Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Alba; Imagine receiving a quarterly household electricity bill of £10,000 – because this is the kind of money Britain’s Electricity System Operator paid last Wednesday, to prevent blackouts during the heatwave.
London narrowly avoided blackout as electricity prices surged last week
The UK was forced to pay 5,000% higher than the typical price for electricity to prevent a power blackout in south-east London.
Britain paid the highest price on record for electricity in London last week as the capital narrowly avoided a power blackout, it has emerged.
National Grid’s Electricity System Operator (ESO) was forced to pay £9,724.54 per megawatt hour to Belgium, more than 5,000% higher than the typical price, last Wednesday to prevent a blackout in south-east London, as first reported by Bloomberg.
A sequence of issues around the hottest UK days on record led to extreme constraints in the power system and hiked up demand.
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While the amount bought at the record amount was minimal – reportedly enough to supply eight houses for a year – it has exposed the UK’s reliance on importing electricity from interconnectors overseas, particularly France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
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But Wednesday’s sky-high transaction could be felt by households in their upcoming energy bills as energy suppliers pass on the costs.
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Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/london-belgium-london-fire-brigade-europe-france-b2130623.html
Part of the reason for the electricity shortfall might have been the British solar panel fleet’s failure to perform during hot weather.
Weather ‘too hot’ for solar panels
Power output during heatwave drops below levels typically reached in spring
By Helen Cahill
19 July 2022 • 7:07pmThe weather was too hot for solar panels on Tuesday as soaring temperatures reduced their efficiency.
As the heatwave pushed the mercury above 40C for the first time ever in Britain, solar output remained well below the levels usually reached at peak times in spring.
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Solar panels become less efficient when temperatures rise above 25C, meaning energy generation drops off, with efficiency decreasing by around 0.35 percentage points for every degree above this level.
Professor Alastair Buckley, of the University of Sheffield, said: “We never see peak output in mid summer.
“The temperature of the actual solar cell depends on a combination of the ambient temperature and the radiative heating from the sun and also cooling from wind. We saw cell temperatures of 70 degrees yesterday on our test system. Normally it would be between 40 degrees and 50 degrees.”
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Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/07/19/weather-hot-solar-panels/
Can you imagine a global warming energy solution more useless, than a solution which fails in hot weather?
This struggle to supply adequate energy during adverse conditions makes me wonder what Britain’s next winter will be like. Solar is close to useless during winter at high latitudes, and widespread prolonged European wind droughts like last September are not exactly uncommon. If Russia continues to play geopolitical games with gas supplies, and France continues to experience problems with their nuclear fleet, there may be no spare capacity available at any price, next time Britain run short of electricity.
Only British voters can fix this crisis, by demanding politicians prioritise energy security and affordability over hitting net zero targets.
My bill would have been $4,147 more on my $305 dollar bill for only 1 extra day of elect at that price.
Of course, when it all goes horribly wrong, the lights go off, industries collapse and people start being killed in the cold, we will be told by the BBC, the rest of the media, the entire political class within the acceptable Overton window, and Greta’s zombie army, that it was because we did not install enough green energy quickly enough.
Call it the Griff Pricing Plan. Be sure and use lots of electricity on the (random) free day per month and just focus on that when paying the bill for the other outrageous days. It used to be called the lobbyist plan but that did not sell very well.
Just so you know, the CdTe thin film panels work more efficiently than silicon panels in high heat conditions but such facts are swept aside along with slave labor-made polysilicon components from western China. And these thin film panels can compete without subsidies, if the slave labor was not in the mix in the 10 super league list of producers from China.
So we need two sets of panels. Normal panels for the bulk of the year, and CdTe panels for the hot days?
Or just look at all the factors….
Our Technology | First Solar
Recycling | First Solar
First Solar: Our Pledge on Forced Labor (vimeo.com)
and price and margins (without slave labor competition)
I’m sure that griff or Simon will be along shortly to assure us that before man started burning fossil fuels, there were no heat waves.
I follow the data on gridwatch.co.uk here in the UK. I had puzzled why the output from solar panels was so low last week. They wandered either side of 15%.
The figures aren’t minute by minute, but they are regularly updated. All the figures for the power transferred by interconnectors to and from Europe are also displayed…_
For 3 or 4 days last week the Sheffield source of the solar power statistics could not be read by several sites because they changed their format.
I keep telling you, if you want your solar panels to work at peak efficiency, you need to keep them in the shade. Does nobody care about science anymore?
So much for paving the Sahara with solar panels then, eh?
Amazing that a solar panel can’t stand the heat of the sun! What is their purpose anyway?
As for wind power, a “wind drought” (anticyclone) in September isn’t much of a problem, since September weather is fairly mild (not too hot, not too cold) in most years, and generally sunny in calm weather.
But an anticyclone in winter over northern Europe can result in cold, foggy or cloudy weather for days or weeks on end with very little wind, and the sun angle is too low in winter to “burn off” the fog. Neither wind power nor solar power works in such conditions, and pollution from burning fossil fuels (particularly coal) is trapped under the thermal inversion.
The once-Great Britain needs to get off its global-warming high horse and start developing all of its energy resources. Wait another five months or so, it will be cool enough, but they’ll need to keep the lights on much longer–in December, daylight only lasts about 8 hours.
They also need to imitate France, which gets about 75% of its electricity from nuclear power!
Ten days ago the British media was absolutely blaringly abuzz with hype about the forecast “heat wave”, pictures of wildfires, people running through fountains, “Get ready for the Future” headlines, predictions of thousands of heat deaths….
Here is the reality, 2 hot afternoons, July 18 and 19…
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/uk/london/historic
One has such a hard time calling their predictive garbage “news reporting”….
The Brits have no one to blame but themselves, this whole mess is stupid and completely preventable.
Well here in South Australia we’re pioneering some inertia which should make us all relaxed and comfortable-
Pioneering big battery key to future grid (msn.com)
Hornsdale Power Reserve is an outstanding demonstration of the market-changing role of large-scale batteries in the race to net zero emissions,….
The project was also granted $5 million from the South Australian government’s grid-scale energy storage fund and $8 million from the federal Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
That’s market changing for you.
Why Britain is short of power in the summer I don’t know as demand is lower, winter is when we get peak demand so what it will be like this coming winter?
The other thing is we seem to be exporting more power than we import?
They are linked. We have a lot of capacity in maintenance at the moment, which is why CCGT generation doesn’t go above about 16GW. LNG import capacity on the Continent is limited, so we are importing extra LNG and exporting it again, partly as pipeline gas, and partly by running available CCGT hard to create an export electricity surplus when we can, saving Continental power stations from having to run methane out of their limited supply. We can’t pipe out all the gas we can land over our demand – the pipelines have been pushed beyond normal max capacity.
Where it gets ridiculous is when the cost of supplying France with electricity is paying silly money for imports from Belgium.
Not only is Britain shooting itself in the foot by going green it’s also shooting itself in the other foot by refusing to give money to Russia for cheap gas with the shocking result that Russia refuses give it away for nothing.
Well that’s 2 feet taken care of. How about trying for the head next?
And this morning at 09.41 UK time wind is close to zero, only producing 0.27 GW and coal fired power is running at 0.98 GW producing 3.6x more power than wind.
And its summer and demand is low and the living is easy. Winter is coming.
‘only British voters can fix this’ if only we could find a Conservative politician somewhere.
“your SUVs made it too hot for solar panels!” – Greta, probably