Between 4:30 and 6:00pm on Tuesday, wind farms were paid about £65,000 to stop producing enough electricity to power 50,000 homes for a day, according to data from the UK Wind Curtailment Monitor. 

I suspect that wind - being easily 'switch on and offable' is being used to fine tune the grid balance. Given thermal generation stations take a fairly long time to start up and shut down, I guess that the grid plan ahead for the worst case demand and have sufficient thermal stations on line - if demand turns out to be a little less, then they shut down the easiest/cheapest to switch off. Yes, given the way the market is arranged if the grid can no longer fulfil their side of a contract to accept power there will be financial adjustments to be made.

    - Andy.

And this is where  apparently inefficient storage comes into its own - if that lost wind power had been heating water, electrolysing  water to hydrogen, pumping seawater into a lagoon or even just charging some batteries it would have been totally 'free' despite the apparent inefficiency of such processes. If we are to rely on bursty power sources then we need storage that can handle that - and all the technology I listed exists, we just need some large sheds dotted about near the wind farm shore stations and larger solar farms.
Mike

PS
Note that in the context of the grid, assuming the 50000 houses for a day is 2kW * 10 hours 50,000 for easy sums, that gigawatt hour or so is not that great an amount, but it is unfortunate it cannot be better used with the current set up.

Michael Kelly: An engineer shows us what net zero would really mean

The numbers here are quite staggering.

www.youtube.com/watch

Well yes, we all know that storing electricity in any great quantity is difficult.

Your latest Tesla or whatever car might store 100 kWh, but that isn't going to get you through a whole winter. 5 days?

Well yes, we all know that storing electricity in any great quantity is difficult.

Your latest Tesla or whatever car might store 100 kWh, but that isn't going to get you through a whole winter. 5 days?

It isn't just the cost of storage, it's the costs of new generation capacity and more importantly, the cost of distribution network upgrades too.

On a side note, it appears that Norway is having second thoughts about continuing to export due to the low reservoir levels it is experiencing which is resulting in lower hydro generating capacity, so I wouldn't rely too much on our neighbours being friendly with their interconnecters. Also we are exporting to France because their power workers are on strike and their nuclear capacity is coming to the end of it's service life.