By Paul Homewood
David Rose had a good article on wind constraint payments the other day on UnHerd. You can read it here.
He began with the example of the Seagreen Offshore Wind Farm, commissioned two years ago. It lies just off the Scottish coast at Montrose.
Seagreen has capacity of 1.1 GW, but as he notes:
“Having become fully operational in late 2022, Seagreen generated an impressive quantity of power in the first 10 months of this year, which earned its operators some £70 million. But they were paid almost as much to switch its turbines off – at least £57 million”
The problem, he says, is that there is simply not enough transmission capacity to take all of the wind power from Seagreen and all of the other Scottish wind farms.
Data from the Renewable Energy Foundation confirms that in the last 12 months, Seagreen supplied 1412 GWh to the grid, but was paid £62 million to not send 3020 GWh, which otherwise would have been generated and transmitted.
Rose goes on to write about how the amounts paid out to Seagreen and others now will be dwarfed in a few years time, if Miliband’s plan to massively expand wind power goes ahead. The current plan to waste £4 billion building two new interconnectors from Scotland to England will make little difference in overall terms.
By 2030, connection between Scotland and England will be a minor issue anyway. The real problem will be the regular large surpluses of wind power across the whole of the grid, when it is simply too windy.
In their report earlier this year, the National Grid projected that balancing costs in total could rise to £5 billion in the 2030s. This was based on the last government’s 2035 deadline for 100% clean power, so Miliband’s plans will likely accelerate these cost increases.
https://www.neso.energy/document/318666/download
Sorry for the poor image – the zoomed image below explains that the black line represents the “Leading the Way” scenario, and the yellow the “Consumer Transformation” one, two of the four scenarios used in their Future Energy Scenarios this year. As I commented at the time, the only realistic one is the second, Consumer Transformation, which suggests balancing costs rising to around £5 billion in the 2030s:
This is double the current cost of balancing, which itself has risen from just over a billion five years ago. Constraint payments, (the yellow block), make up about two thirds of the total.
As the National Grid admit, forecasting balancing costs post-2030 is difficult, because it depends on how the whole system is structured. For instance, a fleet of electrolysers would mop up some surplus power, as would mammoth increases in storage. Maybe excess power could be exported.
Their projections already assume massive network reinforcement after 2030.
In short, we will all have to pay one way or another, whether through balancing costs, for network upgrades, storage and whatever else they think of.