Bill Ponton
Magical thinking about energy may not hold up much longer in the UK. Disagreements between European nations may scuttle plans for an integrated energy policy and with it the UK fantasy of attaining net zero. Central to the thinking of energy planners in the UK is the hope that an affordable solution to energy storage will magically appear. Batteries, green hydrogen storage and pumped hydropower storage are all hopelessly impractical and uneconomical. As a result, planners have eyed the vast hydropower potential of Norway. Its hydropower installed capacity is 32 gigawatts (GW). Hydropower accounts for 97% of Norway’s electricity generation. Its hydropower reservoirs have a storage capacity of approximately 85 terawatt-hours (TWh).
UK energy planners look on with envy at Norway’s holdings and have negotiated an agreement to import electricity from Norway via an interconnector. UK planners hoped that Norway would provide the UK with all the electricity that it needed during periods when UK wind and solar generation slackened. They assumed that Norway would take one for the team, so to speak, if the UK got into difficulties with its energy experiment. Afterall, didn’t Norway want to save the planet and reduce the UK carbon footprint. Apparently, not as much as one would have thought. Norway’s electorate has just said no to a scheme for further European grid integration.
This does not bode well for UK planners. They have been increasing their reliance on imported electricity from Norway. The UK’s percentage of imported electricity over interconnects has climbed steadily from 6% in 2022 to 14% in 2024. At a time when natural gas generation has diminished from 39% in 2022 to 26% in 2024 (see figure below).
Natural gas generation compensates for vacillations in wind and solar generation. Imported electricity over interconnects from Norway is now playing a greater role in compensating for those fluctuations. One would think that Norway’s vast hydropower storage capacity would allow it to provide the UK with electricity and not hinder its ability to provide electricity at a consistent, affordable rate to its own citizens, but that is not what has happened. The UK power fluctuations have led to an increase in electricity price volatility in Norway and the voters don’t like it. They want to quarantine themselves from high electricity prices that inflict the UK and Germany, which also has an interconnector with Norway.
In 2023, Norway turned down a British request for a submarine cable to Scotland, an event which could foreshadow future reluctance to expand interconnect capacity beyond the current design. The UK is facing a dilemma. Scaling back natural gas generation to meet 2030 green electricity targets means becoming more dependent on electricity imports. However, that import strategy depends on the UK being ability to strike a deal with Norway that will not have Norwegians subsidizing the UK green energy experiment.
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Apologies for repetition but this seems a more appropriate article than where I first uploaded it
Story tip: Plans for hundreds of batteries in shipping containers on farmland near Canterbury
The city council ruled in late February the EIA – a means to formally explore the impact a project will have on a nearby area – would not be needed.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/plans-for-hundreds-of-batteries-in-shipping-containers-on-fa-322315/
Show them a few videos of Moss Landing, in California.
Out of ignorant curiosity — what frequency do these interconnects use, and what is their energy loss?
They are direct current, so will have inverters at both ends to convert from/to AC 50Hz which is the standard across Europe/UK.
HVDC losses are less at around 3% per 1000km, compared to HVAC losses at 7%. Losses crossover around 700kms. Surprisingly, HVDC end conversions don’t add much extra loss.
Quoting from the WIKI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current): “HVDC lines are commonly used for long-distance power transmission, since they require fewer conductors and incur less power loss than equivalent AC lines. HVDC also allows power transmission between AC transmission systems that are not synchronized.”
Most HVDC links use voltages between 100 kV and 800 kV.
I assume they’re using semiconductors to perform the DC-AC conversion. Which always makes me feel that the voltage levels you’ve quoted must be very stressful on the components. Wonder what the MTBs are?
Commutation failure is the most common cause of HVDC failure
https://energycentral.com/c/gr/commutation-failure-hvdc-%E2%9A%A1%F0%9F%92%A1%F0%9F%9A%A6
More likely old fashioned vacuum tubes. They are still in use in many places and in those places are the best choice.
There probably still using mercury vapour rectifiers, for AC-DC conversion.
Thanks — I knew I was ignorant, just not how much!
My take on a sane and sensible UK energy policy:
[1] Short term: use whatever we have to in order to get energy prices down. Including what is in the North Sea.
[2] Short to medium term: fracking for natural gas.
[3] Medium to long term: nuclear.
[4] Long term: research energy conversion from diffuse sources to more concentrated ones. For example, solar power collected in space to synthetic gasoline-like fuels.
Why nuclear? It is the most expensive. Why not revert to coal, best for base load – and gas to deal with variable demand? Coal used to be 50% to 60% of UK supply.
Nuclear is on.y viable with subsidies from taxpayers and consumers. The UK Hinckley Point is being built with Chinese + EDF money, is now twice the projected cost, and 12 years behind schedule if it opens as now planned in 2030. The original UK nuclear fleet was paid for by the taxpayer and consumer in inflated prices.
The original wholesale price for Hinckley C was £24 per MWh, but now Government – which refused to chip in with the capital cost – has guaranteed the consortium £128 per MWh, inflation linked for lifetime of the reactor otherwise it wouldn’t be viable to finish the project and get the thing working. This price is double gas or coal and just as expensive as wind and solar.
I don’t understand the persistant thinking by some that nuclear is “the solution” and not coal and gas.
The real solution is throwing overboard the whole climate change/Net Zero scam and getting back to what worked and was cheap… coal and gas.
Nuclear doesn’t need to be expensive, we’re making it expensive by building one or two essentially prototype reactors to meet ~25% of our base load, and then dragging out the planning and construction over 20 years, if instead we simply adopted proven French/Korean etc designs, built enough to cover all of our base load, and expedited planning/construction, we could get the cost/MWh down to levels competitive with coal.
Basically it’s a learning curve, and we’ve decided to stay at the very bottom of it.
The other thing, I think, we’re doing is failing to take a whole of systems approach to nuclear. SMRs can, and should, be used to both redesign but to also use money from, the electrical grid. Using some or a lot of the monies we’d spend on building out the grid and making it both more robust and cheaper.
Use SMRs in the system’s design, cleverly place them closer to the point of use, and we might just be able to reduce long-range transmission lines with highly efficient SMRs carrying the base loads with the grid supplying, primarily, the variable or peak loads. If we’re lucky, and we don’t just use a one-size-fits-all approach to sizing the SMRs, there will be enough of locally produced excess between, say, downtown office buildings, industrial sections, and residential clusters, that the grid will not have to supply more than a minimal amount of excess power to supply peak loads within a local production grid.
I grok that the monies for the grid, power generation, and such come from different buckets and there are likely some contractual and legal obstacles to pooling the money but I’d think that this would offer the lowest cost solution to both enhancing and making more robust both the power generation and the grid, thus making our electric supply more secure.
I’ve read recently that the US have found SMRs more expensive to build/run than large reactors, and have returned to the traditional technology.
With SMR’s it’s the same problem as Sizewell/Hinkley C, new and unproven technology versus tried and trusted designs.
With Sizewell/Hinkley we’ve chosen to go with a new and unproven reactors, of which the only 3 in existence were plagued with problems and took 20 years to build, over older but successful designs that would likely be available at a fraction of the cost/MWh.
If it were me, I’d probably have ordered 20 or so of the Korean OPR-1,000s, which the Koreans can put up in about 5 years, or failing that an older French/US design.
SMRs would be ideal to power desalination plants. Southern California could have all the water it needs for drinking, cooking, filling swimming pools, watering lawns, and as millions became aware of this year, fighting fires.
There should be many reservoirs in the mountains around southern CA cities. Connect them to pipelines with sprinkler sticking up on tall pipes. When a fire breaks out, turn on the sprinklers to wet down several long lines of defense.
Neighborhoods like the ones which got wiped out could have misting sprinklers all along their streets, perhaps on every rooftop. If every building in Topanga, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu had been equipped with rooftop sprinklers, with a water supply of several hours, they would’ve been too damp to burn.
Getting a good mist into the air would’ve put out flying embers before they could light things on fire.
SMR powered desalination could provide plenty of water for such a defense system, and in extreme emergency the pumps could mix some straight ocean water in. Getting the soil a bit salty is better than having almost an entire city destroyed. Sprinkling on a lot more desalinated water should dillute the salt. Plus there’d be the benefit of replenishing aquifers.
Nuclear is expensive because the environmentalists want it to be. Get rid of the nuisance lawsuits and rationalize the regulations and the cost drops dramatically.
Your right about the past and current costs of nuclear. We have the small modular reactors to use instead.
Highly regulated large & very expensive bespoke nuclear reactors need to be rare.
Factory produced Small Modular Reactors should be the way to go. Cluster 6-8 SMRs together and swap out modules as needed for refueling. These can be sized to fit on a semi-tractor trailer. Because they will be a standard design and factory produced, the cost will be much lower. There are several promising designs, some of which are already U.S. NRC approved and in production.
Collecting energy in space and bringing it to Earth would warm our atmosphere as that energy was converted into heat.
Not to mention microwave cooking any living thing that passes through the energy beam.
Depends on the power density of the beam.
I’ll keep my chocolate bars in a tin 😀
I think y’all missed my point. Yes, solar mirrors or similar would be both dangerous and potentially disruptive. But what if the conversion to more concentrated energy was done in space? Then it would “simply” be a matter of bringing the stuff down. By rocket, or even perhaps some “Jack and the Beanstalk” scheme. A matter of economics.
Solar power collected in space and transmitted to the surface efficiently … is a weapon.
Do you want government controlling a many megawatt microwave laser? Sure hope it doesn’t drift off of the receiver!!
If anyone was expecting a sudden outbreak of common sense I hate to disabuse them of it; not with our Parliament.
The government has approved plans to build an offshore windfarm capable of powering about 1m British homes before the end of the decade.
The plan to extend the Rampion offshore windfarm by adding 90 turbines off the Sussex coast
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/04/offshore-windfarm-in-sussex-turbines-rampion
The English Channel is a very busy waterway and adding 90 turbines is going to make it even more congested 🙂
The congestion will clear up as trade collapses.
Not to mention the HoL. Just yesterday I was reading a transcript of a debate on net-zero. Only one, who presented meaningful figures justifying the abandoning of the whole idea. The rest continued to spout the crap of climate crisis and needing to save the planet.
They’re not interested in reality.
The House of Lords is now pretty much all political retreads. The last hereditaries will go soon – Sir Starmer promised! He didn’t say we’d get Wise, Experienced Legislators, though. Just more retreads.
Frabjous Day!
Auto
“retreads” I like it
From the Guardian article:
“Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “The UK has a boundless supply of wind that cannot be turned on and off at the whims of dictators and petrostates. “
And you can’t turn the wind on when it is needed either Ed. Idiot.
Miliband is the dumbest of the dumb.
Dumber than Biden or (shudder) Harris? Maybe you’re just comparing Miliband to British pols.
I don’t mean to be mean, but Brits keep electing characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Miliband is the kind of British politician who Carroll was making fun of when he wrote “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
To be sure we elected Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama and Biden, so I shouldn’t get too cocky.
Here’s the visual footprint of that new wind farm. On a good day you could see tye tips of the blades from the North Downs close to the M25.
The existing windfarm is bad enough, but its turbines only extend to 140m/462ft, whereas the new ones will be 1,066ft. Taller than the Eiffel Tower. Note this map covers a much smaller area.
The problem is deeper. It’s not just the UK that’s trying to use Norway as a UPS, it is also the UK’s chief rival in the race over the Net Zero cliff into economic ruin, Germany, with its 30 000 plus windy machines, frequent dunkelflautes, closure of nuclear plants, re-opening of coal plants… but only temporarily.
Then there’s the rest of Europe too teetering on the brink, as cold, still air moves down over it from the Arctic in Winter – odd that – for days/weeks on end, also hoping to tap in to the magic supply from the European Interconnector which will ever be available because… well, you know, the wind’s always blowing and the sun’s always shining somewhere – and at upwards of $1 000 per MWh it’s worth it to save the planet.
O/T Westminster (Labour) Council is recruiting…
Are you privileged? Take the quiz to find out…
https://data.reachplc.com/250933036408959
Trump kicks it out, Starmer drags it in.
What does Question 8 reveal, the one about seeing your own mob denigrated on TV. This should get a huge YES answer because your average ordinary UK person (seen by some minorities as privileged) would be under persistent attack by special interest folk in small sad groups (who would confuse the survey by also voting YES). What a nonsense survey.
Geoff S
Nonsense – of course.
So the recruiter can exercise their [her/his/xeyr/our/wowr etc. ffs] prejudices, without being caught.
Easy.
Auto
The price the good citizens of Norway pay for their electricity has increased by more than 50% since the UK and Germany began to import Norwegian hydro in earnest. Electric is the main source of energy for the country, and the Norsk folke do not like it one bit. They simply won’t finance the stupidity of the Germans or the Brits.
… or the Danes or Dutch either. I just written the following for the benefit of the ESNZ Select Committee:
Sounds like the UK needs another Margaret Thatcher.
Another John Major would be a start.
The grey man?
We need Wat Tyler
Don’t think Norway will continue to play the UK/Germany electricity game. They cannot.
Norway would be doing Britain a favor if they cut off all electricity imports today.
” UK planners hoped that Norway would provide the UK with all the electricity that it needed during periods when UK wind and solar generation slackened. “
Are you sure of this? I download the UK data from Elexon frequently and graph it. I can find no correlation between interconnector flows and demand in the UK, which is surprising. Even looking only at “net” demand in the UK, that is, demand with wind and solar subtracted. This is counter-intuitive. The attached graph shows the data for the North Sea link to Norway, but other interconnectors show a similar pattern. The UK demands almost entirely on natural gas now for load following. Here is a correlation table from Jan 2022 to present which confirms this:
Demand_Net Gas Norway
Demand_Net 1.00 0.88 0.14
Gas 0.88 1.00 -0.08
Norway 0.14 -0.08 1.00
Joel,
yes, that is what it looks like.
Norway and Viking interconnectors are less than 3 Giigawatt combined, not really that large. The French interconnectors are greater in capcity.
NSL often operates more or less as baseload. The full capacity hasn’t always been available (there have been diplomatic “failures” at converter stations). However, you need to look at the wider interconnection picture to see how vulnerable the UK is to Norwegian policy.
THis chart gives some insight into the various modes of interconnector use depending on the lelvel of renewables output. When it’s windy they are used preferentially to help with higher demand hours, and cut back during low demand hours. When it isn’t, then supply can be more variable as we compete to bid for it. However, the red NSL from Norway is there much of the time
There’s a Tom Stanton video on wind power in the Orkney Islands. They built wind turbines all over the place but the connection to the rest of the UK is too small to send it all through. It’s almost never NOT windy in the Orkneys, so why the foot dragging by UK government and electric utilities on installing a large enough connection to take all the excess power? It should be far less costly than running a line to Norway.
SSE operate the Viking wind farm in the Shetlands. In 2024 its output was curtailed 57% of the time at a cost of £10m.
So SSE get the curtailment payment – millions – without lifting a finger … might that suggest why there is no link.
And might not be for – oooh – years?!
Auto
There is a very costly oversize link to Shetland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland_HVDC_Connection
Its operation so far has been somewhat intermittent. There is also considerable congestion from Blackhillock substation on windy days for transmission South to the Beauly-Denny line. A 400MWh battery there has been undergoing commissioning, but ti will only scratch the sides of the problem.
Why don’t you inquire with the power company to see why?
Are the wind farm developers getting paid for the wind they produce but can’t sell? If so, why bother? Who, BTW, thought this was a good idea to build?
The UK National Energy System Operator (NESO) expect curtailment costs to wind farms will reach £6bn by 2030 unless the system is changed.
For example the Seagreen wind farm in the North Sea has so far been paid £104m for generating but £262m to switch off.
Prof Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has done a study for Net Zero Watch and calculates that the the total cost of the UK electricity system will rise from £34.1bn in 2024 to £58.9bn in 2030 under NESO’s Net Zero CP2030 plans
‘Will Net Zero reduce electricity costs in 2030?’ , Net Zero Watch
Thanks for the Net Zero link. I read that paper. I could not confirm the author’s assertion that the price of electricity correlates with imports. I also am puzzled that the govt talks about replacing NatGas when it is the only significant power source on the grid which load follows. They talk about increasing imports but imports do not load follow. Also, this paper only talks about the grid, which accounts for 20% of the UK’s energy use.
Many things the UK government says about climate change are puzzling!