Analysts from an energy storage specialist say £920 million annual cost of ‘curtailment’ could be cut 80% by using existing technologies like battery storage more effectively. But that would obviously require a lot of expensive batteries, and gas power stations could easily do the job on a much more extensive scale. Such is the state of the UK electricity grid thanks to net zero climate obsessions and intermittent wind power dotted all over the place, especially in areas remote from population centres – i.e. the opposite of where that power is most needed.
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Grid capacity constraints added nearly £1 billion of ‘curtailment’ costs to electricity bills for homes and businesses in 2023 as abundant energy from wind farms was unable to be transmitted to areas of demand, says Field Energy.
The majority of this cost was down to a single pinch point in the UK’s electricity grid on the Scottish/English border called the B6 boundary.
Analysis by energy storage developer and operator Field estimates this boundary alone could cause up to £2.2 billion of curtailment costs by 2030 as the UK’s curtailment problem escalates. Overall UK curtailment costs could reach £3.5 billion by that date.
Nearly three quarters of the UK’s total curtailment cost in 2023 came from paying gas power plants in England and Wales to fire up, as capacity constraints on the grid meant cheaper, abundant wind power from Scotland couldn’t be exported south when required.
Field’s analysis also reveals that wind farms in Scotland are being curtailed 40% of the time, while transmission capacity across key boundaries in the UK, including the B6 boundary, rarely has more than a 50% utilisation rate, further restricting the flow of electricity.
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To address the specific curtailment problem caused by the B6 boundary on the Scottish/English border, building 10GW of energy storage in key locations across the UK would reduce the estimated £2.2 billion curtailment costs by nearly 90%, Field’s analysis suggests.
Full article here.
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Image: Whitelee wind farm, Scotland [credit: Bjmullan / Wikipedia]
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Zatso now? this past week….Heron‘s told me there’s NO FISH in my ponds and asks why there’s so much talk of building even MORE ponds ( expanding the Pylon network – to you and me)
This past week or so, it’s been a good job BusinessUK ( laugh) is on holiday ‘cos Wind was on strike….. only 2-3GW production, supplying ALL our homes, laughably for 3.6798 minutes of the each day, or thereabouts!
So buggers the question: what are they really being paid for, and by whom?
The cost of the bottleneck is greater than the cost of fixing it 🤔
I love it when “heads, I win; tails, you lose” becomes a law.
If the Scots leave the Union the savings from severing the grid to cut of their subsidy gouging energy payments and cancelling their general subsidies would both be significant , We don’t need more over subsidised and over aid for over generating what we don’t need wind power leccy. Letbthem figure out what to do when the wind don’t blow.
Nuclear plus clean gas to handle the variability above base load level is cheapest, 24/7 and has no need for storage backup. Perhaps someone should tell the Treasury? Switch off the Scottish renewables as we build out nuclear, because they are the most likely to demand offset payments?
Why no BBC news story about a whole Europwide week of no wind. Here we had a world record. 0h point four three gigawatts
Oh? Need to do that one again, Guinness wasn’t invited to corroborate …. like they did all the other records ? Never mind we’ll soon be seeing al over again on “Record Breakers”