A place to post links and discussions around the UK's energy production, National Grid, energy consumption, and green energy news.
See https://grid.iamkate.com/ for the UK's current energy production and sources.
Created 23/07/23
Wholesale electricity price normally fluctuates up and down quite a lot, but usually in the £0-£200-ish range. Yesterday afternoon it spiked up to £1400 briefly, then came back to normal. Unlucky to those paying dynamic pricing!
I can't find any news or reporting about this. Any idea what happened?
I did notice that gas usage was really high, at about 26GW at one point, and wind was very low. So maybe it was simply high demand combined with low supply, now that we don't have coal power? 😕
I think there's a discontinuity around 25GW of gas generating. If we go over that, things get very expensive. The only way that happens is very low wind during the high demand period which is under the hours of darkness, and nuclear is diminished / there's nothing left in the pumped hydro stations. All of which we had yesterday.
Yesterday I think the only wind farm getting decent wind was Moray East in Scotland, and to add to the problems we even had to curtail the power from it (pay for it to reduce power). That was probably because the power couldn't be routed to where it was needed geographically. We need for transmission lines, which means pylons.
Edit: Had dogger bank wind farm been up and running (currently being commissioned - delayed from last year) this probably wouldn't have happened. We'd have had a couple of extra GW which would have been very useful.
As an old starcraft player I'm obligated to say...
Construct more pylons!
So it means that if you ran your hoover from 4:30 to 5:30pm on dynamic tariff, that would cost you about 15 quid.
When you're on those tarrifs you usually try and avoid any electricity usage between 1630 - 1900 and rely on your battery storage (if you have it) which would have been charged at a cheaper rate.
But if you don't follow those guidelines then, yeah, you're fucked.
I don’t live in the UK, but I do know that if a nuclear reactor scrams(basically, enters a condition in which it needs to rapidly shut down to ensure plant safety, while rare it is entirely safe 99.9% of the time), it will often do this to power prices as other plants take time to start up and make up for the sudden loss in a large generator. It could have been that?
nope, I didn't see any change in our nuclear output. And all the reactors are online, except one which is in planned maintenance: https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
Our nuclear capability has diminished a lot over the few years. We entered 2020 with 8 sites, and now only have 5 sites. 3GW of generating capacity gone. They developed too many problems after 35-45 years running.
Only one of them has a replacement being built. Hinckley point which is due to come online in 2030 (Originally 2023) and will replace those 3GW. Unfortunately, by then we'll have shutdown the current 5 sites. That means we'll exit the decade -5GW of nuclear generation with no other plans for nuclear.
Whilst I'm very pro-wind and storage, I do worry that the current aging nuclear reactors and the ever expanding budget / schedule of HP is going to lead us to having an energy deficit on a more regular basis in the second half of the decade. However the die was cast 10/20 years ago. All we can do now is get storage & connectors in place as soon as we can.
Geez only $90 for me here in Canada
Relevant article from the Guardian basically 'because power plant operators could'
The network operator requested generators to produce more (due to the cold). Generators said "ka-ching!"
Purely a guess, but maybe a combination of cold, dim, and the wind dropping off.
Then as somebody else mentioned, when the estimates came in, gas stations absolutely rinsing it.
Things happen, and we'll gradually get better as storage improves.
That's some really cool data you have access to.
Dark coldrum combined with some grid problem would be my speculation.