Turning OFF Costs. Why?

Presumably, the national grid contracted with the owners of the wind turbines to purchase all of the electricity produced by those turbines. If at times of low load this power is nor needed, then presumably some turbines are turned off, but the national grid still have to pay for the power that could have been produced.

The details may be more complex than that, but with a similar result.

The cost is less than £10 a head.

We need grid-scale energy storage if we are going to use more renewables.  But we don't have anywhere near enough, and nobody is doing anything about it.

As usual, the government has targets, but no energy policy.

I'm sure you have heard this before but can you suggest a method of "Grid scale" storage, say 1 TWhr? No neither can I or anyone else. This is why we have none (well a tiny bit of pumped storage be we have had this a long time). Even that storage would only drive the grid for about 24 hours, which is nothing like enough to get rid of fossil fuels!

There is no energy policy, there is a don't use energy policy, invented by Green Idiots who know nothing. Note what is happening in Australia at the moment, many poor old people are freezing to death, on the alter of Green is best and saving the planet.

This article is interesting.

wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/09/claim-lets-put-batteries-on-wind-and-solar-farms/

I suspect it's just part of the bigger problem of keeping the grid in balance - too much generation at any point in time is just as disruptive as too little - similar to paying heavy industry to reduce their demand (which I gather they also do in various ways) - wind has the nice feature of being very switch-on-and-off-able - far faster response than any thermal generation station - so is in many ways a good choice for fine tuning grid balance.

   - Andy.

There are some interesting ideas that are not batteries, that may suit some trickier locations.

ITM have their electrolysers for example. If the headline figure of 36kg of H2 per hour at 2MW DC input per module is more or less right, then if the hydrogen is burnt later, you get about half of your KVA t back.  At the moment the idea is to use it to thin natural gas,   in the manner of the Hydeploy system currently trialing hydrogen methane blends of by up to 20% by volume, in the domestic supply - and so far it seems to work just fine..

Compressed air is also in the frame with a thermal twist https://www.hydrostor.ca/technology/ for example.

Then there are tidal lagoons that can be over pumped in times of excess supply.

There is certainly a problem storing GWhrs safely, but in among the childish politics and soundbites, some serious folk are doing some serious engineering. The next 100 years or so should bottom the problem out.

Mike.

Not sure you want or need one Tera-watt hour 'fuel dump', but it does fit with the current scheme of centralized generation, because it might be vulnerable to attack, fires, or just good old single point failure. However if/as we move to a grid with far more  lower power generating sites, then a few thousand storage sites each with banks totalling half a gigawatt hour may be more sensible, or even at the street or domestic level, a few days supply for a house is perhaps half a megawatt hour. - back to that 36kg cylinder of hydrogen again (a touch under 1000 litres at 20C and 1atm, or more sensibly an oil drum size at racing bike tyre sort of pressures).

Mike.

There are plenty of grid-scale approaches that have been suggested over the years,  We already have pumped storage hydro, but not much of it.  Lithium Ion batteries would be really expensive.

Others I have seen suggested are:

• Any lower energy density, but cheaper batteries, e.g. sodium ion, and flow batteries.
• Spinning flywheels.
• Compressed air.
• Hydrogen.
• Making a big pile of "bricks" really hot, then running turbines from the heat.

I have probably forgotten a few.  There are others, such as big weights dangling down disused mine shafts, but we don't have that many vertical shafts to use.  But nobody has ever produced more than prototypes of any of them.

I would expect to see lots of relatively small "batteries" scattered around, either near towns or where renewables are connected to the grid.  Building one massive multi-TWh battery somewhere in the midlands doesn't make a lot of sense.

The whole thing is a big mess. Look at the market for example -  QUOTE:

Our regulator has made a catalogue of errors and it has cost consumers billions

You do not need a regulator if prices are transparent, choice is simple, and competition is fair.

Ofgem – the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets – is needed because before today’s price débacle that has sent bills out of control, the competition between energy suppliers was none of those things.

In reality, energy suppliers supply nothing except bills. They do not supply the electricity and gas that runs down the wires and pipes into our homes. Or the pipes and wires come to that. 

Those were fitted decades ago and the job of keeping them repaired and fit for the second quarter of the 21st century is actually down to National Grid which owns that infrastructure. All the suppliers do is add a charge on to your bill to cover that work. The amount is set by Ofgem and is now around £100.

So what do suppliers actually do? They buy electricity and gas on the market, work out what we have used, and send us a bill. They do not send energy into our homes – generators and storage facilities do that. A simple accounting exercise works out how much profit or loss the supplier has notionally made.

UK's Electricity Mix

For 30 suppliers those losses have been so catastrophic that they have gone bust. But their customers have not lost their supply. That must continue or no one would change supplier and there would not even be a pretence of competition.

Customers of failed firms are picked up by a large supplier which then repays customers the surpluses created by overestimated monthly direct debits and buys energy on the market to supply them.

The National Audit Office said the cost to consumers of those failed firms had already hit £2.7bn.

Ofgem itself has admitted the mess has added £94 a year onto every household’s bills – even the half who have never changed supplier. Add on the estimated £1.9bn to bail out Bulb – which with 1.6 million customers was too big to be absorbed by this mechanism – and the price of Ofgem’s failed competition regime is closing in on £5bn.

It will, it said in December, “ensure that we learn the lessons … and adapt our approach”.

There is another problem with the energy system: it is a false market. The suppliers – billing firms – can only compete on price. But if they simply charged for a unit of electricity or gas, as a supermarket does for a tin of beans, it would be too easy to see who was cheapest and only a very few large firms would survive. So Ofgem makes comparing prices difficult.

First, in 2013 it forced all suppliers to have a standing charge – an accountancy mechanism inherited from the industry’s nationalised past.

A typical household – itself a fictional Ofgem construct – pays £821 a year for the units of electricity and £157.60 for the standing charge, just to be connected. A sixth of the bill is independent of what a household uses even if that is zero. That makes the cheapest deal different for high, medium or low users depending on the standing charge and unit price, both of which the supplier can vary.

Suppliers encouraged the confusion by inventing tens of thousands of tariffs with different prices for units and standing charges over different fixed periods. A dozen parasitic websites sprang up to do the complex calculations to find the best deal. Every customer who switched both fuels earned them £60.

But they hid the truth in two ways. In 2018 Ofgem ruled they did not have to list every tariff so the comparison sites could do deals with a supplier to get its tariff at the top of the tables.

Second, Ofgem allowed them to charm customers with fictional savings. The actual saving is the cost of the old tariff minus the new tariff which is often tiny. Instead, suppliers quoted the difference between the new tariff and the tariff they would revert to if they did not change. Those revert rates were kept artificially high and people who switched found the promised savings did not materialise. Ofgem responded by capping the revert rate.

But as wholesale prices have soared above the cap that is the rate almost all of us now pay. No competition and no market. 

Ofgem should read its own mission statement, and better protect consumers “whether or not it would promote competition”.