There is a nice UK grid dashboard too [0]. The UK grid is actually quite variable given the amount of wind input, so imports/exports tend to be quite twitchy depending on what's happening - frequently going to negative and also substantially positive on pricing.
But this promote better flow to Norway that has the hydropower, ultimately making more profit to the Energy Companies there. Sell expensive hydro energy when there is no wind, buy cheap wind energy at night when no pnes need it and pump water to the reservoirs. It would be good to see how this cable was lobbied and some estimates in the gain in profit the multinational energy companies are making. Or did everyone think this was made for bringing energy to UK homes and lower the carbon footprint.
The point of the cable is to balance out the energy flows across Europe and to make renewable energy less variable. If there is excess supply in the UK, they can make money by selling it to the continent and if there is too little energy they can buy it from the continent. It works the same the other way around.
Norway has a lot of hydro, but AFAIK no pumped hydro. I don't know why that is? It sounds like a reasonable idea, to even out the European prices. Perhaps it is not as easy as an armchair consultant would believe? Sweden seems to be in a similar situation.
Norway does have a modest amount of pumped hydro: about 1.2 GW.
But inter-connectors are a great alternative to pumped hydro. When the UK and Denmark have an excess of wind energy, it can be sent to Norway. Norway can then conserve water in their storage lakes, and sell it back to the UK and Denmark on days when they need it.
This shit has ruined the Norwegian electricity market and wrecked havoc on the prices.
Norway has an insane amount of hydro which is cheap but the market price has gotten very expensive because of European idiocy and this common market the Europeans are working for.
Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the last coal fired power plant in the UK, is scheduled to close in September.
They probably won't close earlier as they will be under capacity market contracts until then, and will have a supply of coal that needs to be disposed of (ie: burned/used).
They're also making very good money in the balancing market, and generation margins are getting tighter. It wouldn't surprise me if the closure gets delayed.
For how long would it need to be mothballed before you’d be comfortable demolishing it? Important to be conservative wrt grid stability, but at some point, burn the ships so there is no going back.
Mothballed plants don’t really contribute to grid stability. They need to be kept in a pretty active state, ready to spin up at a moments notice in order to be any use.
The fuel (coal) left onsite is also an environmental liability and really needs to be gotten rid of by burning it, necessitating a carefully planned shutdown schedule.
Realistically, there is no going back: once the last coal-fired plant is closed (in September 2024), it will be gone for good.
Meh we're down to 1.1% of generation being coal in the last year; low enough to stop worrying about. Lets worry about how to get rid of the 33.5% of gas!
We've gone over a month without burning any coal, but then the Ukraine war happened and we were at risks of blackouts. That 1.1% is likely heavily concentrated as a much higher percentage on a relatively small days over winter and/or where wind levels were low.
We probably want to be sure if gas imports are heavily hit again or a major interconnector goes down we'll be fine before entirely demolishing it.
There was an issue with gas in the 2022/23 winter as the Russia-Ukraine war affected supplies and caused prices to skyrocket. More coal than usual was burnt because of this. But it's a moot point now: coal-fired plants have continued to close in line with UK government policy, and the last remaining one is scheduled to close in September.
I suppose gas and coal are sourced from different places and that may give some resilience to the system. They also serve very different functions in the grid. Coal is for baseline and gas is for peak.
Coal is very much used only for peak in the UK in recent years. The remaining plants (in fact, there’s only one still in service now) are kept on standby during winter and activated only when demand is forecast to exceed supply (plus a safety margin).
Gas is now more of a year-round flexible baseload, taking up the slack whenever demand is high and/or renewables production is low.
Nuclear is now the only true baseload in the UK - always generating more-or-less the same output except when they have to be shut down for maintenance, refuelling, or decommissioning!
These days, it's nearer the other way around in the UK - gas is closer to baseload (sort of) and coal has a profile closer to a peaker (especially when turning up/down rather than on/off).
The good thing about this is that its bidirectional, so can be used to offload ~4.2% of the total generation capacity of the UK, or should they need it, import that amount.
That should also cut the tops and bottoms off the spot price of electricity.
A large amount of wind power generation is in Scotland, four further interconnects are being built to transfer this to SE England, but it’ll take a while.
indeed! there is a bottleneck between scotland and england in terms of grid capacity that needs to be solved. Its not cheap, and probably not as lucrative.
What are the reasons why an interconnect might be uni directional? I get that a DC interconnect might only go in one direction at a time, but might it not be able to change such direction that is?
Regulation and tax are big ones. The ElecLink UK/France interconnector was significantly delayed due to disagreements in how it should be regulated and taxed. Similarly, things like the EU Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism have the potential to make it unprofitable to import electricity into the EU without affecting exports (because even significant price discrepancies would be swallowed up by the additional carbon tax which might be imposed). (In the case of the UK the EU will likely agree to waive the carbon tax but it's not certain even there).
Better electrical connection to the mainland seems good all round. Denmark is electrically connected to the other neighbouring countries so this yields (indirectly) a higher current link to the rest of Europe as well.
Spikes in production and demand occurring at different places at different times and electrical storage being tricky makes this a good thing.
Unfortunate wording here: "The cable was laid on the seabed using a custom-made vessel The Leonardo Da Vinci which was then buried using Asso trenchers."
That's a very recent phenomenon though right? Presumably the current rates of inflation have a big impact. It wasn't so long ago that we were seeing record low strike prices being accepted for offshore wind, down to about £40/MWh.
There are a couple of things which are misleading about the quoted CfD strike prices. Firstly they are in 2012 prices. Secondly, they are inflated by CPI every year which means the market prices then lower than a true fixed price would be priced. Thirdly, in all rounds prior to the most recent round, what was granted by govt were actually options to enter into a CfD, so developers were able to walk away and replace CfDs with higher-priced market PPAs at COD if they wanted to (and many have indeed done that). As a result, the business plan which some developers have followed has essentially been to bid the lowest price they could get sufficient debt financing with and then try to improve on that with higher priced PPAs or finding financing willing to take merchant risk at COD.
I actually meant to say interest rates above but that these strike prices are inflated by CPI isn't really obvious so I'm glad you've mentioned it.
Is there anywhere I can read about these arrangements? It would be really interesting to know the true cost per mWh delivered from some of these schemes.
Yes, interest rate rises have made a meaningful difference too via their impact on cost of capital/discount rates/IRRs demanded.
There's a summary at the House of Commons library website here. I hadn't seen it before today but it seems to cover most of the key points I'm aware of (from investing in the UK and European power space for work) and is reasonably concise: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
It’s mostly the fact that the more wind you build the less each turbine will make in profit as in general they all spin at the same time pushing the prices down when they produce electricity.
The solution is to increase demand during those moments and thus these new interconnects to Denmark and Norway. Other option is to build storage or new consumption (hydrogen, ammonia, e fuels, etc)
I don't think that is particularly an issue, at least in the UK. They have a guaranteed price per unit. If the wholesale price is above that then it is paid back.
The UK already has a stupid amount of offshore wind with multitudes more in the planning / development phase.
This is part of a wider strategy with The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany and interconnect their energy markets using the north sea renewables as both generation and interconnection.
As further up in the thread, if a cyclone comes in on the gulf stream it arrives 20hrs earlier in the UK than in Denmark, and when significant wind power is built on the Irish Atlantic coast then there's effects will be amplified and a smoother renewable provision for now Europe will be available.
This interconnector was already exporting to Denmark earlier in the week when the UK was experiencing record wind generation (per Electricity Maps [1]). The link currently can’t be maximized from West Denmark to the UK due to transmission constraints on the DK side.
For things like inverters for example, yes, you have to measure things to decide when to turn on (say) transistors based on that information. You have to carefully design it if you want to be able to drive the exact same H-bridge in reverse as a rectifier.
The UK has very large amounts of offshore wind, unfortunately it isn't enough and we're not developing more capacity fast enough. It doesn't help that the government has utterly screwed the incentives:
For reference, a human child weighs about 15 kg per meter. But since humans grow in 3 dimensions, a healthy adult human will be around 40–45 kg per meter, similar to the cable. In our current overweight society, realistic adult humans are of course heavier.
What’s the cost difference in using people vs cable? If we make the assumption that people can be bought at insurance rates and have equal capacity to a cable.
Didn't see mention of the voltage/current specs. 1400A at 1MV maybe? HVDC is morbidly fascinating, and the gear to transform has that awesome 1950s sci-fi look.
I actually drove all the way out to the Britned HVDC transformer station near Rotterdam earlier this year. Absolutely huge bunch of gear, mostly enclosed though and no public tours :(
So while each line is only 525kV relative to the environment, it's 1.05MV between the two lines. A megavolt seems to have been practical HVDC tech for a while now, I was just idly wondering if they had taken things up a notch in this latest project.
So it has a payback period of over 3 decades. Lots of talk of all the resources spent building it, only the carbon savings of usage. I wonder how long the carbon payback is. In an era of rapidly improving renewables, this doesn't seem like picking low-hanging fruit.
Re: cutting undersea cables. For critical infrastructure like this during cold war style conditions (i.e. Russian-NATO conflict), I wonder how pros/cons of public vs private ownership compare...
For example: I could imagine sabotaging public infra is more akin to an attack on the state (therefore disincentized). But on the other hand, I suspect private interests can be more clever in protecting their investment, because they can more readily pay for high mitigation costs when consequent losses would be high.
Anyone else know how to thing of the tradeoffs between public vs private infrastructure here?
AFAIK attacks on sufficiently important private infra is also considered an attack on the state. There is no meaningful difference, other than the scale of the attack and the importance of that infra.
The main defining factor in how the state responds to such an attack is whether escalation is in the interest of the victim. E.g. recent attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea.
That's surely more about convience, i.e. no one in Europe wants to actually deal with Russia so will faff around pretending they don't know who did it as long as possible
There's only three possible outcomes that have any chance of being true and none of them are good:
- It was the Russians, and the demands by the public to respond might escalate the current situation from a nice contained proxy war into something that might get actual voters killed.
- It was the Ukrainians, which would be politically awkward because we're supposed to be allies.
- It was the USA, which would also be politically awkward for the same reason.
So in all cases it would be better to not find out in the first place, hence the current faffing about.
Not sure it had to be a state operation. The attack could have been done by just a handful of guys with practically no funding. The pipe is not that deep underwater and would not require much incentive to blow.
It's the most monitored underwater area in the world and the magnitude of the explosion as detected by seismographic stations looked like a small nuke. Not sure a handful of guys would be capable of that.
I would assume that this would be considered "critical national infrastructure" and there'll be close cooperation between the private operators and the National Protective Security Authority which a child agency of MI5
The map seems buggy for Canada. The "Country" map for Canada seems to be wrong, as it looks like it's subdivided into several pieces (as if it was the "Zone" view).
I posted 1.5 months ago about how a potentially catastrophic grid event three years ago instead showed how successful the EU cooperation is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38251463
As an aside, the UK is still part of this but thanks to Brexit they got the opportunity to finance this interconnector by themselves and not avail themselves to the vast funds from the European Energy Programme for Recovery. For example Malta did and while the Malta Interconnector is not a world record in length but it certainly is in the relative amount: currently it's already above a quarter of the energy needs of Malta and in 2015 the relevant EU report said it's expected this to grow to 35% eventually.
> but thanks to Brexit they got the opportunity to finance this interconnector by themselves and not avail themselves to the vast funds from the European Energy Programme for Recovery
the UK was a net contributor to the EU
everything it "received" from the EU was paid for by itself
Not counting anything else just these two we could say the EU had a 3.6% tariff on UK imports (insanely low! check https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/daily_update_e/ta... -- and note the post brexit deal only created a 0% tariff on goods and not services). And even that is a severe exaggeration because there were other benefits to this.
On the other hand, the way these things went it's very likely the UK already contributed to the EERP but got nothing out of it.
> very likely the UK already contributed to the EERP but *got nothing out of it*.
I for one am swimming in all the surplus cash not going to the EU any more, as well as all those upwards revisions to GDP and employment, and our pound soaring to new highs improving my purchasing power.
Are there any safety concerns around 1.4GW flowing through a cable surrounded by salt water? I’m entirely uneducated in the ways of zap juice, but that sounds like a recipe for spontaneous electrocution if that cable breaks anywhere.
The power cable operators don't want to waste any energy and will have power monitoring systems at least at both ends, so much as with a fusebox at home, I'm sure that the cable would be switched off very quickly if that happened. In addition, the power would be dissipated close around the source of the breakage by the (not insignificant) electrical resistance of water. Since the North Sea is about 100 metres deep, the only victims in such event would be fish and other seabed creatures. I don't tend to chew power lines, though, so don't worry about me.
Well at least for the first 1.4 GW, yes. Also there is some nonzero transmission loss so that needs to be taken into account.
The cable can move electricity from the UK to Denmark too btw, so some of the price surges in the Danish region could get damped because the UK will start exporting electricity and the additional supply will bring down the price again.
“ It will bring more than £500 million in savings for UK consumers in the first ten years.”
If you believe that I have a monorail to sell you! Why pass onto consumers what you can take as profit.
Norwegian news is reporting that the price of electricity will increase a tiny amount (about £10-15 a year) in both Norway & the UK as an increased flow of power means more bidders for it, pushing the price up when power is scarce (which seems to be most of the time).
>Why pass onto consumers what you can take as profit.
Because other suppliers will outbid you.
>Norwegian news is reporting that the price of electricity will increase a tiny amount (about £10-15 a year) in both Norway & the UK as an increased flow of power means more bidders for it, pushing the price up when power is scarce (which seems to be most of the time).
That doesn't make sense, if energy is scarce in one country but not the other then the additional supply should lower prices.
It will lower the peaks of the prices, but at the same time increase the depths. Currently those on market driven tarrifs can sometimes get paid to take electricity, and certainly have low prices. For example Octopus Agile is charging under 5p/kWh from 2230-2300 today, and from 0600-0630 actually paid its customers 4p/kWh
With Denmark able to buy 1GW this will increase demand at the cheapest bits (when supply is high), but with Denmark able to sell 1GW it will increase supply and thus drive lower price.
The majority of people in the UK don't pay market prices for electricity and instead pay a government set "cap" which is based around hiding the actual cost in the marketing material because far too many people in the UK don't understand what you can do with 1kWh or how it affects your bill - some people on think that turning 30W of LED lights off makes a material difference to the monthly cost they pay for example.
>For example Octopus Agile is charging under 5p/kWh from 2230-2300 today, and from 0600-0630 actually paid its customers 4p/kWh
I understand that, the market is trying to deal with an inefficiency in the system. What I don't understand is how removing those inefficiencies will lead to higher prices. If anything it should do the opposite.
The cap is incidental, I don't like it but it doesn't really have much to do with this.
It increased the demand from 2230-2300 (assuming Denmark either has higher demand at that time, or could itself export to Germany)
If the cost in the UK is 5p/unit and in Denmark is 7p/unit, the price will stabilise at 6p/unit as the UK sells to Denmark, decreasing UK supply thus pushing price up
If the cost in the UK is 42p/unit and in Denmark it's 40p/unit, the price will instead by 41p/unit as the UK buys more from Denmark, increasing supply, thus pushing the price down
>Presumably it is this extra demand that could cause the price rise.
The cable works both ways.
Having an inter-connector opens the market to a larger pool of suppliers on both sides of the cable. You would expect this to lower prices rather than increase them.
I don't know if the UK government paid the full amount, but £50 million a year for £1.7 billion is a 2.9% interest rate, which is approximately sensible.
Verse 1: From the shores of the Danes to Britannia's realm, Where the sea meets the sky in a watery helm, There's a thread made of power, so silent and sleek, A marvel of might that the ancients would seek.
Chorus: Oh, Viking Link, your cables enfold, Uniting the lands as the sagas once told. Electric currents, like legends of old, Viking Link, forging futures so bold.
Verse 2: Beneath the North Sea where the mermaids do sing, Lies a path of pure energy, a power-bringing string, Connecting the heart of the emerald isles, With wind-harnessed force that covers the miles.
Chorus: Oh, Viking Link, your currents so free, Dance 'cross the depths of the deep, briny sea. Blending the watts as the mead-masters would, Viking Link, for the greater world's good.
Bridge: Hark! As the turbines spin round and round, A whisper of Odin, in kilowatts found. Thor might have thundered with fierce, mighty sound, But our silent giant lies under the ground.
Verse 3: From the fjords where the Vikings once launched their great fleets, Comes a new age of conquest, where technology meets. And the UK replies with welcoming hands, Together they stand, where power demands.
Final Chorus: Oh, Viking Link, your saga's begun, Tales of electrons, from dusk until dawn. May your current flow steady and strong, Viking Link, in our hearts, your song lingers on.
And .gov is short for "government", but only the USA's, and .edu is short for "education", but only the USA's.
There were strange third-level-only location-based restrictions on .us for a long time, created by the one guy (!) responsible for it, so it didn't get much use in the critical 1990s period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us
[0] https://grid.iamkate.com/