I thought the issue with wind in the UK was that its supply is (Scotland) where the demand isn’t (the south). So we’d (a) have to build loads of pylons or expensive underground cables and (b) lose a lot in transmission.
You would have to build lots of transmission, but the losses aren't particularly significant for high voltage lines — it's only about 1000 km from the Shetland islands to Southampton, and HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km. Pricing seems to be a trade secret, but the suggested numbers on the Wikipedia page for the 8 GW cross-channel link were £110M for the converter stations and £1M/km for the undersea cable.
I know that a mere back-of-the-envelope calculation isn't worth much more than the used envelope it was written on (doubly so when it is based on guesstimates of the input numbers), but that would be only £1bn for 8 GW or £4bn for 32 GW (compared to actual average usage of 31.5 GW last year), which is the kind of thing that the British government shouldn't blink at but in practice actually faffs and fails at basically all the time.
(And the sector is theoretically privatised, so this would have to become a business investment, which in turns will have potential investors ask inconvenient questions like "What's the risk we have cheaper options in 10 years that make this power line redundant? And what about those fusion reactors I keep reading about in the Sunday Times? What if Scotland becomes independent and stops selling you the electricity?")
With proper high volatage direct current (HVDC) transmission, the transmission losses transporting electricity from Scotland to the south of England are not very relevant. It's like a couple of percent.
A bigger problem is just the UK's inability to complete infrastructure megaprojects on land, so the connectors would likely need to go in the sea and take a perhaps inefficient route.
There are a number of problems with wind in the UK. NIMBYism means it’s either in the north (nowhere near the consumer) or out in the sea which is both not terribly near the consumer and ferociously expensive to maintain. The UK Energy Catapult estimates that a single service vessel “truck roll” or “boat launch” (I guess) is something like £250K. Probably much more now as that figure is 10 years old. This means that it makes economic sense to wait until you have several broken wind turbines before sending out a service vessel. Couple this with the fact that they dont seem to have as long a lifetime as was promised (various reasons). Finally it is a meteorological reality that when it’s very cold in the UK and energy demands are high… it is also usually very still with no wind, and of course in the middle of winter when there are few hours of daylight helping us with solar generation.
> Finally it is a meteorological reality that when it’s very cold in the UK and energy demands are high… it is also usually very still with no wind, and of course in the middle of winter when there are few hours of daylight helping us with solar generation.
Your meteorological reality seems to not correlate with actual reality. In the UK the highest energy demand is actually correlated with high wind speeds [1]
I frequently hear people bring up transmission losses as a concern, and genuinely curious where this idea comes from? Was this taught in schools or part of some disinformation campaign?
My understanding is that it is "simple" resistance heating of the transmission lines (P = I^2 R). Which is why high voltage lines are good ideas ( V = I R ) -- they lower the current.
Heating can be quite significant. I guess whether or not it’s economically significant depends on your cost of generation. There was a mega-outage which cut off Italy when overheated, sagging cables, struck the treetops in the middle of either another random outage or some scheduled maintenance. It’s been many years since I read the full report on the incident (which was excellent) but there was some great data in there about degrees of heating vs degree of sagging.
ben_w|2 years ago
I know that a mere back-of-the-envelope calculation isn't worth much more than the used envelope it was written on (doubly so when it is based on guesstimates of the input numbers), but that would be only £1bn for 8 GW or £4bn for 32 GW (compared to actual average usage of 31.5 GW last year), which is the kind of thing that the British government shouldn't blink at but in practice actually faffs and fails at basically all the time.
(And the sector is theoretically privatised, so this would have to become a business investment, which in turns will have potential investors ask inconvenient questions like "What's the risk we have cheaper options in 10 years that make this power line redundant? And what about those fusion reactors I keep reading about in the Sunday Times? What if Scotland becomes independent and stops selling you the electricity?")
eigenspace|2 years ago
A bigger problem is just the UK's inability to complete infrastructure megaprojects on land, so the connectors would likely need to go in the sea and take a perhaps inefficient route.
nickdothutton|2 years ago
cycomanic|2 years ago
Your meteorological reality seems to not correlate with actual reality. In the UK the highest energy demand is actually correlated with high wind speeds [1]
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa69c6
ebiester|2 years ago
bluGill|2 years ago
ZeroGravitas|2 years ago
It's not a physical or geographic limitation.
And doesn't apply to offshore wind.
s1artibartfast|2 years ago
I frequently hear people bring up transmission losses as a concern, and genuinely curious where this idea comes from? Was this taught in schools or part of some disinformation campaign?
fghorow|2 years ago
nickdothutton|2 years ago
nradov|2 years ago