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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>>Troels Halken says: June 20, 2010 at 1:45 pm
>>There is nothing new in the article. We have done so for some time here
>>in Denmark, simply because wind turbine are the cheapest to turn of.
Since you never use any of your wind power anyway, you might as well turn your windelecs off completely.
http://incoteco.com/upload/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf
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“Troels Halken says:
June 20, 2010 at 1:45 pm
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. ”
Troels, is that Danish humour? You confirm everything the Telegraph says and at the same time insult their readership, plus WUWT for re-publishing it? Now if i take what you say about the situation in Denmark then i would say the Telegraph has written a rather good article – it describes the situation correctly. That’s better than most journalism i would say.
jim hogg says:{June 20, 2010 at 1:43 pm}
“Peter F – Glad someone else read this. So far there’s only been a test,”
Perhaps the test is not about shutting down windmills but rather a test to see how the public will react to payments for not using them. If there is little negative reaction, they know they can get away with it. As you can tell, I don’t trust anyone involved on either side as long as they are spending OPM.
So, this is the Brave new Green World:
Praise the savings and pass the checkbook.
Peter H calls this scaremongering? More like ironymongering. Dreams of windmills replacing big oil are silly.
>> Veronica says: June 20, 2010 at 1:49 pm
>> Ralph. Denmark is IN Scandinavia, I think you’ll find.
Scandinavia Storre.
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Smokey, or whatever your name is:
Being for or against big government and taxes is a matter of opinion. It is not a fact we can measure or in other way determine the truth of. If I was interested in opinions I would visit blogs discussing peoples opinions.
Oh but our governments have done worse than that here in the UK! We sold off the national rail companies to private concerns – then send them a cheque once a year as well! We’re actually paying MORE now for our entire rail network than we did when it was a nationally-owned company – but it’s mostly privately-owned! I’ve run out of exclamation marks now.
There are sound reasons why wind farms will need to be swithced off in the future, as more and more are built. The energy produced cannot, with current technology, be stored. I believe that the energy from wind turbines is so variable – it varies as the cube of the wind velocuty _ that it cannot be used to directly drive things like electric motors. The only way, currently, that it can be used is to feed the power into an existing, STABLE, electric grid. The problem is, that the varying power of WFs, if it gets to be too large, destabilizes the grid. There is a limit as to how much wind energy a stable electric grid can take; I believe the figure is about 15 to 20%.
This means that if WFs are able to generate so much electricity that they just dont destabilize the electric grid when power demand is high, they will almost certainly destabilize the same grid when power demand drops. So if during the day, the wind energy just does not destabilize the grid, what happens at night? Clearly, if the wind turbines generate the same amount of power, they will have to be “turned off”, otherwise the grid will become unstable.
This does not matter for conventional ways of generating energy. Down time conserves “fuel”, and can be used for routine maintenance. It is part of normal practice and is already costed in to how electric grids are run.
Wind farms add a problem, which means there are going to be more and more occasions when generators will be paid to turn the wind turbines off in the future.
“Troels Halken says: ”
Hey, i remember you from an older Wind Energy thread – i think you said you work for some Danish Wind Power company, right?
Troels:
“Being for or against big government and taxes is a matter of opinion. It is not a fact we can measure or in other way determine the truth of.”
Of course it can be measured. Polling organizations do it all the time, with error bars in the ±3% range.
In the U.S., Conservatives outnumber Liberals by about a 2 – 1 margin. That’s why people here are so upset with the hijacking of our formerly excellent economy and the massive new taxes that are coming.
Oh Boy, it looks like a true nerve has been touched with this article, for the sacred cow of wind power has been shown to be pure bunk.
When I’ve driven through the passes in California where the windfarms are there, I’ve been frequently wondering why so many of them simply are not running. This explains it, perhaps we should see if the California utilities are in a similar situation…
Troels Halken says:
June 20, 2010 at 1:45 pm
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.
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Isn’t yours as a business developer for the wind industry though? In the UK we have a saying “Never trust a salesman”. You are right about our crazy climate laws in the UK though penalising business and consumers, but the wind industry lobbied hard for those subsidies.
“Ralph. Denmark is IN Scandinavia, I think you’ll find.”
No it isn’t. Scandinavia is the peninsula where Sweden and Norway are situated.
Peter H says:
June 20, 2010 at 12:55 pm
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.
Then why did “The National Grid” do the test? Moreover, don’t you think the “prospect”, which you agree is in fact frightening, could be better eliminated simply by making it legally impossible to pay Windmill Farms for not producing energy? Why is the “prospect” even at all possible in the first place?
“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, then, Dave H, following your line of logic you seem to be saying that wind power will always be “tiny” so it will never be a problem to worry much about. So if that is the case, what is the point in building them in the first place?
We waste money to build them, we waste money to operate them, for a “tiny” amount of power. So basically, we have substituted money for coal and now have a power generator that burns cash instead of fossil fuel.
Marvelous. Just marvelous.
Windmills don’t work. End of.
Our Energy minister here in the UK, Chris Huhne, wants to build another 2,600 of these monstrosities to provide the power that a couple of nuke-powered stations could do and much more efficiently. Who is is going to pay for the 2,600 windmills? The UK taxpayer, that’s who. I cannot opt out of paying for something I know does not do what it claims to do. A portion of my earnings is going to be taken from me whether I like it or not to pay for something which has been proven to be useless.
What to do?
Smokey:
“Of course it can be measured. Polling organizations do it all the time, with error bars in the ±3% range.”
You didn’t get it: You can’t measure or otherwise determine if big government is ultimately good or bad.
But I can tell you this: The Danish citizens are some of, if not the happiest in the world year after year. That you can measure and you can find it on the website of the Economist. And we have what you term big government and high taxes compared to the US. As I said: You cannot objective determine if big government and high taxes are ultimately good or bad.
Atomic:
“Isn’t yours as a business developer for the wind industry though? In the UK we have a saying “Never trust a salesman”.”
Then it is good that I’m a business developer and not a salesman, don’t you think?
Re: Veronica
They can and do turn off coal/gas power stations. They know roughly how much electricity they will need at any time of the day and arrange the production accordingly. So they will therefore tell some power stations to reduce their output to a certain level at a certain time. If there is an unexpected spike in demand they have the likes of Dinorwig power station which takes 75 seconds to get to full power from a standing start. While they are using this power the traditional gas/coal stations can bring more power on line. They will also have a certain amount of power on standby just in case of emergency (eg. a power station failing, unexpected increase in demand). By standby I mean ready to generate electricity with minimum startup time.
The problem with the wind is that they do not know with any degree of certainty when it is going to blow. They therefore can not go to the wind farms and say they want X amount at this time and Y amount at that time. It also means that no matter how much electricity is generated by wind power, they have to have enough of the coal/gas stations on standby to cover all electricity generated by the wind turbines just in case the wind decides to either stop blowing or blow to hard.
“The trial demonstrates that wind can help balance supply and demand just like other generation types: this is potentially useful to us on warm but windy summer days when generation outstrips the low demand – and a higher proportion of generation is made up of wind and inflexible nuclear.”
Does this guy even know what is coming out of his mouth? What about on still summer days? On a breezy summer day you can open a window, that’s smart wind energy. He’s basically saying that wind energy is only good as a suplement. An unreliable supplement at that. Also why is there a higher demand for energy on hot summer days in the UK?
One might expect that the British will get better at using the available mix of electrical sources with more experience.
Troels Halken says:
June 20, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Being for or against big government and taxes is a matter of opinion. It is not a fact we can measure or in other way determine the truth of.
Wrong: it’s well established fact that Communism doesn’t work, and Socialism’s outcomes are not far behind…and counting. I take it you’ve just awakened from about, say, a 200yr. nap?
Peter – have you ever actually watched as the change in demand on ‘the grid’ and seen how there is a constant battle to maintain 60 Hz (or 50 for most European countries)? First there is a ‘phase lead’ situation followed by a ‘phase lag’ and generating stations interconneceted on the grid are constantly as it is adjusting speed (or phase) and the amount of 60 (or 50) Hz energy being fed into ‘the grid’.
This isn’t like paralleling automobile batteries with a pair of jumper cables.
Adding ‘wind’ exacerbates the situation to the point well, where “power system security” (as the industry phrase puts it) cannot be maintained (it becomes unstable and can collapse) … think changing torsional forces acting on every rotary machine (generator) in the system … and wildly so in an unstable system …
.
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Here in the Pacific Nothwest, Washington and Oregon is supplied by the Bonneville Power Authority, which increased their windmill generation capacity last year from 1695 MW to 2692 MW (a 58 % increase). Yet the amount of power produced by the windmills decreased by 29 %.
See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/WindEnergy.htm