    will this madness never end.

    Like

  25. dfh
    I was talking about the UK and getting power from the north of Scotland down into the middle of England. What I meant by the comment was as well as the transmission lines there is a lot more equipment needed. From prices seen, it can be more than the lines cost. I gather it would be a central spine rather than cross-connected parallel paths. They would need to minimise the tie ins of the spine so easier to built a totally new line than restring existing ones. Because the lines will have significant periods with little or no generation at
    the ends of the spurs, you will need at the very least statcoms at generation sites to control line voltages. There will also need to be syncons down the spine to provide inertia if you have islanding. Any smaller parallel circuits will probably need phase shifting equipment to limit spring washers. The protection system needs major uprating and probably new switchyards built. There will also need to be massive batteries (I assume GTs are a nono for Zero Carbon) to provide reserves. I believe all those terms were covered in Climate Etc articles to save tedious definitions here.
    I’m from the generation side of the grid, rather than transmission so I will stand corrected by someone with more knowledge.
    Connecting two full grids by DC (the Lincolnshire to Norway lines) is often a cheaper cost that bringing in the equivalent in new build generation. This is because as long as the DC is less than about 10% of grid load, and it’s a strong grid node it is connected to, both grids don’t need major upgrades.
    All the above can be done. The British consumer has to decide if the benefits are worth the cost. I don’t think they will which I would agree with.

    Like

  26. I tried several times posting a response to dfh (no links or naughty words) but the system didn’t seem to like it.
    I will try later

    Like

  27. Chris,

    It’s just wordpress again. I had to release your comment from spam.

    Like

  28. Chris,

    It seems to have appeared now. Apologies for the vagaries of WordPress.

    Like

  30. From what I can gather, the Viking Link interconnector is a high voltage DC twin power cable linking AC-DC converter stations at Bicker Fen, Lincs, UK and Revsing, Jutland, Denmark. National Grid is selling it as ‘importing renewable energy’ and it seems that Revsing is connected to the offshore Horns Rev wind farms in Denmark (infamous for those photos of wind shadow revealed by condensing water vapour). The Viking link is 765km long! Probably the world’s longest interconnector, which begs the question: why can’t National grid build something similar (of much shorter length) to transport electricity generated by Scottish wind farms to Middle England? What am I missing here?

    Like

  31. Jaime
    Bicker Fen and Revsing are very likely to be strong grid nodes. Where would the DC start in Scotland? The other big factor is how reliable the power is at the sending point – the load factor of the line. For wind maybe 30%. For something tapped into Norwegian Hydro and the European nukes maybe 80%. Economics look at the line loading in pence per MWh.. The other thing is the more interties your grid has, the more secure. If there are multiple AC, you get plagued by circulating currents, so DC is good for interties.
    In general terms, DC is cheaper than AC if longer than 50km in water and about 750lm on land. DC is point to point. AC often has tie-ins. These add to the costs.

    Liked by 1 person

  34. Chris M: many thanks for your input here, and elsewhere, which confirms that, to borrow a climateer cliche, it’s worse than we thought.

    Lacking your expertise, I thought this excerpt from the interview just defied common sense:
    “So peak demand on the system is about 50 Gw today, and I just mentioned that at National Grid alone we have 170 Gw in the queue, and I think for the system as a whole it’s more like 280 Gw. So we are dealing with a transition here where we have multiples of the entire system in the queue ahead of us, so this is a, you know, an absolute step-change and inflection point, so that scale point can’t be made strongly enough.”

    In addition, there’s no mention of the point that most of this massive hike in generation will be connecting to the periphery of the grid whereas, historically, the flow has been in the opposite direction. That must add to the challenge.

    Like

  36. Jaime. I apologise for not writing in terminology you can understand, but if I had explain each of the terms and how they fit together, it would take a textbook. In the Dilbert dictum “Do you want the simple but misleading explanation or the one you won’t understand?” I was trying for the middle but it looked like I missed. Sorry about that. But the takeaway is that to allow for all the unreliable intermittent generation from remote sites, the grid will cost megabucks and take decades to build.

    Mike – it isn’t that unusual to have generation some distance from load centres. Think of where the nukes are. All those 170GW of “generation” plans are kiteflying to attract subsidies. That is what they harvest.

    DFH
    They are trying to sell their power electronics (which is good) A solution looking for a problem.

    Rephrasing and simplifying what I had previously written. Think of grids or sub- grids that contain both generation and load centres. They about balance so can run without power from outside. There are a number of these that are or can be independent of each other. It can be very beneficial to electrically connect the two grids so that aa surplus in one area can be used in the other. However, the connecting lines need to be heavy duty to take large loads. At both ends, they need terminals/ switchyards well connected to their own grids so power can get to or away from the connector. The connection lines are interconnectors or interties. In general, they go across political boundaries or between big islands. If the two grids are well tied together, they may run at exactly the same frequency and phase angle using AC interconnectors. Think of the North European grid France to Poland where a lot of power goes across the borders. If the two grids have different timing of their frequency, undersea connections or a long way apart, it is DC.

    We have a cynical saying. The three parameters of electricity are that it can be clean, cheap, reliable. You can only choose two. What would it be?
    I .

    Liked by 3 people

  37. Chris; thanks for that correction. I should have given my comment a little more thought before posting: Wylfa is certainly on the periphery!

    Liked by 1 person

  38. Chris – thanks for the response.
    I like your “cynical saying. The three parameters of electricity are that it can be clean, cheap, reliable. You can only choose two. What would it be?”

    My 1st thought/answer would be “cheap + reliable” but seems that is not an option for net zero UK. If I answered “clean + reliable” for the UK that’s when “cheap” goes out the window.

    “clean + cheap” is a tricky option, maybe Nuclear power?

    Like

  39. DFh
    Clean and cheap is wind and solar. The lights go out at sundown or when the wind stops blowing though.
    Now how many would opt for the realities of this option if giving a choice?

    Like

  40. Chris – just flipped a switch to turn on the light & sat at my computer to read/respond to comments.
    my only worry up till now was a light bulb may need replaced or disc failure on the pc.
    the things we take for granted thru the existing grid hits home with your last comment – https://youtu.be/ratQlft_G5c

    Like

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