From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie/Philip Bratby

It’s started already!

From The Telegraph:

British solar farms have been paid to switch off for the first time as sunny days prompt a surge of clean power that could overwhelm the grid.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the UK’s power grids and is overseen by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has issued switch-off orders to solar facilities this year, new research reveals.

Operators are paid to switch off when these orders are issued, with the extra cost added to consumer and business energy bills.

The solar operators claiming compensation are understood to include some of the UK’s biggest energy suppliers, such as EDF Renewables and Octopus Energy.

Such “constraint payments” are already common with wind farms because so many have been built in areas such as northern Scotland or offshore, areas without grid capacity to carry the power they generate.

So far this year, constraint payments have cost consumers £650m, according to the Wasted Wind website. The cost is added to energy bills.

Overall “balancing payments” could hit £8bn a year by 2030 without massive grid upgrades, according to Neso estimates. Such upgrades would also be extremely costly, with consumers liable.

Read the full story here.

This is of course the tip of the iceberg. The real problems will start when we have three times as much wind and solar capacity.

As I noted here, there will be many occasions during the year when we will be throwing a third of the electricity we produce, when demand is low and wind and solar power are high.

The only way to have enough renewable capacity at times of stress during winter is to build large surpluses in.

What this latest news shows though is that there are already regional imbalances appearing, with too much solar power in local areas.

NESO’s own projections for 2030 show that these surpluses will add £15/MWh to electricity costs. Even that is optimistic, because it assumes we will be able to export some of it, which may not be the case. It also assumes grid expansions.

Even at £15/MWh, that works out at £5 billion a year.

Once again, the red herring of zonal pricing is mentioned in the Telegraph report:

Octopus has been campaigning for Britain’s energy market to be broken up into regions that set their own prices based on supply and demand. This reform, known as zonal pricing, would theoretically reduce or even eliminate constraint payments by encouraging developers to build infrastructure in areas where prices were highest, meaning there would be sufficient cabling.

The basic idea is that new generation will be attracted to areas with high demand, and consumers attracted to the areas where supply exceeds demand, with price differentials the driver.

But most new generation will be paid via CfDs, so will be unaffected by whatever the market price happens to be. Moreover, most will be offshore wind, and therefore not embedded regionally.

As for the idea that people and industry are suddenly going to relocate to the Scottish Highlands is ridiculous. Or that people are going to switch all their electrical appliances on when it is windy, just because prices come down,

Zonal pricing will no doubt be a good way for Octopus to charge higher prices. But the real solution is not to rearrange the deckchairs. It is to stop building wind and solar farms that cannot reliably meet demand when and where it is needed.