There are now serious concerns that too much solar power will soon overwhelm the electricity grid in Britain.
Too much energy sounds too good to be true. Surely it will mean lower prices for everybody? Unfortunately, electricity does not work like that.
A functioning electricity grid requires that supply and demand are matched every second of the day. Too little power results in blackouts, but so too does too much power. You can easily store oil and gas, but apart from the tiny amount of battery and pumped storage we have, you cannot do the same with electricity.
What you cannot use gets thrown away. Battery storage is incredibly expensive and currently we only have enough of it to power the country for a few minutes.
So, what is the problem?
We already have so much solar power capacity installed in the UK that it is close to overwhelming the grid. At midday on one sunny day last week, solar was providing 40% of our electricity. Add in wind and nuclear power and the figure goes up to 90%.
Ed Miliband wants to triple solar and wind power capacity by 2030, so it does not take a genius to work out that we will have much more electricity than the grid can handle on days like that one. Worse still, he wants to plaster our roof with solar panels, which will simply exacerbate the problem by reducing demand.
Currently we can cope with the days when there is too much
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Simple solution – when there is too much solar power, use it to power the wind turbines in the “wrong” direction, ie against the wind!
Like practically everything I can think of, nothing will be done until ideology meets reality, head on.
At which point, the cry will go up: “Something must be done”, but it will almost certainly be too late.
Asking what could possibly go wrong is a question you ask before driving onto the rickety bridge, not when you’re halfway across and it’s falling apart around you…
“Too much energy sounds too good to be true. Surely it will mean lower prices for everybody?”
Remember the halcyon days of EEC agricultural subsidies resulting in too much butter, cheese, meat, milk, and wine – and the various mountains and lakes thereof?
Did that result in lower prices for everybody, or higher prices to pay for the subsidies?
It is a certainty of market economics that subsidies misallocate resources to produce a glut of what is subsidised and a shortage of what is not. Exhibit A: UK electricity supply.
The fact that solar farms’ output bypasses NESO and its controls must have been approved by somebody. This seems to be akin to allowing trains on a mountain railway to run without brakes.
Madness engineered into the system.
“Our analysis shows that low demand is increasingly driven by weather patterns – most notably solar photovoltaic generation – rather than underlying consumer behaviour.”
What on earth does she mean by this? When the sun is shining people use less electricity? Has that not always been the case? Isn’t that “underlying consumer behaviour”? I suppose it is now exacerbated by people having domestic panels, so not only do they use less anyway but use their own rather than getting it from the grid.
“a newly expanded demand flexibility service that will pay people to use surplus power”
I can’t see this having a major impact. Doesn’t it presuppose people hanging around at home with nothing to do, deferring their electricity consuming activities until they get a text message telling them now’s the time to switch on? I’m sure some people already time certain usage for night-time when it’s cheap, but that is a predictable daily event.
Of course, all of this is a bit like inviting wasps into your house and instead of getting rid of them, devising ever more elaborate ways to mitigate their activity but encouraging them to stay.
The wasps will understand.
They are helping save the planet after all
Today’s bureaucrats cannot make any conclusion without “analysis”. I wonder what they do if caught out in the rain.
The “demand” numbers she is writing about are the amount of electrical power taken from the grid, not the total amount consumed – so it doesn’t include people using the electricity from their own panels. If it’s the amount demanded from the national high-voltage grid, then it wouldn’t even include people using surplus PV electricity from other people on the same distribution network, since that doesn’t pass through the national grid.
I still don’t see how any kind of dynamic pricing would work in practice – not that would make any difference to demand of any kind.
We are prepared for a couple of weeks blackout. Food and water, diesel. The family laughed at me, but they’ll be knocking on my door when the day comes.
Yes, you’ll suddenly be everybody’s best friend! But some of the people who arrive on your doorstep might not be friendly and might not want to share nicely. They’ll just take everything you have.
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I have wondered about this. Is it practical. Does HMG have secret food reserves.
It would be useful to have a printed plan so stock could be rotated within date. Also to know what combination of foods could make a tolerable balanced diet for (say) 30 days.
Toilet rolls and disinfectant last indefinitely, I believe. Water in bottle lasts a long time but in a bad case bleach sterilisation might be necessary.
I do not currently expect supply problems to last that long but after an interruption mass buying might restrict access to some goods for weeks.
Sweden instruct their citizens that they should always be prepared to live off what they have at home for a week.
i pray this will save the destruction of our farmland.
Particularly in Lincolnshire and East Anglia which provides me with almost all the vegetables I don’t grow for myself.
‘Thriving Democracy. Freedom.’ ‘Thank Einstein you don’t live in Russia or China’.
A corrupt government which won maybe 20% of the adult vote, acting as Eco-Dictator, with the unaccountable Green Nazi Millipede in full control. Not only destroying our economy, but our eco systems as well. The full cost of solar in £ and eco-damage is rarely discussed. And how effective is it, when for 5 months out of 12, we live in dark, cold and rain?
Money Laundering + Non – Science + Totalitarianism = Millipede/Green.
But then we have to ask WHY? —-Because we have a Political Class that do not work for us. They work for the UN and WEF, and for International Courts and Treaties, and they put all of that FIRST and the UK citizens LAST.
At UN level it is claimed that the wealthy west has become wealthy by using up more than its fair share of the worlds resources (coal oil and gas) and we are to STOP doing that. Tragically our own Political Class agree and are setting about this redistribution exercise that uses irrational fear of a largely manufactured climate crisis as the excuse.