And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.".
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
Power lines that cut over your property? I can buy that - thats a nuisance. I'm not saying I would I am saying that as a rural property owner that would be annoying.
Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
I do wonder how much nymbyism is influenced by most individuals carrying 5-10 years earnings in their home. Such a potential liability might make one awfully concerned about liabilities.
The Green Party around there picked up a lot of ex Conservative votes and oppose the nuclear plant at Sizewell and pylons for renewables. Its a weird alliance.
Eh, it explains their performance EU-wide: combine the worst of both worlds.
I've mostly voted Green all my life but for the last 5 or so years I remain satisfied at their losses, as they're somehow unable to understand why people are moving away.
(My comment's a little bitter, but I do hope they figure this one out.)
I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.
Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.
I live close to the route that this will be built and regularly get cheap/free energy from my energy provider, partially because I live close to the wind generation in question.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
> And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
> You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C.
It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once.
And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
You might find the crossover for hot water heating is higher than 0p; your boiler is likely only around 70% efficient. So at 6p/therm for gas, you'd break even with resistive electric heating at around the 10p/kWh mark.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
> The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc...
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
This will probably take a little longer for private use, but the industrial sector is already doing this. Cooling chambers being cooled down further during cheap electricity prices (or sunshine when they have their own solar) or storing heat/"cool" underground
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
With flexible rate agreements, that's already possible, and some DIYers already are doing this - the problem is the interfacing. Heat pumps (and central heating systems in general) are notorious for being walled gardens, most freezers run on analog technology (i.e. a bi-metal strip acting as a thermostat).
I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
You are correct. Some devices expose local API's, most have walled garden cloud API's
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production).
I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])
It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
We have this system in Finland and whilst I was sceptical at first, it works much better. Electricity prices are published about 24h in advance for 15m intervals (was 60m up until 2 weeks ago). You can therefore time your usage dependent on demand on the grid (which is correlated to production of course).
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
Smart thermostats and water heaters can to that to some extent. Heat or cool the room a little more and run the water heater when electricity is cheap, so that they don't have to run when it is expensive. Of course, electricity price matches supply and demand.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
Already have thermostats that move based on signals from the utilities. There were some early pioneers in this stuff over 10 years ago in the bay area. They also aggregated the power to bid it, but I imagine they could aggregate to buy as well.
We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
It would be much more effective to even out things , and trivial (engineering wise) to stop wasting the outputs of all these heat pumps by effective integration. Ie dump heat removed by ac or freezer into hot water heating, etc
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
Good water heaters are key. Mine is 200 liters and I've experienced cold water exactly once in three decades: One day 3 guests took hour-long showers each. Normally a family of five will never experience cold water.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
This is already happening with electric car charging. However, part of the reason this can't apply here is that the UK doesn't have regional pricing. For this to work you'd need to vary people's prices depending on which pylon they're connected to.
A lot of thermostats already do that. Unfortunately these programs are not terribly popular. People see that the temperature is off and complain. Look up people talking about Nest Energy Shift (different but somewhat similar idea), most comments are quite negative.
I'm on the octopus agile tariff that has 30 minute pricing and an API to query it. Prices for tomorrow published at 4pm today. So the pricing bit is sorted. Just need to make the devices understand it now.
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem.
Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
Tell me about it. I live in a region of the country which has had a very active "no pylons" campaign running for several years now with no resolution in either direction yet. The latest proposal is to bury the lines instead which results in far longer build times, destruction of land, and inconvenience for everyone along the route, and they don't seem to like that idea either.
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
Tbf the government just passed anti-blocking legislation that is meant to address exactly this - for national infrastructure projects you won't be able to sue the government over it directly anymore. Whether that's good or bad.....time will tell.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
The problem is they are treating it as a free market issue with hourly auctions, but the 'free market' system ignores transmission. So the windmills can sell cheap electricity in the auctions that can't be delivered to anybody who needs it. Then after the auction you have to pay the windmill operators to switch off the excess production.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
Thanks. This make it even more crazy. Paying for not produced energy (probably some great deals secured there - with guarantees from both sides no matter the reality) and also same owners of both types of production sites.
Funny how such deals get done, probably only to meet the magic "2030" rules, without taking into account situations like the one happening right now.
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
I've only heard about this, but do I understand correctly that:
- Norwegian hydro-electricity is normally quite cheap
- 'They' built a cable from Norway to the rest of Europe to couple the markets
- Since the markets are coupled, mainland Europe buys the hydro-electricity from Norway, driving up prices in Norway.
- People are pissed, understandably I guess.
Norway already have this kind of solution where a companies on the same land can register to the grid companies, and the production and consumtion within the same messurement intervals is not counted as selling to the grid. This way you can use the public grid for your own "internal" transfer.
It looks like UK, like many other countries, already have grid that can't cope with casual usage and transferring power from farms to users. Adding "renting" of grid sound like it could make it even worse (if possible).
The Norwegian grid is divided up into different regional grids and they each have different electricity prices. Those who build interconnects between the areas can get some of the price difference. It's very different from the UK market, which pretends to have a single area, runs auctions to determine the price and then has to make post-auction adjustments (in the billions) to fix the fact that electricity can't be transmitted across the grid.
Those 4 "Eastern Green Link" projects look interesting - pretty sensible given how close most places in the UK are to the sea to go for subsea cables. Fewer problems with planning permission as well...
A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
Readit News
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/undergrounding/
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
Dead Comment
I've mostly voted Green all my life but for the last 5 or so years I remain satisfied at their losses, as they're somehow unable to understand why people are moving away.
(My comment's a little bitter, but I do hope they figure this one out.)
Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
[0] https://www.homewizard.com/energy-socket/
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
[0] https://ngenic.se/en/tune/
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
A lot of thermostats support it
The problem here is
1) the excess power is not near the demand
2) the cost of electricity near the excess power is no lower than where there's no excess
3) nimbys prevent the extra interconnects being built which equalise power availability and power demand
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
Deleted Comment
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-12-september-2025/
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
Correct?
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.