Electricity transmission [credit: green lantern electric]
The UK National Grid is now for technical reasons unable to adequately control its own electricity generation, due to excessive amounts of solar power output under favourable weather conditions. This cost the country nearly £10 million last Monday alone and is ‘likely to occur on any sunny weekends this summer’.
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Energy data firm EnAppSys has raised concerns about National Grid ESO‘s actions, stating that power is “being dumped into Belgium and the Netherlands”, reports Energy Live News.
According to EnAppSys, these countries currently have an excess of power, prompting National Grid ESO to pay high prices to offload the surplus.
Energy Live News contacted National Grid ESO for comment, but they declined to provide a statement.
Phil Hewitt, Director of EnAppSys, shed light on the situation, explaining that National Grid ESO cited it as an “energy action” taken to manage an oversupply of power and reduce generation and interconnector imports.
Mr Hewitt told Energy Live News: “The reason National Grid ESO gave yesterday (Monday 29th May) was that it was an energy action. This means they had too much power and needed to reduce generation and interconnector imports.
“They couldn’t turn off power stations because they needed them on to provide inertia to the system so this left the interconnectors as their only option. To change the output of interconnectors, they trade with counterparties that have access to the intraday markets on the other side of the interconnector. These traders quote prices that National Grid ESO then accepts to change the output of the interconnectors.
“This kind of high price reversal event is likely to occur on any sunny weekends this summer. As a response to the high energy prices last year, industrial and domestic consumers in Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France have responded by installing solar panels; this has resulted in a big increase in solar generation on sunny days.
“Electricity system operators in these countries need to investigate how to create curtailment products to encourage consumers to stop generation during these periods, otherwise the SOs will be spending a lot of money on balancing the markets on these kind of days.
“Yesterday (Monday 29th May), National Grid ESO spent £9.4 million on balancing the system by trading and using the balancing mechanism.”
Full report here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Yes, INERTIA : Remember that! Sun & Solar don’t have it. Politicians are in reverse gear too – Negative Inertia if you will. talk about torque sense.. …. ! 🙂
..’ for technical reasons unable to adequately control its own electricity generation..’ Technical reasons? really? have they NO engineers? Ha ha – d’they mean political reasons
investigate how to create curtailment products to encourage consumers to stop generation during these periods
‘curtailment products’ – 🤪
‘encourage consumers’ – consumers aren’t the issue?
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The plan to carpet the Sahara with solar panels – and link them to Britain
Morocco is racing to turn the barren Sahara desert into a renewable powerhouse
2 June 2023
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/02/the-plan-to-carpet-the-sahara-with-solar-panels/
Spot the problem 🤔
Maybe it would be a good idea to stop getting electricity from the EU countries, refurbish and update the British coal fired and CCGT power stations, chop down the unsightly, unreliable, intermittent bird mincer monstrosities, remove the solar panels covering farm land. That way the customers don’t have to pay out to the subsidy farmers when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t appear from behind the clouds. The whole ‘renewable energy’ thing is just a scam to keep the ‘greens’ quiet.
So we build a system that sometimes has substantial overcapcity and we have to pay to get rid of the surplus and sometimes has substantial undercapacity and we have to pay to make up the shortfall. Yet apparently building overcapacity and making these payments doesn’t mean it’s more costly.
Can’t decide if this is absurd or mildly obscene – it certainly looks like National Grid are not fit for purpose ?
They have doubtless hit all their “diverse and inclusive workforce” and other ESG targets… – by painting target rings around them.
National Grid owns and operates the electric transmission system in England and Wales. It sold the bulk of its U.K. gas transmission business in fiscal 2023 to fund the acquisition of PPL’s U.K. power distribution (Western Power Distribution (WPD)) assets. In the Northeastern United States, it serves electricity and gas customers combined in three states. It also owns regulated transmission and electricity generation in the United States, metering services, merchant transmission lines in the U.K., and the Grain (U.K.) liquefied natural gas facility.
Pretty close to NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
Oh what a network tangled network we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Offer Brits a spell of free electricity instead of paying other countries, who don’t want it anyway, mad money to get rid of it somehow – then sticking the costs onto UK energy bills.
Um, if you create an electrical energy generation resource you don’t control the energy supply to, so it requires 100% fossil backup, and replaces no fossil generation capacity, , and that energy is at a maximum when it it isn’t needed in daylight on the long hot summer days, and non existent when it’s needed, on dark cold winter nights, you should be considered either fundamentally stupid, or blatantly fraudulent, and certainly incompetent as an electrical engineer. THere is no benefit to anyone made to pay for this waste of money by the generation monopoly exploiting fraudulent laws, only the politicians, banks and capitalist lobbyists who harvest all the regressive easy money £Billions in subsidies for pointlessly making supply more expensive.
and once again the green mob runs full face into the Law of Unintended Consequences (ha ha ha ha ha).
If the EU plan is anything to go by, they could soon be ‘dumping’ into EV batteries instead of paying unwilling foreigners…
To prevent outages, EU scientists want electric vehicles and the grid to talk
1 Jun 2023
To ensure the stable functioning of the grid after the electric vehicle revolution, scientists want to see technology included in vehicles that would enable them to communicate with the power grid.
Researchers want the grid to signal to vehicles when power demand is exceeding capacity. “It must be able to say: It’s getting too much!” said the scientist.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/road-transport/news/to-prevent-outages-eu-scientists-want-electric-vehicles-and-the-grid-to-talk/
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The other side of that coin is when the grid has too much power and not enough consumers, as per the blog post.