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.”
This certainly explains why Spain is broke and why ‘green’ energy costs so much.
Why couldn’t I have thought of this, getting paid to deliver no product.
Troels, maybe you’re happy, and maybe you’re not. But one thing is sure, you’re promoting a self-serving agenda, no less than Barrie Harrop.
It’s also clear that you’ve never read Hazlitt, and in fact don’t understand the title of his book. Likewise Hayek.
Your envy and hatred of the ‘rich’ ignores the fact that the top one percent of earners pay more taxes to the federal government than all of the other 95%. Since poor people provide zero jobs, you’d best hope the rich stay around. Because the alternative is to give the money to the government, and then we’re back to Hazlitt and Hayek.
How do the Brits feel for getting gigged every flip of the switch?
Scandinavia includes Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The Nordic countries include the scandinavian countries + Finland and Iceland.
Denmark is part of scandinavia.
Is it just me, or does it seem that the more outrageous the green buffoonery that is put in the spotlight, the more condescending, indignant, and strident the defensive reaction?
Hey, don’t yell at us cause your boat’s got a hole in it and is sinking fast, and we aren’t real pleased about going down with the ship simply because you insist upon it.
Troels Halken
http://tinyurl.com/ykevgd8
This is a complete non-story.
Balancing a modern power system is complicated. The system operator continuously constrains power stations off or on for numerous and various reasons, including transmission system “congestion”, also for voltage management, also to provide “operating contingency”, to make sure system frequency can be managed at all times, and for other reasons.
The UK power market achieves much of this through mandatory and commercial arrangements, known as the Balancing Mechanism and Ancillary Services. These arrangements have existed since 2001 (going all the way back to the 1997 Labour Party manifesto) and have nothing to do with wind or any other particular generating technology.
Balancing actions can appear especially counter-intuitive at times of minimum demand. So please don’t fly off the handle at things that don’t look right at first sight -certainly not on the back of a journalistic article about a test.
The occasional need to constrain power generating equipment off will not materially affect the economics. Nobody in the article said anything about how frequently wind generation would need to be constrained off. If people believe that wind can make a useful contribution to our energy supply (personally, I’m agnostic) then constraining it off for a few hours ain’t gonna swing the issue.
If there is a possibility that wind might need to be occasionally constrained off by the system operator, then it is right and prudent that the industry carries out tests well in advance. Looks like that’s all that happened in this case.
There is no end of testing all the time on various aspects of the power system. Perhaps the difference here seems to be that somebody took a particular test in order to develop an emotive argument.
And paying power stations to reduce their output in the balancing mechanism is not all that unusual. It’s a market with particular technical characteristics – there is no rule to say that prices must be positive. You just need to be in the right place at the right time … and not price yourself out of the market.
Relatively high price is also a feature of the UK balancing mechanism: it is intended to hurt operators who cause imbalance, and to reward those who help to resolve imbalance. These extra incentives should help to drive investments (build more reliable plant or to make it more flexible, or suffer the consequences).
Take a look at the balancing mechanism website (www.bemreports.com) and you’ll see that balancing prices are frequently many multiples of the forward-traded power prices. And if you look around, you might even find instances of payments to reduce output.
I agree that WUWT should encourage healthy discussion about subsidising (or not) certain forms of energy production. That’s the high-level question at stake here.
But this newpaper article does nothing to alter that debate either way. Picking on something that routinely happens in the balancing mechanism is a complete non-story and takes the arguments backwards.
The sad part is: Windmills are not about saving the environment, they are just another short term business model, made viable by taxpayer money. The long term solution is, of course, nuclear.
It may have been a test in UK, but here in New Zealand where we generate 65% of our electricity from hydro, it is becoming more and more common for hydro stations to spill water in order to allow WFs to remain connected to the grid.
We also run a full wholesale electricty market, and it is apparent that when wind is blowing the wholesale electricity price is extemely low, and when the wind isn’t blowing the wholesale price is exteremly high. This makes for a very unstable pricing mechanism, and a low rate of return for WF owners.
Troels Halken says:
June 20, 2010 at 3:10 pm
“Just leave me with my high taxes, big government and my happy life ;-)”
I recognise that argument from the DDR. They said they had zero % Unemployment.
Tim says: “Why would you PAY someone when you DONT buy their product?”
It’s not that unusual to pay somebody when you don’t buy their product. For example, a cancellation charge for something you have ordered but no longer wish to receive.
In the case of the power industry, some power stations may plan to generate output and sell into the market. But the system operator (for whatever reason) needs to re-jig the actual operation of the plant by asking some not to generate and others to make-good the lost production.
Technically, the required power stations need to stop operating and we all get the benefit of stable system operation and security of supply as a result. Commercially there is a basis for something akin to a cancellation charge between the power stations and the system operators.
This is nothing unusal – it happens all the time. It is happening right now as you read this text. And if it didn’t, you wouldn’t.
Well they certainly weren’t switched off on Global Wind Day 8.00am 15th June. as NETA figures for great britains energy generation for GB Wind were…0.0%(17MW) (due to low wind)
oh….and 7th June 0.0%(4MW) oh and 5th June 0.0%(3MW) oh and 3rd June 0.0%(11MW)……………
Dear Ralph,
I read the article you posted on the Danish wind industry. Its main point seems to be that Denmark, with major grid connections to Germany as well as Norway and Sweden, which can accept the fluctuations as ‘partners’ in the grid, will have less of a problem with power surges from wind than an ‘island’ system like the UK. It is implicit that if (theortically) all of Denmarks grid-shaers were to go wind-power to the same extent as Denmark, the same problems as in the UK would arise here too, but has some usefulness as a secondary element. Pan-European drives for wind power do not make sense inthis light. I can stand the sight of them, but that is a matter of taste I suppose.
There are “days”… yes. The problem is that those days usually coincide when the greatest electricity demand. When do you think the highest demand for electricity will be? I’ll let you know – it’s when a high settles over the country, which tends to produce very still days. In the summer they get very warm. In the winter they get very cold. In both cases electricity demand shoots through the roof.
Something to bear in mind is that when one of these high pressure areas settles over the UK, it covers jut about the entire country.
What this means? Well, you have a peak in demand for electricity at a time when there’s no wind.
Or what about when the wind is gusting? They can only go so fast – above a certain windspeed they have to be turned off so they don’t damage themselves. Of course when the wind is that high, demand for electricity tends to be higher as well…
Those windmills are useless when they’re most needed. They have a very narrow operating band and they can only be relied upon produce electricity in any significant at the wrong times. Usually they don’t produce enough to be worth having on the grid in the first place.
And, as others have pointed out, they need reliable base-load capacity to back them when they aren’t producing. For every wind farm Gigawatt you’ll need the equivalent capacity in a conventional power station – because they don’t provide electricity reliably, or at the right time.
On top of which, they eat birds and require the destruction of thousands of square miles of natural habitat.
Please explain why it’s a good thing to spend money on something that is so destructive, so inefficient and so wasteful. I can’t seem to work it out.
Tim says:
June 20, 2010 at 3:08 pm
I guess I just don’t get it. Why would you PAY someone when you DONT buy their product?
That is an excellent question. Here’s another example of this type of policy from the US:
There may be several reasons.
Sunny Spain suspends solar subsidy scam
€18bn flushed down the baño
“Dead broke Spain can’t afford to prop up renewables anymore…
Estimates put the investment in solar energy in Spain at €18bn – but the investment was predicated… on taxpayer subsidies… Incredibly, Spain pays more in subsidies for renewables than the total cost of energy production for the country. It leaves industry with bills 17 per cent higher than the EU average…
Spanish economist Professor Gabriel Calzada, at the University of Madrid estimated that each green job had cost the country $774,000.
Worse, a “green” job costs 2.2 jobs that might otherwise have been created… Industry, which can’t afford to pay the higher fuel bills, simply moves elsewhere.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/17/spain_sustainability_scam/
———
Unlike Spain, the UK is still pretending it isn’t bankrupt. Ironically the only reason the UK is only as far in the hole as they are is because of North Sea OIL.
All in all, the UK is looking more Monty Pythonesque all the time, only without the humor. The rich are getting richer having windmills on the lands while the “small people” are going back to their good old days as feudal serfs.
And the vast majority of UK serfs don’t even have wood…
03 June 2010
Rising electricity prices are increasing the use of wood for heating in South Eastern Europe to alarming levels, posing a serious threat to health and the environment, experts warned.
http://www.euractiv.com/en/enlargement/impoverished-se-europeans-turn-wood-heating-news-494816
I think I understand: We have a problem created by taxpayer/ratepayer subsidy which can only be solved by another subsidy. If only there were a cheaper, simpler solution…
Guys, straying too far into politics is becoming quite unpleasant here. Can I suggest that comments stick to the point of the article? As the climate sceptic audience grows larger, it is going to have all sorts checking out WUWT, and if this place is chock full of idealogical rants, you will exclude many of us coming here for good strong information on the climate stuff. I know there are trolls around, but attacking people’s politics is unpleasant and unnecessary.
@jim Cripwell (June 20, 2010 at 2:06 pm) — “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%.”
Germany, hardly technologically backward but now finding nearly every square millimeter of their countryside infested with the giant turbines, has called off further development because of grid instability. The figure there is about 5%. Denmark has 20%; nearly all of that is dumped to Sweden and Norway, which have much larger grids.
— Almost everybody else:
You are arguing on the basis of actual electricity generated by wind turbines. This is absurd. The purpose of wind turbines has nothing whatever to do with electricity — indeed, there is some question, given the fact that they need to be regularly rotated, faced into the wind, dehumidified and heated, etc. while their actual per-unit consumption is never even measured, whether they generate any net power whatever — but rather to generate subsidies, tax breaks, and phony “carbon credits” for international financiers. This they do wonderfully well, and it now becomes utter perfection when they can be paid for not generating electricity, which of course they do to perfection.
The goal of genuine environmentalists now should be to support all the bureaucratic planning, the tax and subsidy arrangements, and so on, with guaranteed payment, but instead of actually building the things, once all the arrangements are made the turbines, towers, and cement are all dumped in the Marianas Trench. Taxpayers, grid operators, and ratepayers would all be better off — not to mention environmentalists — and the financiers would never notice the difference.
Sure wind power seems at first to be a good idea. But lots of things do that don’t end up working out in the end. Look at ethanol for example and bio fuels. An almost complete failure. If wind power is not cost effective, and does not reduce dependence on conventional energy sources, there is no use for it no matter how much wishful thinking one might have. The President wants to move towards less reliance on fossil fuels, and do this without building additional nuclear plants. Talk about wishful thinking. What he really wants is to tax energy through the roof, so we use less of it, and the Govt can raise trillions of extra dollars from this new source of revenue.
Pater H- we ignorant readers of newspapers also have sayings-one of which is “ignorance is bliss” which can explain some conditions of happiness, I suppose.
As for previous arguments that since wind is not a large portion of generation, the cost of payments in lieu of operation is not significant, it appears from the article that the cost per Mw ratio of payments to Wind for no generation compared to payments failure to generate from thermal is about 9:1. Looks to be pretty significant.
While the UK example was evidently only a test, this condition has already occured in Texas and soon comming to the PJM grid area.
Halken ignores that Danish interconnections to external grids with high proportions of Hydro which can absorb or replace grid changes in short order make for a entirely different grid management situation.
Incidently, electric power system control, trtansmission, and generation, in my case is “you” trade and has been for about 35 years. From previous comments on this blog, there several other power engineers as well.
While it may be merely a language difference, in the USA “Business Development” translates to “lobbyist” or “contributor” in the case of “developing” wind power requirements and subsidies. I would prefer “salesman”, but that’s just me.
Maybe wind power does generate “most of the time” in Europe, but the load factor still appears to be about 30% or less regardless.
In addition to the subsidies, there are the additional costs of transmission, additions to control systems, additional spinning reserves, and its fuel use, all of which are currently being included in users electric rates.
Yeah, some USA farmers are paid to refrain from planting crops to reduce surplus and its effect on market prices. But they were not paid to buy the seed, plant and til their fields, and then not harvest.
Jim Cripwell says: June 20, 2010 at 2:06 pm
The energy produced cannot, with current technology, be stored.
Not so. See here or, if you’re from the USA, here.
The same type of affair is being considered for tidal schemes to smooth out the supply/demand mismatch. But these are tiddlers in terms of grid capacity. Many more would have to be built pushing the real cost of renewables even higher.
“AJB says:
[…]
The same type of affair is being considered for tidal schemes to smooth out the supply/demand mismatch. But these are tiddlers in terms of grid capacity. Many more would have to be built pushing the real cost of renewables even higher.”
Pumped storage. The cost is not the problem. Resistance by environmentalists is. You get NIMBY syndrome on a GreenPeace scale by suggesting to blow off a mountain top and flood a valley.
@Craig Goodrich:
Craig, you are so right about comments to “–Almost Everybody else:”
I was foolish enough to attend a conference on “Green Technology” here in the “green”, “PC”, Pacific Northwest part of the USA. Huge room fillled with people over several days. But not many “technologists”. My estimate (after eating dinner, lunch, and conversing with attendees during intermissions) is ~60% lawyers, maybe 10% “investors” (including one speaker who said literally — ‘we don’t want to hear about your science projects, we want a minimum $1billion return on our investment’), ~10% government bureaucrats (federal, state, local), ~10% press (passive) and public relations shills, *maybe* 5% real “green technologists” with “skin in the game” and the rest people like me wondering WTF/OMG. My estimates probably understimate the percentage of lawyers, given the list of conference sponsors.
And the comments on Spain and and the topic of windmills. Can’t help but make the Don Quixote connection.
And @HB:
You can’t not talk about politics, economics and policy w/”climate” and “environmentalism”. There so little discussed that’s real science (or even engineering) (not that there isn’t real science and engineering)– it’s primarily about politics, money and power, and so little about science and information, sadly. Thank someone, anyone, Anthony et al. for WUWT.
And a kind-of sad thing, Essex and McKitrick’s 1st ed. book was published in 2002, 2ed in 2008. Though it’s easier to find now in the USA, had to buy my old 1ed. copy through a bookseller in Canada.
Gee! No wonder Al Gore gets paid so much when not bellowing hot air!