Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned over the extraordinary level of payments to wind farms to switch off.
These so-called ‘constraint payments’ are deemed necessary when the wires in the transmission grid have inadequate capacity to get a generator’s power to market. [emphasis, links added]
When that happens, the wind farm (and it is always a wind farm) is paid to switch off, and a gas-fired power station is paid to switch on so that the end user of the electricity is not left short.
This is particularly a problem for wind farms in Scottish waters because there is relatively little transmission capacity running across the border to England, where most of the power users are found.
In 2022, I noted that the offshore wind farm called Moray East had spent 25% of the previous year switched off. The suspicion is that there may be perverse incentives for developers to build wind farms in Scotland precisely so they receive constraint payments.
With a large new offshore wind farm called Seagreen coming on stream in 2023, I was interested to see how things had developed. The data, taken from the Renewable Energy Foundation, is revealing.
Figure 1 shows that the total payments to wind farms have risen to £303 million [$382M] off a constrained volume of 4.3 terawatt hours. That’s roughly four days’ electricity demand thrown away entirely.
And if we break down the 2023 bill, we can see that once again it is the canny Scots who are the big beneficiaries (Figure 2), with Moray East getting an extraordinary £43 million [$54M], and Seagreen (as expected) not far behind at £39 million [$49M].
Moray East’s constrained volume is 590 GWh, which will represent something like 20% of its output. Seagreen’s is 759 GWh, which will be somewhat higher.
Interestingly, payments to Moray East’s neighbor, Beatrice, have fallen away sharply, from £33 million [$42M] in 2022 to just £9 million [$11M] in 2023. I don’t know why this is.
In summary then, the rip-off continues and indeed is getting worse.
Top photo of Scottish wind turbines by Ondrej Rafaj on Unsplash
Read more at NZW
Ontario Hydro signed a power sharing contract with New York State, paid them to accept our surplus electricity. I have never been alerted to these occurrences, If so I would have taken the surplus for free.
The east coast of Australia is one big ‘grid’. If one state is having a good day, say South Australia with wind mills, or Queensland with sun catchers, they ‘sell’ the excess to an adjoining State, at a negative price.
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem#nem-dispatch-overview
I’ve been checking daily now for several years, at 1500 hours Australian Eastern Time. First look at the pricing, then try to guess what percentage of the total generation is from the weather dependents. Click on “Fuel Mix” and check the breakdown, overall or by State. It’s fun! (and I’m a lousy ‘guesser’.)
Hi Graham, I’ve just done as you suggested and the overall picture is not surprising. It’s been a windy afternoon and the sun was shining. BUT – that all stops by around 7pm or sooner if storms (that is clouds gather) and the renewables output will literally crash.
This is precisely the scenario people should fear. When all coal power stations are shut (Bowen’s plan) what will kick in to keep the lights on when the wind stops and the clouds gather?
Simple answer should be as obvious as the preverbial, but many people live in fantacy land, while not realising that a grid the size of Eastern Australia and the milions of people who rely on it working for them 24/7, cannot function reliably on unreliable electricity generation. There MUST be something in the background (I prefer the foreground) that keeps producing 24/7.
The question I have is what will happen to the east coast grid if (say) Queensland gets the s***s because they are keeping other states supplied “at their expense”, so the state disconnects from the grid? NSW could do the same. What then?
The other problem of M&R at power stations hit the headlines last week in Vic when Lo Yang went off line. It wasn’t because of the storm. What happened? And it wasn’t down power lines either.
I’m on US “Mountain Standard Time”, Arizona. 2200 here is 1500 EST, Aus. I visited about 15 minutes ago. Black coal: 51%; Brown Coal: 11%. The total for wind and solar: 29%. When I looked at the pricing, SA and Vic were both negative, so I guessed 33% for the weather dependent generation.
I gather that AEMO is the offspring of the federal government and private industry, so one State ‘dropping out’ is very unlikely.
Any power plant that is feeding into the grid will shut down automatically if/when a powerline is knocked down. For the story, all I have to go by is a twice daily “Headlines” email from the Sydney Morning Herald, and they didn’t do any follow-up on the incident. The powerhouse in Queensland that had a generator blow up last year – I heard even less. SMH is very much pro-“climate change”. But, the emails are free of charge, and I’m supposed to be able to “read” a couple of articles a month, also free. The last time I tried, “You have used up your free articles, please subscribe”. (Social Security goes only so far.)(Slow typing tonight, over 45 minutes for the reply.)
Time to dismantle all Wind Turbine quit threating Eagles and Owls and killing Whales with those eyesores time for the Eco-Freaks to Dump this Renewable Nonsense Birds before Windfarms