UK Wind Farms Are Producing Too Much Energy

[Caribbeans]

City A.M | Jan 18, 2023

National Grid forked out £82m to operators of wind farms last month to constrain supplies and reduce output amid blustery conditions, to prevent the UK’s energy network from being overwhelmed.

This is on top of £122m it has paid out over the first 11 months of 2022 – as part of £1.34bn it spent to manage supplies last year.

Contrary to popular perception, wind turbines do not thrive in stormy or overly windy conditions – as National Grid typically tells producers to reduce output to stop power spiking across the grid and to reduce pressure on the network.

The latest data on constraints from National Grid’s electricity system operator (NGESO) comes amid reports of record wind power generation this month.

NGESO has revealed that wind power generated record amounts of energy last Tuesday, topping 21 gigawatts (GW) for the first time ever...more

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/UK-Wind-Farms-Are-Producing-Too-Much-Energy.html

In the future, will there be MORE excess renewable energy

or LESS?

[VMA131Marine]

1. More energy storage is required to buffer supply fluctuations

to the grid. Currently, it’s probably easier to take wind turbines offline than reduce output on gas turbine generators and nuclear plants that prefer to operate at near constant output.

[Blues Heron]

2. They should hook a bitcoin rig to the base of each one to turn all that excess into digital cash

Dont let those electrons go to waste!

[Caribbeans]

3. hooking up an electrolyzer

and making hydrogen allows that H2 to power a bitcoin rig

or anything else - trucks, cars, ships, airplanes, houses etc

think of H2 as bottled wind energy

Who would have thought Hyundai would one day be a leader in a once-in-a-lifetime energy revolution

[NNadir]

4. As usual, these silly fantasies have appreciation of neither economics nor engineering.

This bullshit has been going on for many decades. The moments that wind energy are producing "too much energy" - the selective attention of this nonsense scam do not justify the expense, environmental or economic, of building plants that will operate for a few hours, or even days, a year.

The purveyors of this nonsense are completely unaware of issues like, say, hysteresis.

There's always selective attention, wherein people who clearly have never opened a science book, who elevate their fantasies over the practical implications of climate change (about which they clearly don't give a shit) announce that so called "renewable energy" produced 100% of energy during some short (sometimes a matter of minutes) period of low demand, while ignoring month long episodes of Dunkelflaute.

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.

I note with disgust that as we are still carrying on with this nonsense in 2023 nearly half a century after the launch of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy in 1976, that hydrogen is even worse, less sustainable, than batteries, both of which are designed to address the appalling unreliability of wind and solar energy, which soaked up trillions of dollars without ever having produced, combined, 3% of the annual energy demand, as of 2021, 624 Exajoules. (Wind and solar combined produced just 11, in 2021, an immense economic and environmental disaster.)

The moments that wind is producing excess energy do nothing more than to harm the overall economics of the grid, destabilizing it, and driving prices higher. There is a reason that both Germany and Denmark have the highest electricity prices in the OECD.

If one pays to require two systems to do what one can do reliably, both the external (environmental and health) and internal (cash) costs are higher.

The results of this wind/solar/battery/hydrogen fantasy are in:

Week beginning on January 15, 2023: 419.15 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 417.80 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 396.52 ppm
Last updated: January 23, 2023

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

We are chanting our way to doom.

[NickB79]

7. And then turn the electrolyzers off when the wind isn't blowing enough, right?

I mean, you wouldn't keep the electrolyzers running 24/7, even when they have to use gas and coal derived electricity from the grid and make blue H2, right? That would be lunacy, seeing as blue hydrogen generates MORE carbon than just burning natural gas straight up, and would give the fossil fuel industry billions in revenue.

Sure, it would make hydrogen many times more expensive, and possibly damage the electrolyzers cycling them on and off on a weekly or even daily basis, but that's just the price you have to pay to not "accidentally" produce blue hydrogen that offsets all the green hydrogen.

[Blue Owl]

5. By tRump's expertise, cancer rates should be skyrocketing

[hatrack]

6. Don't worry, the Tories will find a way to whine about this as well . . .

[NNadir]

8. Oh, and a Gigawatt is not a unit of energy, except for the people who write this nonsense.

Obviously they didn't graduate from a good high school, since the unit of energy is the Joule not the Watt and they apparently don't know that.

Every time people hand out this kind of bull, they display appalling ignorance.

If anyone wants to know why and how climate change is literally racing out of control, this bullshit about a one day surge would be a perfect point of reference.

It's appalling.

This summer people all over the world will drop dead from extreme heat, and still this delusional happy talk will persist.

January 23: 419.71 ppm
January 22: 418.99 ppm
January 21: 419.00 ppm
January 20: 419.15 ppm
January 19: 419.08 ppm
Last Updated: January 24, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Not a shred of decency. None.

[NeoGreen]

9. Just in case anyone is really, really confused...

... a Gigawatt is 1,000,000 Kilowatts and often the 'hour' denominator is left off the unit in general discussion.

From the American Physical Society:

https://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/energy/units.cfm

Joule (J).
This is the basic energy unit of the metric system, or in a later more comprehensive formulation, the International System of Units (SI). It is ultimately defined in terms of the meter, kilogram, and second.

Kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The kilowatt-hour is a standard unit of electricity production and consumption. By definition, noting that 1 kilowatt = 1000 watts:

1 kWh = 3.6 x 10^6 Joules.

[NNadir]

10. Actually the wind and solar industry rely entirely on ignorance...

...in representing their unreliable shit in units of GW rather than TJ, PJ or EJ. This accounts in part for the stupid decision to squander trillions of dollars and huge swathes of land mass on the solar and wind scam that has produced only 12 EJ on a planet consuming 624 EJ per year as of 2021.

The entire solar and wind industry can't produce as much energy as the year to year growth in the use of dangerous fossil fuels. Of course antinukes couldn't give a rat's ass about fossil fuels. Their scam would die without them.

Still the assholes hyping this wasted effort still insist on these bullshit soothsaying exercises that so called renewable energy wl produce 100% of the world's energy by some year after they're dead and a future generation will be paying for their outrageous ignorance. These are, after all, the sort of people who can't tell the difference between a denominator and a numerator.

This belief in the paranoid fears and oblivious fantasies of badly educated antinukes is a reason that we are now pushing 420 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere.

The money squandered on solar and wind energy have done nothing at all to address climate change or to save any of the millions of people who die each year from air pollution, this while intellectually empty paranoids pick lint out of their navels and whine about so called "nuclear waste."

If you ask these kinds of people to show that the seventy year history of the storage of used nuclear fuels has killed as many people as will die in the next three hours from air pollution they either change the subject or slither away.

Personally, I prefer the latter. I weep for the dead unnecessarily killed by appeals to ignorance, whether it comes from antivax types or anrinuke types, who are nearly equivalent, except that the anti-nukes are greater killers, being responsible for about 70 million deaths every decade, more people than died in the most recent World War. Exposure to the mentality of these types disgusts me.

Ignorance kills.