This is also where setting up things like hydrolysis (for green hydrogen extraction) and/or desalinization near the wind farms would be immense benefit. Don't need to lay as much cable, and are...
This is also where setting up things like hydrolysis (for green hydrogen extraction) and/or desalinization near the wind farms would be immense benefit.
Don't need to lay as much cable, and are deploying other neccessary green infrastructure in a way that lets production scale with energy availability.
There are definitely trial hydrolysis systems running up on the Scottish island of Orkney, where they have more power than they know what to do with. They used Orkney to trial all sorts of...
There are definitely trial hydrolysis systems running up on the Scottish island of Orkney, where they have more power than they know what to do with.
They used Orkney to trial all sorts of renewable power systems back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine worked on a number of projects up there including wind, solar, tidal and biomass. Which means that now the island produces more power than they can either use or send back over the puny 1MW cable to the mainland. Seeing as installing a more capacious link would cost vast amounts because... sea cables.. they've been trying to find other ways to use the excess power.
So now they have hydrogen powered ferries. The Scottish government have a much better policy on renewable energy than the English one. In that they appear to actually have some kind of policy to do something. The ban on onshore wind here is approaching the status of crime against humanity. This fucking government...
Anyway, fun fact, I live quite close to that big cluster of offshore wind in the east of England and I remember them upgrading all the power lines a few years ago to handle the input, which was fun to watch as they went past my house at the time. They did it with little carts hanging from the lines themselves, with workers sitting in them and pulling themselves along while attaching extra cables along the way (to turn double power lines into triple ones). All of this was done with the power on which I know is safe but it still seems insane.
The article discusses hydrogen. I don't think the UK has any need for desalination? They also discuss how setting energy prices regionally would encourage industry (of any energy-intensive sort)...
The article discusses hydrogen. I don't think the UK has any need for desalination?
They also discuss how setting energy prices regionally would encourage industry (of any energy-intensive sort) to move north and also encourage power production in the south.
I was talking in the abstract (as this is a problem that affects all wind farms to varying degrees). And climate change is exacerbating problems. If the UK does not have a need for desalinization,...
I was talking in the abstract (as this is a problem that affects all wind farms to varying degrees).
And climate change is exacerbating problems. If the UK does not have a need for desalinization, they could still benefit from it by packaging up massive barrels of potable water to send to places that do need it.
Water is not a global market. Bottled water aside, water is too heavy and too cheap to ship in the huge amounts needed for farming or even residential use. If shipping water were commercially...
Water is not a global market. Bottled water aside, water is too heavy and too cheap to ship in the huge amounts needed for farming or even residential use.
If shipping water were commercially feasible then no land next to a port would have any water shortages. You wouldn't use desalination, you'd just ship it in tankers from somewhere that has plenty of water. Places like Israel and Saudi Arabia would import water.
Compare with the global markets for grain or oil. Water gets used to grow grain which is shipped worldwide, because grain gets a higher price than water.
Times change. Frakking didn't make sense, until it did. If regular sources of freshwater become increasingly scarce, things that were previously not economical might become so. Probably via giant...
Times change. Frakking didn't make sense, until it did.
If regular sources of freshwater become increasingly scarce, things that were previously not economical might become so. Probably via giant desalinization pipelines in/out of the desert.
We don't really do passive ocean current shipping. Yet. There may come a time where tossing a continous stream of floating shipping containers and letting them drift wherever for pickup whenever is a viable option.
It seems like it would make more sense to build a desalination plant at the destination, using the ocean water and energy that’s already there? Ultimately the argument needs to be made with...
It seems like it would make more sense to build a desalination plant at the destination, using the ocean water and energy that’s already there?
Ultimately the argument needs to be made with numbers, though.
Last year, the UK generated ~30% of its energy from renewables, of which windpower (~23% total generation) was by far the biggest contributor.
But on the windiest days, we deliberately capped the amount of power our turbines were producing, reducing the total amount generated by 6%. In fact, it’s worse than that: not only did we turn off our turbines, but we paid the owners of windfarms to turn them off. This is called curtailment.
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The simplest way to fix the problem is to build bigger cables, allowing all the wind energy we generate to be routed to the places that need it. The bottleneck in the system is the so called B6 boundary, which is the interface between the Scottish transmission network and the English one.
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The Eastern HVDC is estimated to cost ~£3.4bn, and will add 4GW of capacity. Maximum curtailment in 2022 was 5GW (on November 11th at 5AM), so this wouldn’t quite have covered that, but that was an unusual day. 99.7% of the curtailment we saw in 2022 would have been solved by an additional 4GW of transmission.
However, laying high voltage cables is slow – much slower than building new wind turbines. In the time it takes for this transmission to come online (2GW by 2027 & 4GW by 2029), we will have added far more new wind capacity North of the B6 boundary.
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Electricity prices – which are the main way that incentives are communicated to market participants – are completely location independent in the UK. This means that a generator with a wind farm on the Outer Hebrides can sell a MWh to an electricity supplier with customers in Surrey, and neither of them has to worry about how the energy gets from point A to point B. Conversely, a wind turbine in Surrey sees no price benefit from selling its MWh to a customer next door, despite the obvious efficiency benefits.
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Locational pricing remains a vigorous topic of debate as part of the government’s Reform of Energy Market Arrangements (REMA). NGESO, an influential participant, has clearly stated their case for a locational pricing scheme. BEIS will combine this with feedback from other stakeholders across the industry and perhaps a dash of politics and we’ll see where we end up.
This is also where setting up things like hydrolysis (for green hydrogen extraction) and/or desalinization near the wind farms would be immense benefit.
Don't need to lay as much cable, and are deploying other neccessary green infrastructure in a way that lets production scale with energy availability.
There are definitely trial hydrolysis systems running up on the Scottish island of Orkney, where they have more power than they know what to do with.
They used Orkney to trial all sorts of renewable power systems back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine worked on a number of projects up there including wind, solar, tidal and biomass. Which means that now the island produces more power than they can either use or send back over the puny 1MW cable to the mainland. Seeing as installing a more capacious link would cost vast amounts because... sea cables.. they've been trying to find other ways to use the excess power.
So now they have hydrogen powered ferries. The Scottish government have a much better policy on renewable energy than the English one. In that they appear to actually have some kind of policy to do something. The ban on onshore wind here is approaching the status of crime against humanity. This fucking government...
Anyway, fun fact, I live quite close to that big cluster of offshore wind in the east of England and I remember them upgrading all the power lines a few years ago to handle the input, which was fun to watch as they went past my house at the time. They did it with little carts hanging from the lines themselves, with workers sitting in them and pulling themselves along while attaching extra cables along the way (to turn double power lines into triple ones). All of this was done with the power on which I know is safe but it still seems insane.
The article discusses hydrogen. I don't think the UK has any need for desalination?
They also discuss how setting energy prices regionally would encourage industry (of any energy-intensive sort) to move north and also encourage power production in the south.
I was talking in the abstract (as this is a problem that affects all wind farms to varying degrees).
And climate change is exacerbating problems. If the UK does not have a need for desalinization, they could still benefit from it by packaging up massive barrels of potable water to send to places that do need it.
Water is not a global market. Bottled water aside, water is too heavy and too cheap to ship in the huge amounts needed for farming or even residential use.
If shipping water were commercially feasible then no land next to a port would have any water shortages. You wouldn't use desalination, you'd just ship it in tankers from somewhere that has plenty of water. Places like Israel and Saudi Arabia would import water.
Compare with the global markets for grain or oil. Water gets used to grow grain which is shipped worldwide, because grain gets a higher price than water.
Times change. Frakking didn't make sense, until it did.
If regular sources of freshwater become increasingly scarce, things that were previously not economical might become so. Probably via giant desalinization pipelines in/out of the desert.
We don't really do passive ocean current shipping. Yet. There may come a time where tossing a continous stream of floating shipping containers and letting them drift wherever for pickup whenever is a viable option.
It seems like it would make more sense to build a desalination plant at the destination, using the ocean water and energy that’s already there?
Ultimately the argument needs to be made with numbers, though.
From the blog post:
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