Firms paid to shut down wind farms when the wind is blowing

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy ... owing.html

Hmm, I don't fully understand the situation here but it seems pretty crazy to me.

Surely it's just a simple case of supply and demand? If nobody wants energy, why is it that companies who are still producing it anyway expect to get paid for doing so???? I don't understand the business model.

Perhaps it's time to look at more effective storage - we have loads of empty mines, we could fill them with gas over night with surplus power, and use it through the day to prevent us having to bring coal/gas stations coming online for a few extra hours.

Infact, if the companies running the wind farms were to do this themselves they could make even more money! Get paid not to provide power to the grid, and use that power to store energy themselves. Then stream it back later for even more money!

There was a giant storage lake in the north of England somewhere. It uses spare energy to pump water up to a higher lake and then it releases the energy during peak hours. If they created more using old mines they could use wind power to build up energy reserves. Also nuclear is very easy to cut back on so that really should be used to cut back rather than wind or renewables.

Because it's much more cost effective then turning a power station on and off when they aren't needed?

For fossil fuel power stations yes but not for nuclear power stations. They can be shut off almost instantly with no will effect.

Apart from massive increased costs in maintenance for the turbines and all the associated equipment. WInd turbines as they generate electricity directly and not through an intermediate step can be shut off far more efficiently than other form and as they contribute less (per wind farm) than others they can be used to really fine tune the power supply.

With the sole exception of the Sizewell B plant, nuclear power cannot be readily turned on and off at will. It's not how the stations were designed. The control rods can be dropped in to stop or suspend the nuclear reaction but the reactor is still kicking out a massive amount of power that has to go somewhere.
Switching off/on requires a fairly substantial effort to run the system down and then back up, it takes several hours, even days depending on the circumstances, for a nuclear plant to come back on-line which isn't much use to balance short term spikes and troughs in demand.

It all comes back to the idea that Nuclear is base load power, i.e. on all the time due to the relative cost of downtime at a nuclear power station (a nuclear plant costs almost as much to run when it isn't generating as when it is so it's better to have them on for as much time a safely practicable).

Modern gas stations are far more flexible and can be readily turned off and on. Older gas, coal and oil stations also aren't that flexible in terms of output variation due to the design of their turbines and generators.
In the past, a lot of flexibility for the grid came from hydro power in the north of England, Wales and Scotland. Excess power is used to pump water back into the supply reservoir thereby storing the power. There aren't, currently, many, if any, similar systems for gas other than to meet domestic, rather than industrial, supply.

There simply aren't many efficient ways to store electrical energy so the grid has to manage supply and demand very carefully. If there is significant over or under supply then it throws the supply frequency (50Hz) out and power stations will start to disconnect automatically from the grid to protect their generators and that will aggravate the problem as individual power stations usually represent fairly large chunks of capacity.

As for why companies expect to be paid for power they generate but that isn't used you can thank changes the government made to the way electricity generation is paid for.
In the past the price of electricity was set by National Grid company depending on demand. IF there wasn't much demand then the price was low (overnight for instance, which is where Economy 7 and Economy 10 came from). As demand increased and varied during the day so did the price of electricity set by NGC. Flexible generators (Hydro) would come one stream to meet surges in demand when the price was high and switch off again when the prices dropped.
The system worked well for generators that supplied a lot of base load power (like nuclear).

At the start of the decade the system was changed to a contract based system. Electricity suppliers had to set, in advance, the amount of electricity they would generate and agree contracts for this supply with electricity consumers. This basically fixed the price of electricity each supplier was selling for a period of time. If the supplier had additional (and especially flexible) capacity compared to the amount they had contracts for they could sell the excess (at a vastly inflated price) at times of peak demand to other supplier who had a shortfall.
The newer system rewarded suppliers that had the most flexible and lowest cost capacity and penalised the less flexible generators. That's why British Energy (the privatised nuclear generator) was about to go bankrupt and was bought by EDF. They didn't have enough cheap flexible capacity compared to the other generators. It's also a significant contributing factor in the rush for Gas power stations seen in the early 2000's.

Wind power is potentially flexible but need the wind to be blowing. If there is no need for the electricity being generated then it's lost but the company will still get paid based on the contract price that's been agreed for that generation.

We obviously need more storgage capacity.

Wind power and solar have their benefits but as has been mentioned not always when we need it. Nuclear may not be be perfect for shutting off completely. Though can it be operated at reduced capacity? such as 80% as an example. There are other options such as fuel cells. During surplus capacity fuel cells could be used to store energy and during peak hours they discharge. These could be within the home and even attached to home generators such as PV cells and home windmills.

Giant wind turbines 'the future of UK green energy'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10359529.stm

Wow they must get paid a lot not to provide electricity!

I just wish they'd get off this wind power gravytrain and start investing in wave/tidal power. The wind is variable - tides are not. If you want a consistent supply of "green" energy then wind isn't the answer.

Harvesting tidal power in the way it's usually done can severely f*ck up the environment, which is a bad thing.

Can't they sell surplus leccy to other countries? On the continent some countries import/export their leccy so maybe it is possible for the UK too?
I remember reading the in Germany households got paid for using leccy at times. They had so much wind that and they needed to get rid off the surplus...

It seems to me that the government is pushing too hard for 'green energy' for the sake of it, regardless of how it works out in practice.
Perfectly exemplified by David Cameron's small home wind turbine, the ultimate green accessory..... which required so much energy to make, that, in the position it was put, would have had to be there for 300 years (I heard from one source, anyway) to recoup the difference. Added to which, he had to remove it because he never got planning permission for it in the first place.