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reteps if it's the one I am thinking of then the tunnel was already there, it was part of the closed Penrith to ****ermouth freight line. It was covered in an episode of "Walking Britains Lost Railways" with Rob Bell.
This is what is sorely lacking in the UK, joined up thinking. They are already excavating for HS2, so bury the lines. You need cooling, so run the North<>South water transfer pipework alongside to cool it. Three projects in one.
Unfortunately it's the same old story in the UK, the kind of thinking where the council will resurface your road then the water board will come and dig it up two weeks later to lay new pipes.
reteps - the dissipation mechanisms for DC and AC are slightly different - there's the instantaneous I^2xR ohmic heating at point in the wire, which will be the same for both systems, assuming the same conductor configuration and taking into account the RMS average of a time-varying sinusoid . That is the stuff in the wire, however the AC system also produces a time-varying magnetic field in the vicinity of the wire.
This could be reduced if you twist the two conductors together tightly, but I suspect that making a cable with two tightly twisted conductors running at hundreds of kV voltage difference is not something that you really want to consider the insurance on. So just thinking about a simple single phase set up the flow and return wires are going to be separated by a metre or two - and in this configuration they form a rather thin, but very long single turn winding in a transformer that has the rest of the planet as its secondary. The secondary circuit acts as a parasitic load that adds to the overall loss experienced by the AC transmission method.
@Cowboyinvestor, I was talking about EHV. I think that 11 - 33kV is not too dissimilar in price when buried vs. overhead.
I believe that there are advantages to HV DC transmission but the physics of resistive loss and heating effects must be the same. I was reading something about HV DC transmission within the week, I'll see if I can find it. Here's one view, not the one I read though: https://new.abb.com/systems/hvdc/why-hvdc/technical-advantages, and here's another, although I am not sold on point #4: https://www.engineeringenotes.com/electrical-engineering/hvdc-transmission/top-20-advantages-of-hvdc-transmission-electrical-engineering/29255 - also not the one I read.
Just for clarity on the cable discussion, are we talking about HV 11kv/33kv or are we talking EHV 132/275/400kv?
reteps, is the same true of HVDC?
SOTRR....... you can have our water................ but it 'aint cheap :-)
I think that this is a good read, but then I'm a techie.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/45349-Undergrounding_high_voltage_electricity_transmission_lines_The_technical_issues_INT.pdf
I completely ignored the cost of the tunnel too.
Laying underground high-voltage cables is a very much more expensive business than putting up pylons and overhead lines. Underground cables need cooling. Overhead lines get it for free from the air. Underground cables need insulating. Overhead lines get it for free from the air. From memory, there's a six-mile stretch of underground HV cable in an area of extreme natural beauty (Lake District? Peak District?) and it has to be cooled by having a stream running through the tunnel. It cost a phenomenal amount when compared with a six-mile stretch of pylons.
I believe the idea was at least floated that there should be water transmission pipes laid under or by HS2 to carry water from the water/rain rich North to the South where there are often drought warnings and hosepipe bans. I guess it is too much to expect some joined up thinking where power transmission could also be part of the groundworks taking advantage of the fact that the ground will be dug up anyway. Instead no doubt there is another multi-billion pound project to lay huge North<>South cables on a completely different route requiring twice the disruption and no doubt four times the capex.
We have 9 Vestas turbines near our property on this past Sunday only seven producing during the day then at 4pm with increased demand they alter to face the prevailing wind and the feathered blades adjust and begin producing which probably takes ten minutes.
The main grid over the border was upgraded around ten years ago by adding another cable to each phase I think the voltage may have been adjusted also.
By extreme north of england I of course mean scotland, apologies to all.
There is one additional caveat which always impacts on the ability for the grid to use every joule that is thrown in its direction and this is due to the fact that the grid is not a single bucket which can take every joule if there is a supply and consequent demand somewhere else on the system. Wind power in the extreme north of england is limited in its ability to be transmitted to the south east, where it may well be needed because of the significant distance and the limited transmission capacity of the transmission network North to South.
The grid operators are, I understand, increasing the north-south transmission capacity to deal with just this issue, but it is not a simply matter of chunking up the wires. I am told that a whole new transmission line needs to be added, and this necessarily takes up space and large amounts of money in construction. Batteries located at either end of the transmission bottleneck will in time help with the problem but the simple fact is that we are moving to a different geographic distribution of power generation and until sufficient battery infrastructure is in place it is sometimes more cost effective for the grid to say thanks but no thanks to power generated in the extreme north instead of overloading its lines or simply transmitting long distances at peak times. (Remember power dissipation goes as the square of the current so adding 1MWh at peak times might yield only 0.8MWh at the output end, instead of 0.95Mwh under low load conditions.)
SoTRR - we need to drill down to understand what this 80% figure is all about - is it really that the payment rate is 180% per kWh for energy that is curtailed as opposed per kWh that is supplied for use.
Or does the 80% figure, assuming it is accurate mean that instead of being paid to supply 180kWh they are only supplying 100kWh for use whilst 80 kWh is being requested to be thrown away (all kWh's being paid at the same rate). If the grid is only taking some 55% of what is being offered to it then it does beg the question as to why.
One of the answers to this question is 'until 2015 we had no way to store that energy apart from in pumped hydro projects and we've run out of all of them' - the grid battery revolution of course changes that paradigm and allows much more energy from variable renewable projects to be used to offset otherwise polluting sources.
I can see the case for continuing to pay for the power when not needed (not that I necessarily agree with it at the full rate) but not why the payment rate needs to be as much as 80% higher than what would have been paid for the power if taken.
To divert the power to resistor banks I assume only requires a command to be sent to the turbine management system electronically and a further command once power is required again. It's not like someone in a van has to race down to the turbine to turn an allen key 50 times to do the bypass. Cost of said bypass request would be minimal.
The resistor banks would be part of the original deployment design and I would assume some power would be diverted anyway if for example the wind is too strong for the demand level at that time.
Just sounds like another exploitative contract term that adds unnecessarily to consumer pricing.
Maybe our VFRB option for the Scottish/UK deployment could be part financed through Innovate UK funding? The industrial strategy challenge fund has money available (several £100m in the 'industrial decarbonisation' theme) to invest in this type of application. The rumours I'm hearing is the bulk of the UKRI pot is going on carbon capture storage (CCS) projects, surely a VRFB battery project makes some better sense here?
https://www.ukri.org/innovation/industrial-strategy-challenge-fund/industrial-decarbonisation/
Not really...because battery technology is only just catching up. Many of these wind farms were constructed without battery back up. Yes we all want more sustainable energy generation but there is the issue/perceived issue of consistency with wind and sunshine. When it was only in its' infancy it didn't really matter if the odd wind trubine needed switching off but now wind and solar are becoming extremely large contributors so and need to turn off chunks of that generation facility will be costly unless there is adequate back up/storage available. Even then that storage won't overcome cost of turning off turbines if hurricane force winds decide to hit over several days. There's still much to be done as this very new sustainable industry develops. Again these are issues Govts are having to face when making decisions for their national grids... There's still a lot of fear out there and the main question is still... 'What happens when/if...'
I believe that all forms of generation are reimbursed if the grid does not take the power that they are chucking out. The only real difference is that those that consume a fuel can in principle turn the stations down if given sufficient warning, and can thereby save cost on their fuel. Wind farms and PV farms make no such saving should the grid decide that it doesn't want what they are generating so if the grid asks them to turn off the power all that they can do is feed their power into great banks of resistors, called load banks and produce heat which is wasted because it is in a field somewhere.
You decide if it is fair to pay the power stations that consume fuel and generate CO2 the same amount as renewable sources for each MWh of energy that they are told that they cannot sell to the grid. Given that there is no such thing as a carbon tax yet it would seem to me that it is not only fair to pay renewables more than the fossil fueled sources (as they cannot make any fuel saving) but that it is also better to do that so as to encourage people to stop burning the stuff and putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
If we followed the polluter pays principal properly then each tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere should cost the producers an additional $500+ per tonne ( https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/if-carbon-tech-follows-batterys-path-co2-capture-could-be-super-cheap-by-20#gs.Aa8Fe3s for cost of Direct Air Capture). Alternatively they can capture the CO2 at the output of their smokestack and find some way themselves to bury their own waste.
Doesn't it just stick out why not run and store all that electricity through cleaner means instead of being switched off and generating energy whilst the wind blows
From my local news.
https://news.stv.tv/scotland/almost-650m-spent-in-a-decade-to-switch-off-wind-turbines
Well the best solution I suppose would be if we all turn on every electric device so we consume more energy. Or maybe if there was some way to store it then that could work as well I suppose. Tricky.
Can anyone tell me what would help alleviate this?
lol
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/19/wind-farms-paid-3-million-per-day-switch-turbines/
Wind farms were paid up to £3 million per day to switch off their turbines and not produce electricity last week, The Telegraph can disclose.
Energy firms were handed more than £12 million in compensation following a fault with a major power line carrying electricity to England from turbines in Scotland.
The payouts, which will ultimately be added onto consumer bills, were between 25 per cent and 80 per cent more than the firms, which own giant wind farms in Scotland, would have received had they been producing electricity, according to an analysis of official figures.
The payments have prompted questions in Parliament, as one charity warned that consumers were having to fund the consequences of an "excessive" number of onshore wind farms, which can overwhelm the electricity grid....