andrewducker | Interesting Links for 21-03-2023

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From:

mtbc

(1): I bet they loved being able to write that headline!

From:

bens_dad

3. Did his shirt change colour gradually ?

2+4 So are we getter more or less green?

1. I hope this doesn't become a running theme.

From:

andrewducker

3) I think so, yes. There's no specific point where it changes.

I suspect how Green we're getting depends on a bunch of factors. But we certainly should be enabling renewables faster

From:

danieldwilliam

#4 I'm not persuaded that Jackson from Octopus entirely understands the UK Grid, or grids in general.

The specific problem with the UK Grid is that the UK is long and narrow and our biggest demand centre (London) is at one end of the country. We now find that we have lots of renewable energy at the other end where almost nobody lives. We've quite rationally built the UK grid with the 440kv lines in the south and the smaller 230kv or even 130kv lines north of the Highland Boundary fault. So that's the legacy situation we find ourselves in. That's on top of the standard problem with any grid that they were designed around moving power from 1.0GW or 500MW dense power generators to cities that are dense but a bit more spread-out and now have to move power from smaller, intermittent generators. Upgrading those wires is expensive. (The planning delays are true also, but we are talking billions of pounds for the upgrades).

The more generic issue with his comments is that stranded assets are a real thing as is grid congestion and they both have costs. If you build an expensive set of big wires you want to be certain that the on-puter is going to be in business for decades in order to pay you to build and maintain that bit of infrastructure. You also want to be certain that if you build several new connections they are not all going to try to move power to the same place at the same time - requiring the grid operator to either build more infrastructure or pay people to stop generating. If you get that wrong someone is left holding the bag for that. Probably the end consumer.

So there is a risk of privatised gain and socialised loss in grid investment.

Small generators being able to hook themselves up to the grid is not cost free for everyone else or risk free.

I'm not for a minute suggesting that the UK Grid operator has done a good job. I personally think that it was so obvious that more transmission capacity running north to south was necessary that the operator could have taken on more risk and also that the UK government could have underwritten some of that risk so that the grid operator was not on the hook for it all in a way that threatened their solvency.

From:

andrewducker

I agree that letting people just hook up is over the top. But also that, yes, we ought to have invested more in the spine of the transmission system.

Better batteries will help, but even so if we're going to produce at one end of the country and use at the other...

From:

danieldwilliam

"we ought to have invested more in the spine of the transmission system."

An important consideration is who is the "we" in this situation.

If you own a power station near London or a demand centre near London you have pretty much already paid for the wires between you and the nearest other bits of infrastructure. The maintenance and improvements to the grid are passed on through some market mechanisms to consumers.

If someone wants to put a power station on the wires at the other end of the country (for their own private profit) should they pay for all of the additional wires required to get the power to London, or just the wires to get to the nearest big set of wires? Or should that be paid by power users? Or tax payers?

That's a political and economic decision which is quite complex. I have some sympathy for the UK Grid operator who was uncertain in 2010 about how what the situation would be like in the 2030's and chose to be cautious rather than bold. They would have been badly caught out if, for example, they'd built several big interconnectors at their own risk from the North Sea and the Highland to the Midlands and then Rolls Royce had opened a Small Modular Reactor factory in 2025, selling power stations at $50/MWH -which they have been threatening to do since about 2005.

Batteries etc do help, not least because instead of building some new wires you can stick some batteries either side of the congestion point and shift the power around in time rather than space and that might be cheaper. Also, big long cables under the sea so you bypass the weak bits of the grid in the Highlands and the relatively congested bits of the grid in the Central Belt.

From:

andrewducker

Yes, I agree that having various private companies making decisions based on how they can make the most profits is not going to work in these kinds of situations, and that there ought to be political/governmental support.