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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.

I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.

Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.

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> Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.

That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.

You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.

It would make sense for energy to be given away locally before we have curtailment used. Why is that not a thing?

Because curtailment is about the available pickups not being able to take the energy. If you had a sink for it, you wouldn't be paid for curtailment so long as it was send through the grid. I bet if you used an alternate local grid the grorious (sic) (in)efficiency of capitalism will figure out how to be paid double.

Then reduce prices in that area, and there will be demand and you'll make more money.

Except you can't because there's a law saying the price of electricity has to be the same everywhere in the country. You can be right next to a wind turbine that's turned off, and they're not allowed to sell to you for less than the price they'd sell to the other end of the country, even though they're also not allowed to sell to the other end of the country.

Of course, this law was probably a reaction to a previous time where the price differences were excessively huge. A law like this doesn't exist for no reason. There is a balancing act, as both extremes were already found to have problems. It can be that the "stupid can't sell law" is actually considered good because it makes investors build new supply at the other end of the country or to build more transmission lines, instead of building where you are and trying to sell to you locally.

The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suitable for wind and a lot of the places that are are less densely populated and so it affects people less there too.

We're a windy island surrounded by sea - which seems to be pretty ideal for wind generation going by the number of huge projects underway?

Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast.

It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.

The north of the UK is definitely windier than the south, but I'm not sure that the west is windier than the east - it's certainly wetter?

e.g.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...

Yes, there is a prevailing south-westerly wind in the UK. The air comes in from the tropics and comes over the UK.

From wiki:

> Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy

But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/

It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.

Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind.

https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml

16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore

To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.

That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW.

We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.

I haven't read it recently but don't think the book, written at the time it was, was necessarily a bad view of things though. I think I first read it in about 2007 or so(?) so we're nearly 20 years on. A lot of it reflected the political debate and projections that were being put out by the government at the time too in what they'd allow in for e.g. offshore installations, so it was basing itself on that too.

IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.

I'd like to see an updated edition too.

The guy who wrote it died not long after the last edition came out, so unfortunately it’s not likely to see one.

Oh, that's a shame!

Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.

It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"

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