Britain’s biggest wind farm companies are to be paid not to produce electricity when the wind is blowing.
Published: 9:00PM BST 19 Jun 2010
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
Critics of wind farms have seized on the revelation as evidence of the unsuitability of turbines to meet the UK’s energy needs in the future. They claim that the ‘intermittent’ nature of wind makes such farms unreliable providers of electricity.
The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.
The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the ‘balancing mechanism’ – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied.
The system is already used to reduce supply from coal and gas-fired power stations when there is low demand. But shutting down wind farms is likely to cost the National grid – and ultimately consumers – far more. When wind turbines are turned off, owners are being deprived not only of money for the electricity they would have generated but also lucrative ‘green’ subsidies for that electricity.
The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.
Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.
It raises the prospect of hugely profitable electricity suppliers receiving large sums of money from the National Grid just for switching off wind turbines.
Dr Lee Moroney, planning director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, a think tank opposed to the widespread introduction of wind farms, said: “As more and more wind farms come on stream this will become more and more of an issue. Wind power is not controllable and does not provide a solid supply to keep the national grid manageable. Paying multinational companies large sums of money not to supply electricity seems wrong.”
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Even better would be if there were a temporary oversupply of electricity from a gas-powered generating station, they could feed it to the windmills to make them go round and round and produce lots of lovely wind! I don’t know why we didn’t think of this decades ago.
@DaveF Lololololol
You couldn’t make it up.
“seems wrong ????????” I am rendered speechless (and as my friends and colleagues will gladly tell you, that doesn’t happen a whole lot).
/dr.bill
Sheer lunacy. And we electricity consumers are being fleeced to pay for this scam. It’s even more lunacy because wind turbines actually cause an increase in CO2 emissions. See http://www.masterresource.org/2010/06/subsidizing-co2-emissions/
This would be funny, if it wasn’t so seriously absurd:
Wind farms had to be highly subsidized in order for them to be built and run, and now the U.K. government is going to subsidize them to NOT do what they were subsidized to do in the first place. Only in the government (and not just the U.K.: ours too).
Given the people currently in control of the our National government in D.C., I shudder to think that it probably won’t be long before this type of bureaucratic lunacy makes it over to our side of the big pond.
SIDEBAR: Governments in Western countries seem chronically stuck on continuing to shovel out large subsidies to multi-national corporations to build UNcompetitive wind and solar installations that CANNOT be used as base load; when what they SHOULD be doing is fully supporting Gen-III+ and (a little further down the road) Gen-IV nuclear plants.
Lets just read what the article says…
“The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.” – so it’s not happened yet.
Further: “Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.” but, windfarms only generate a tiny proportion of UK electricity so the cost is going to be….tiny, and remember, it’s not even happened…
So, the article is reduced to this pure scaremongering “It raises the prospect of hugely profitable electricity suppliers receiving large sums of money from the National Grid just for switching off wind turbines.” raises the prospect! We’re all gonna be taxed to death by ‘raising the prospect of’ something happening? I think not.
So, this is the usual WUWT scaremongering about either tax or big Govt – this time it’s tax.
Don’t buy it people, I don’t, I’m not going to be sacred by such propaganda.
Sad. Absolutely sad.
And if that’s not crazy enough many councils are replacing street lights with more efficient ones, and also intending to turn many of the lights in quiet residential areas off completely after midnight. Thereby reducing the base load even more.
That will make it difficult to export “green” energy from the solar panels in my front garden after dark….
DaveF says:
June 20, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Think of the boon that would be on hot, windless, summer days!
We could use windfarms that way to keep sailboats going on the lake!
Even with this latest development, Real virtual wind farms have a relatively poor return on capital compared to my Virtual virtual windfarm. They pay me whenever they are not in a position to take my output. Which is OK by me, because my wind farm is offline 24/7.
I also have a profit-booster, which consists of a pair of jump-leads. When I want some extra cash for Christmas or say a trip to Vegas, I connect the mains from my utility meter to my windfarm power meter which is the only thing on my windfarm that is not virtual. See those meters whizz round! At the end of the month there is a whopping electricity bill for sure … but an even more whopping cheque!
This pretty much lays bare the notion that wind power was ever supposed to reduce fossil fuel use and thus “carbon” output. The people have been scammed, and scammed good.
Peter H Writes
“So, this is the usual WUWT scaremongering about either tax or big Govt – this time it’s tax. ”
Could I point out Mr H that WUWT is just repeating a story which already appeared in the Uk’s daily telegraph.
Its more like the usual UK MSM scaremongering about tax or big Government.
Which is why Denmark, Europe’s largest wind generator, has NEVER USED any of its wind power – it sells it to Scandinavia instead.
http://incoteco.com/upload/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf
.
Peter F – Glad someone else read this. So far there’s only been a test, so at the moment it’s classic Telegraph scaremongering. However, a precedent has been set: money has changed hands for a trial switch off. I’ll wait and see, and hopefully the facts will surface as the summer passes. As to whether I think we should have wind turbines on such a scale in the first place, that’s another story entirely. Wind power is like wave power: unlikely to deliver when we most need it – in the middle of winter during an extended frost. It is also ridiculously expensive. But it makes a fortune for certain companies and individuals. The much more obvious option,of reliable and potentially profitable tidal current generated power doesn’t seem nearly so attractive to companies whose only concern is easy money, regardless of the rights and wrongs of it. HEP at sea is the option that’s sitting up and begging to be exploited – especially in the fast moving water round Scotland’s coasts but even that is likely to be reduced to subsidy milking and consumer abuse.
Results like this are the logical consequence of political prize-fixing. Similar things happen in Germany – the electricity prize on the Electricity Exchange in Leipzig went negative several times already. It doesn’t happen theoretically as Peter H said, it does happen in reality and will continue to do so as long as the market is rigged.
This site is usually worth the read. But as an engineer I find you reporting on energy simplified if not plain stupid. The article above is clearly copy/pasted from a newspaper, who’s readers is not among the brightest and who know almost nothing of electricity production, consumption, grids and gridcontrol. Oh, and there is nothing new in the article. We have done so for some time here ind Denmark, simply because wind turbine are the cheapest to turn of. And even with 20-30% wind power in our grid, it does not happen often. The real problem is that when the government made the laws on wind power subsidies, they did not take into account that a few days a year there is to much power in the grid, and hence they should have made the law taking this into account, as the penetration of wind power in the grid grows. Then this situation would have been avoided in the first place. But as it rarely occurs, it is hardly a big problem.
It’s the same when Jeff Id rant with his right wing-rhetoric: Taxes and big government.
Here in Denmark we have a saying that in rough translation goes like this: “Carpenter, stick to you trade”. That is also my advice for this blog.
Then why don’t they temporarily turn off the coal fired ones? Or does it take 24 hours to stop them in their tracks?
>>dave ward says: June 20, 2010 at 12:59 pm
>>That will make it difficult to export “green” energy from the solar
>>panels in my front garden after dark….
That’s a real problem. The Greens were depending on night generation from solar panels to make them twice as efficient as they are now.
.
Peter H says:
June 20, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Peter, we’re not scared. We’re outraged. And it isn’t propaganda. It’s fact. Spain has answered that question. So has California. The Foo Foo pie in the sky green dream has failed.
Ralph. Denmark is IN Scandinavia, I think you’ll find.
Only the Liberal Greenies can invert sanity and logic in this way.
I agree with you Peter H with respect to the article being couched in terms which amount to scaremongering.
However, the problem of intermittent supply which is inherent with power generation using wind is real. Further, the fact that the National Grid is contemplating the scenario which is set out in the article does indeed invite a sense of the ridiculous.
It seems that wind power will not in the long run replace anything but an insignificant amount of CO2. It is no answer to the wider problem (if there be a problem).
Peter H says:
June 20, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Lets just read what the article says…
“The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.” – so it’s not happened yet.
Further: “Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.” but, windfarms only generate a tiny proportion of UK electricity so the cost is going to be….tiny, and remember, it’s not even happened…
–end quote
Thanks, Peter, for the advice that we should read what the article says. which you obviously did. However, reading the article is not all. We also need to understand what the article states, which you — also obviously — did not. Therefore the irony of you stating that nothing has happened yet while tens of thousands of pounds were already paid out, even though it was just a trial, so far.
By the way, it will not just be electricity consumers who will be forced to pay for the impracticality of wind-power generation, and that alone is a substantial amount of money. No, every good and service that requires electricity to be produced or provided will have the price of wind-powered energy production added on to the end-consumer price, plus whatever taxes can be raised through all intermediate stages of production.
Electricity, whether we are direct users or not is as essential to modern life as is eating food, drinking water and breathing air. We are all being taxed, many times over, for any and all inefficiencies deliberately being built into energy production and distribution.
The governments of developed nations don’t mind. The more inefficiencies there are, the bigger their tax revenues will become. That is one of the main reasons why governments of the developed nations actively promote any and all hare-brained schemes for increasing tax revenues through making the electricity industry inefficient.
The Government of Alberta, Canada, actually contemplated (and perhaps still does) to replace the provincial income tax through the taxes that can be raised through energy production and distribution. It was assumed (and perhaps still is) that “The People” would gladly accept that method of energy-based taxation because of the promise of unlimited funding for “free” health care.
It would be wrong to call that government business-principle a conspiracy. Those in power have no need to conspire. They just do.
Troels Halken says:
“It’s the same when Jeff Id rant with his right wing-rhetoric: Taxes and big government.”
You say that like there’s something wrong with being against more taxes and big government.