Cost of curtailment and "turn-up"

[nowty]

2) The need to retain ‘spinning reserve’ for the unlikely (but possible) grid outages. It used to be at least 5GW but is now around 2GW - but that is 2GW that is always generated by fossils.

apart from these things, of course: https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/e ... enser.html

And could be generated by biomass.

And Nukes.

[Mart]

There is more than one reason for curtailment. The costs of curtailment payments is well exceeded by the cheaper power from renewables than burning fossils.

Two main reasons.

1) the grid was constructed backwards for off-shore wind turbine generation - “heavier duty’ conductors/contactors/pylons/transformers/voltages/etc nearer the historical fossil generating plants (mostly in the middle of the country and the for operation at what was the edges of the network. That now means that distribution is problematic and requires billions of investment to change the grid network.

2) The need to retain ‘spinning reserve’ for the unlikely (but possible) grid outages. It used to be at least 5GW but is now around 2GW - but that is 2GW that is always generated by fossils. The grid is expecting to be able to run OK without that hisorical spinning reserve during this year (forecast from about 2022).

I expect if curtailment and that spinning fossil plant “required but not actually ‘needed’) were taken into account, the percentage of available renewables would be quite a few percent higher, than recorded by the simple calculation of actual generated power.

I was pondering that too. Also, curtailment isn't new, FF generation used to get curtailment payments (I assume to stay ready with higher temp boilers in case needed?)

But when wind came on the scene, the ability to react very quickly by altering blade alignment, and/or nacelle orientation, made it the goto for curtailment. And at that point many AGW/RE deniers began to focus on curtailment when they hadn't before. [Just like the anti-BEV crowd suddenly being concerned about Cobalt production, despite many decades of use for petrol/diesel refining.

I think we have to just keep pushing the positives, as the issue of storage, curtailment and high leccy prices (till gas prices fall) ain't going anywhere soon ~20yrs?

[John_S]

2) The need to retain ‘spinning reserve’ for the unlikely (but possible) grid outages. It used to be at least 5GW but is now around 2GW - but that is 2GW that is always generated by fossils. The grid is expecting to be able to run OK without that hisorical spinning reserve during this year (forecast from about 2022).

My understanding is that the amount of spinning reserve is determined by the size of the biggest asset online. Ie enough to cope if any asset goes down without getting into a rolling blackout scenario as grid breakers trip.

Perhaps they should be considering the transmission in the biggest cable coming onshore from the North Sea.